The Art of Saying ‘No’ to Trump’s Peace Board

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There are two parts to US President Donald Trump’s revolutionary Board of Peace (BoP) unveiled at Davos on 22 January: a vote of no confidence in the United Nations and an alternative governance structure for maintaining international peace and security. The first part has some merit but the second is deeply flawed and likely to fall flat sooner rather than later.

Disappointment in the UN in turn may be broken down into two components. The first is with respect to its primary mandate to keep the peace. The central geopolitical body for this with virtually unlimited authority is the UN Security Council. The frozen structure of five permanent members (P5)—global power equations have undergone fundamental transformations since the UN’s creation in 1945—with veto power means that the unlimited decision-making authority backed by robust enforcement powers in theory has been frustrated in practice, with rare exceptions, by the equally extensive decision-blocking competence of the P5. In other words, the impotence of the UN in its primary mandate owes more to great-power defiance of international opinion than to the membership at large. In the UN’s eight decades, it would not be easy to pick between Russia and the US as the worst offender.

The second area of concern is the growth in UN entities and system-wide mission creep of an increasingly intrusive international bureaucracy with their continually-expanding corps of international civil servants and technocrats. Their reach now extends deep into sovereign national jurisdictions, sparking a populist backlash against the portmanteau term ‘globalism’. Although the term ‘populist’ is used pejoratively by most ruling elites, its value-neutral empirical meaning is policies that are electorally popular and reflect a growing rebellion against perceived ‘uniparty’ policies on three sets of policies in particular to do with net zero, mass immigration and identitarian politics. Concerningly for the UN system, these policies are (mis)identified with the UN and Davos elites.

Also, several institutions of global governance have become addicted to a model that seeks to continually expand their mandates, budgets and personnel by perpetuating the problems that they were set up to solve. This enables them to operate in a permanent crisis mode by pointing to proliferating and worsening risks, and recasts their identity into advocacy platforms. Success is self-validating: why interfere with a model that is working? Failure is self-negating: see, exactly as we warned, insufficient resources have made the problem worse. The answer to both success and failure is a continual bureaucratic sprawl. Over time this increases their dependence on funding while deflecting attention from the need to scrutinise the paucity of mission-centric outcomes.

All this said as a worst-case critique of the UN, the BoP model has far deeper flaws built into it. Bottom line? It is destructive of the existing order with nothing constructive to commend it.

First, the entire architecture speaks to one man’s vainglorious projection of himself as the world’s benign and enlightened despot. Its scope has widened ambitiously from the original mission of overseeing peace in Gaza to embracing every present and future global conflict. Trump has neither a domestic US mandate for this nor any grounds for global legitimacy. He will be the Board’s chair for as long as he wishes, with veto power over all key decisions, and will handpick his successor. He has arrogated to himself the sole discretion to invite dozens of others to join the Board and in one infamous case (Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney), already uninvited him for the temerity to organise a counter-movement of middle powers. No one voted for him and no globally legitimate and representative body has appointed him.

Second, not only does the BoP lack legitimacy, it is not even tied to American power. Trump will not be its chair as the US president, to be followed by his successor in office. Rather, he will retain his position after leaving office. As things stand, his increasing resort to coercive enforcement against critics and protestors at home and against foreign leaders who refuse to kowtow to him, plus the weaponisation of tariffs as a foreign policy tool to discipline anti-American leaders and regimes, is causing significant loss of support in opinion polls. So much so that Republican party analyst Karl Rove wonders if Trump is intentionally destroying the party’s prospects in the November mid-terms and fracturing the most important alliance in pursuit of ‘imperial delirium’ abroad.

The first outcome would cripple his domestic and foreign policy agenda for the second half of his final term. The second led Carney to pronounce at Davos that the global crisis triggered by Trump was not a transition but had caused a rupture of the existing world order. Carney’s eloquent challenge to Trump’s global vision has attracted much commendation around the world.

The trans-Atlantic alliance has consisted of the fusion of two separate but interlinked military and economic blocs into the world’s biggest security community. Mutual trust and political cohesion have underpinned the security community and account for its robust durability for almost eight decades but are at genuine risk of being shattered beyond repair, with Trump emerging as the biggest threat to its survival. The gravest risk of this is that NATO will take on the attributes of the discredited Warsaw Pact: an instrument of control over allies by the bloc hegemon more than a collective defence pact against the external enemy. Canada’s military believes that in the unlikely event of a US invasion, it would fold within days. So, for the first time in a century, as part of scenario planning they are investing in the Afghanistan mujahedeen model of a 20-year anti-US insurgency, with troops and armed civilians carrying out hit-and-run style ambushes.

Nor is the volatility and opposition to Trump’s global agenda as embedded in the BoP restricted to NATO allies. Leaders of the world’s most consequential countries have responded cautiously to Trump’s invitation to join, not wishing to antagonise the famously thin-skinned president with a blunt refusal. Few would have the discretion to commit a billion dollars to the board, the modern-day equivalent of paying tribute to the emperor of the Middle Kingdom, to buy life membership. Among most of the Arab and Islamic countries to have accepted, interest remains confined largely to peace in Gaza, not other distant conflicts. Some have not hesitated to criticise the project in harsh terms for hijacking the UN-mandated Gaza mechanism to impose a colonial construct on the whole world—except colonialism involved control by a foreign power, not a foreign individual. Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, for example, warns that ‘the UN Charter is being torn’ in favour of ‘a new UN where only he [Trump] is the owner’. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni cite ‘constitutional reasons’ that prohibit their country joining the BoP in light of its charter and leadership structure.

As well as sidelining the UN, the Board of Peace will undermine international law and accountability yet will have neither the authority, mechanisms nor capacity to enforce its decisions. Little wonder that, so far, the list of acceptances consists mostly of vassal states and supplicant leaders desperate to curry favour with Trump.

Related articles:

Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’: Reign of the Rich (3-minute read)

Commercialising Peace: A Strategic Risk (3-minute read)

The UN’s Withering Vine: A US Retreat from Global Governance (3-minute read)

Venezuela and the UN's Proxy War Moment (3-minute read)

The Danger of a Transactional Worldview (3-minute read)

Ramesh Thakur, a former UN assistant secretary-general, is emeritus professor at the Australian National University and Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. He is a former Senior Research Fellow at the Toda Peace Institute and editor of The nuclear ban treaty: a transformational reframing of the global nuclear order.