Hunter Biden Mocks Trump's Iran War Claims, Mock-Nominates Him for Nobel Peace Prize

Hunter Biden used a post on X to put forward a nomination he clearly did not mean seriously: Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. The son of former President Joe Biden wrote that he was officially nominating Trump, and that no president in history had ended the same war so many times.

The joke rests on a count. Biden wrote that the president had ended the war with Iran at least 38 times by CNN's tally, a reference to the administration's repeated assertions that the brief military confrontation between the United States and Iran was over. He added that no president had done this before, that Trump was nowhere near finished ending it, and that the record deserved the Nobel committee's attention. The 38 figure is Biden's attribution to CNN; the source does not show how the count was made.

The post is the latest broadside from Biden against Trump, who often points to his foreign policy record and has argued that his administration prevented wider conflicts in the Middle East. On Iran, Trump has described the campaign as a decisive success. He has said Iran's navy was absolutely destroyed, its air force knocked out, and its missile and air-defence infrastructure severely degraded, leaving Tehran far less able to project military power. He has also said the strikes obliterated or destroyed Iran's nuclear programme and kept the country from getting a nuclear weapon.

The real situation is less settled than the claims of a finished war suggest. Washington and Tehran are still working to turn the Memorandum of Understanding they signed last month into a broader, more lasting peace agreement. Talks are continuing, but tension between the two countries remains high.

The Strait of Hormuz is one of the main sticking points. Roughly one-fifth of the world's seaborne oil trade passes through it. Iran has recently told commercial vessels to use only routes approved by Tehran, and it has warned of a forceful response against ships that stray from the designated corridors.

The United States has rejected that position. At an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, US Ambassador Mike Waltz said that closing or disrupting international waterways cannot be justified as self-defence under international law. He called such actions global blackmail.

Iran's UN Ambassador, Amir-Saeid Iravani, spoke at the same meeting and turned the accusation around. He argued that US military bases in the region bring nothing but insecurity. He warned that Tehran would keep exercising what it calls its inherent right to self-defence if it were attacked again.

So the mockery lands against an unresolved backdrop: a signed MoU, a contested waterway, and two ambassadors trading charges in the same room. What to watch is whether the talks can settle the question of who controls shipping lanes in Hormuz, since that dispute will determine whether the war Trump keeps declaring over stays over.