Donald Trump’s Pantomime United Nations
It didn’t take long for the flattery to begin. On Thursday, the Board of Peace, an entity set up by President Donald Trump, held its first formal meeting, in Washington, D.C., at the newly rebranded Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. At the event, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, the President of Kazakhstan, proposed that the board administer “a special President Trump award,” to recognize its namesake’s “outstanding peace-building efforts and achievements.”
If the moment felt too on the nose, too fawning and obsequious, no one seemed to bat an eye; Tokayev was just one of numerous foreign dignitaries and U.S. officials to heap praise upon Trump at the event. Also in the room was Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA, soccer’s global governing body and facilitator of the World Cup, who, in December, had awarded Trump with the newly manufactured FIFA Peace Prize, during a ceremony at the nearby Kennedy Center, which Trump, for good measure, has also rebranded with his name.
The Board of Peace’s meeting focussed on collective efforts to stabilize and rebuild war-blighted Gaza, but Trump’s need to be at the heart of it all cast a shadow over the proceedings. He kicked off the meeting with a customarily rambling speech, rattling off his myriad peace initiatives and imagined diplomatic triumphs, even while floating the prospect of imminent war with Iran. The Administration has amassed military assets in the region at a scale that suggests the possibility of a sustained offensive campaign. “You’re going to be finding out over the next probably ten days,” Trump said, as several heads of state and top diplomats from countries in Iran’s neighborhood sat in grim silence.
A lot remains confusing and uncertain about the Board of Peace. Thursday’s event produced apparent pledges of about seven billion dollars from nine countries for the reconstruction of Gaza while Trump has separately suggested that the U.S. would muster ten billion dollars on its own for the board, though it was unclear where that money was coming from and whether it would pass congressional scrutiny. There were also offers of thousands of military personnel from countries including Indonesia and Morocco to compose an “international stabilization force” to police the territory. And yet details are sketchy on where such a force would be deployed and how all the money earmarked for it will be tracked and disbursed. A video presentation shown at the meeting touted A.I.-generated images of skyscrapers and luxury beach resorts in Gaza and proffered airy visions of the enclave turning into an “Abrahamic gateway,” a hub for trade networks that would span Europe and India and thread together the Middle East. Less was said about the bleak facts on the ground in Gaza, where Hamas refuses to fully disarm, humanitarian organizations are being denied access by Israel, and civilians languish in limbo, as well as unresolved political questions surrounding the conflict, including the fading prospects of a viable, independent Palestinian state. Among the officials at the Board of Peace meeting, mentions of the need for a two-state solution were scarce.
In November, the United Nations Security Council endorsed a U.S.-backed resolution that authorized the creation of the international force and gave its blessing to the Board of Peace’s stated mandate to aid in Gaza’s redevelopment. But, when the board’s charter emerged, it did not include a word about Gaza. Instead, analysts and diplomats see a far more ambitious project in motion: that Trump is seeking to create an entity that only he controls and which can supplant the work of the Security Council—or, as the board’s charter itself puts it, “depart from approaches and institutions that have too often failed.”
This is the “world order Trump prefers,” Phil Gordon, a former White House coördinator for the Middle East in the Obama Administration and former national-security adviser to Vice-President Kamala Harris, told me. “It’s not a genuinely multilateral one where others have a say, or the United States is constrained,” he said, but one where “the United States, and Trump personally, is at the center of everything.”
On Thursday, Trump outlined his more expansive desires, suggesting that the board could “take it a step further” to deal with other “hot spots” around the world. The faltering U.N., he said, would be brought “back to health.” It was a curious statement, given Trump’s hostility toward the U.N.—in the space of a year, his Administration has pulled the U.S. out of dozens of U.N. or U.N.-linked agencies, and the U.S. still owes the cash-strapped U.N. close to four billion dollars in outstanding dues. That shortfall is one of the reasons for a punishing wave of austerity currently ripping through the U.N. system.
Yet the U.N. provides an obvious reference for the Board of Peace. The board’s chintzy logo is a barely disguised facsimile of the U.N.’s emblem—the sombre olive wreath of peace has been turned into gilded clip art, and the U.N.’s insignia depicting a world map has been shrunk to what looks like MAGA’s imagined sphere of influence, showing North America, the northern rump of Latin America, and, yes, Greenland. Apart from the United States, only one other founding board member, El Salvador, is included in the territory covered in the logo. Gaza—for whose governance and reconstruction the board was established—is nowhere in view.
The Board of Peace was soft-launched, in January, in Davos, Switzerland, when the organizers of the World Economic Forum yielded their platform to the White House for a gaudy opening ceremony. Trump sat center stage as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner took turns lavishing the President with praise for his contributions to global peace, as attendees did again on Thursday. Then a couple dozen world leaders and ministerial-level dignitaries joined Trump, standing around him as he signed the board’s founding charter, which enshrines Trump as an individual—not just as the President of the United States—as the board’s chairman in perpetuity.
The current membership of the board is a motley mix. It includes prominent countries already invested in bringing stability to Gaza—Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf monarchies. The White House has also roped in governments involved in other alleged Trump-led peace initiatives, such as those of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, and Kosovo. Governments of participating countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Kazakhstan, and Indonesia may see membership as a low-stakes way to boost their geopolitical clout. And then there are Trump’s fellow-travellers who have no obvious skin in the game beyond a desire to gratify the President, such as Argentina’s President, Javier Milei, a libertarian firebrand, and the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, Europe’s most prominent illiberal nationalist.
