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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.”
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Ishaan Tharoor
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