President Donald Trump is often accused of being a warmonger and a rogue leader who acts in defiance of international law and global opinion. His menacing plan (abandoned for now) to seize Greenland from Denmark, the “easy way” or the “hard way,” shows why that characterization has become so widely accepted outside his MAGA base.
As if to refute the allegation, Trump last week rolled out a Board of Peace designed — as he wrote in a gushing invitation letter to the prime minister of Sweden — to “bring together a distinguished group of nations ready to shoulder the noble responsibility of building LASTING PEACE.”
But whatever the superficial differences between Trump’s contemplated annexation of Greenland and his attempt to create what the invitation bills as “the most impressive and consequential Board ever assembled,” they are manifestations of the same impulse: Trump wants to do whatever he wants, wherever he wants, unconstrained by any checks or balances, and he would like to make a lot of money doing it.
The U.N. Security Council presumably had no idea, when it approved in November the creation of the Board of Peace, that it was bringing into existence a potential competitor to the United Nations itself. The council’s intent was to create a Gaza governing mechanism free of Hamas control. That goal hasn’t been achieved: Hamas still controls half of Gaza (Israel has the other half), and it refuses to disarm. That makes it impossible to implement the White House’s pie-in-the-sky plan to transform the devastated war zone into a technology and tourism hub.
No one can accuse Trump of not dreaming big. Last week in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum, Trump unveiled a Board of Peace that expands well beyond Gaza to encompass, well, pretty much the whole world. The White House has not publicly released the organization’s charter. But it was obtained by the Times of Israel, and it’s a doozy. The Board of Peace is a multilateral organization in name only. While there is an executive board (it includes MAGA luminaries Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff and Marco Rubio), all power is concentrated in the hands of the chairman. You can guess who that is.
According to the charter, “the Chairman” will have the power to invite states to join the board, to veto resolutions, to dissolve the board, “to adopt resolutions or other directives,” and even to approve its official seal. The designated chairman is not whoever happens to be president of the United States but Trump personally, and the charter does not call for him to step down if and when he leaves the presidency. Barring a health crisis, Trump can run the Board of Peace as long as he likes, and he is empowered to choose his own successor. This is a model closer to the Trump Organization than to the collective leadership of the United Nations or NATO.
The comparison to Trump’s company is especially apt because the Board of Peace, as envisioned by the president, aims to raise a lot of money. If members want to stay on the board for more than three years, they have to contribute a staggering $1 billion. The Mar-a-Lago Club’s initiation fee ($1 million) is quite a bargain by comparison. Where that money will go is unclear. The charter simply says: “The Board of Peace may authorize the establishment of accounts as necessary to carry out its mission.”
Which means that, if any nations do ante up, Trump could have access to a massive slush fund independent of Congress’s power of the purse — much like the Qatar bank accounts set up for the proceeds of Venezuelan oil sales overseen by the administration.
You can see why many invitees to the Board of Peace are keeping a wary distance: They would rather the U.S. support existing international institutions (the White House just announced it was leaving 66 of them) instead of creating a new one dominated entirely by Trump. The list of roughly two dozen early signatories is dominated by dictatorships including Egypt, Belarus, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kazakhstan, along with a few Trump-aligned democracies such as Argentina and Israel.
There is no indication yet that any of these countries are paying for the privilege. The only leader who has suggested he might pay is Russia’s Vladimir Putin — if the U.S. allows him to use frozen Russian funds. From his cynical perspective, that’s a twofer: Putin ensures the money can’t go to Ukraine, while also buying Trump’s favor.
A few countries, such as France, Sweden, and Spain, have risked Trump’s ire by rejecting membership. Canada got disinvited because Trump didn’t like Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos calling on middle powers to band together against great-power bullying. Most nations are simply lying low, no doubt hoping that Trump’s attention will wander and the Board of Peace will vanish into the ether like the Greenland annexation.
The best thing you can say for the Board of Peace is that it is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Just as dictators routinely adopt the form of democracy (voting, constitutions, parliaments) but not its substance, so too the Board of Peace adopts the form of multilateralism but not its substance. It’s a one-man show. That means it won’t be paralyzed by disputes among members, as the U.N. often is, but that’s also its weakness: Few countries are going to volunteer to be bossed around by Chairman Trump.
In all probability, the Board of Peace will be forgotten as quickly as President Joe Biden’s quixotic attempts to create a global community of democracies. If it is remembered at all, it will be as a testament to Trump’s tendency to make everything — even, or perhaps especially, the noble search for world peace — all about his own self-aggrandizement.
The post The Board of Peace is the Trump Organization, international edition appeared first on Washington Post.