Trump dispatched invitations to dozens of countries to join the Board of Peace, but he has been mostly rebuffed or kept at arm’s length by the U.S.’s traditional allies. European skepticism only deepened after Trump sought to include Russia and Belarus in the project. (Russia has yet to announce its decision, whereas Belarus agreed, though Belarusian officials said they did not receive visas from the U.S. to attend the meeting on Thursday.) In January, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, and his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, issued a joint call for the defense and strengthening of the U.N. in the face of Trump’s enterprise. Pope Leo XIV made a similar pitch for the U.N. in declining Trump’s invitation.
Sitting in the room during the meeting on Thursday, a European official in attendance was bemused by the succession of leaders voicing their admiration for Trump, especially after a number of top European politicians have been mocked for their own attempts to ingratiate themselves with the U.S. President over the past year. “One cannot only blame Europeans flattering you-know-who,” the official told me. “We’re not even the worst ones.”
Board-membership terms last three years (conveniently running out just as Trump’s term does). A government can pay a billion dollars for a permanent seat, but it’s unclear to most diplomats whether this experiment will exist or matter beyond Trump’s time in office. Two Presidents I spoke to in the aftermath of the Davos ceremony downplayed any expectation of financial contributions or commitments. The President of Kosovo, Vjosa Osmani, instead cast her small nation’s participation as an act of historical redemption, thanking Washington for its leading role in Kosovo’s struggle for independence from Serbia. “It was the helping hand of the United States of America that came to our rescue,” she told me. “Now, twenty-six years later, we are giving back and we are helping carry that peace forward.”
The Armenian President, Vahagn Khachaturyan, told me that he hoped that the board could help “enhance confidence” in the U.N. system by boosting peacemaking efforts. He lamented that “principles of coexistence are very often violated, and the United Nations is not often able to prevent those violations,” gesturing to the perennial problem of the Security Council, where one of the five veto-wielding powers—in recent history, chiefly Russia and the U.S.—can block significant resolutions to address conflicts such as Russia’s war in Ukraine or Israel’s war in Gaza.
But Trump and his lieutenants rarely speak of principles and seem far more interested in establishing an arena where only the U.S.’s veto counts. You could hear their ideological animus this past weekend, at a major security conference in Munich. Elbridge Colby, the U.S. under-secretary of defense for policy, scoffed at the “hosannas and shibboleths” that constitute talk of shared values and paeans to the rules-based order. Rubio poured scorn on the U.N., saying that “on the most pressing matters before us, it has no answers and has played virtually no role.”
Thant Myint-U, a Burmese-British historian whose grandfather U Thant was the U.N.’s third Secretary-General, said that, “despite all of its failings,” the U.N. “has been a big part of eighty years of unparalleled peace and prosperity in human history.” He warned that if the Board of Peace picks up momentum, it may “set the stage for a much broader collapse of the whole U.N. architecture that we’ve had since 1945.”
There’s plenty of reason to believe that the board may not be much more than a Trump vanity project of dissonant parts and vague goals that will fade from view amid the rolling dramas of his Presidency. But, as the U.S. plays spoiler within an international system in which it was once the linchpin, no other world power seems especially eager to pick up the slack. Thant Myint-U said, “At a time when Washington is challenging the very fundamentals of the U.N., both through the Board of Peace but also through aid cuts and funding cuts and everything else, no other country is saying, We’re either going to make up financially for the missing U.S. contributions, or we’re going to really invest politically in renewing and strengthening the U.N.”
By the sheer fact that the White House is staking so much on the Board of Peace’s success—Trump told his counterparts on Thursday that it could be “the most important day of our careers”—the board may actually have legs. Phil Gordon, the former national-security adviser to Harris, said, “As absurd as it is, it’s also the only game in town.”
This doesn’t bode well for the U.N., or for Gaza, where the Board of Peace’s role remains vague. Figures including the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair hold key positions of authority on the board, but no Palestinian official sits on the top executive rungs of its organizational structure, a fact that led Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, to dismiss the whole enterprise as “a colonialist operation.” A U.S.- and Israeli-vetted Palestinian technocratic committee has been set up, but its head, Ali Shaath, was visibly sidelined during Thursday’s meeting and appears to have been working thus far from Cairo. Meanwhile, Gaza is carved up into one zone under Israeli military control and one where Hamas still holds sway; the bulk of Gaza’s population lives in the latter and is often hit by periodic Israeli strikes on alleged Hamas targets. Hundreds of Palestinians have died since the formal ceasefire was clinched, in October.
On Thursday, U.S. and Israeli officials insisted that Hamas’s full disarmament was a prerequisite to any further progress. But the militant group is unwilling to engage in a complete surrender and abandonment of its self-styled “resistance” mission while Israeli forces remain in Gaza and while rival armed factions, some backed by Israel, gain ground in a territory flush with small arms. Michael Hanna, a Middle East expert and the U.S. program director at the International Crisis Group, said, “There just hasn’t been the kind of pragmatic diplomacy to try to see if there’s a way forward on this issue.”
Daniel Shapiro, a former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council, argued that the Israelis, for their part, likely expect the Board of Peace to fail, not least because “they are very skeptical that anyone will disarm Hamas, other than them”—something that would “require a very significant and quite destructive military operation.” That potential explosion of violence may also play on the minds of wealthy Arab donors whom Trump has lined up to bankroll the Board of Peace’s efforts, but who may end up reneging. “Unless Hamas is disarmed, there is every reason to think there will be another round of this conflict, and most of the donors are not going to actually pay to reconstruct Gaza just to have it be destroyed again,” Shapiro said.
Israel can live with the status quo, but Palestinians in Gaza cannot. Hanna told me that if things stay “in this unreconstructed state, then it’s a slow-bleed displacement that happens.” He warned, “In the face of a kind of stark reality where Gazan society has been razed to the ground, people eventually will vote with their feet.” ♦