Like many punters who have tried to do business with Donald Trump in the past, the UN has found itself a victim of a classic bait-and-switch, thinking it was buying one thing, but getting quite another.
When they voted to endorse the board of peace in November, other members of the UN security council hoped they were binding Trump into a Gaza peace process, but it now appears they were hoodwinked into backing a Trump-dominated pay-to-play club: a global version of his Mar-a-Lago court aimed at supplanting the UN itself.
The outline of Trump’s “board of peace” which has emerged over the past few days is a long way from the body that the council thought it was endorsing. Resolution 2803 was passed 13-0, with Russia and China abstaining, as an attempt to give a UN imprimatur to a Trump-brokered ceasefire in Gaza. The discussions leading up to the vote on 18 November, and the text of the resolution, were all about the conflict.
Handing control of Gaza to a Trump-run “board” for two years cut across longstanding UN principles of self-determination and national sovereignty and against colonialism. It was also vaguer than any other UN peacekeeping resolution in modern times.
Nonetheless, the Arab world and Europe decided to vote for the resolution once wording had been added to at least give lip-service to a future sovereign Palestinian state. It was the best way, their diplomats argued at the time, to keep Trump engaged in Gaza, with the hope of achieving a durable peace.
Two months on, there is not a single mention of Gaza in the “board of peace” charter sent out to national capitals. That document instead portrays the board as a permanent fixture to promote peace and good governance around the world. It will be “pragmatic” and “results-oriented”, it will be “a more nimble and effective international peace-building body”, and will have “the courage to depart from approaches and institutions that have too often failed”.
The document does not name the “failed institutions” that the board will apparently be more nimble and effective than, but there is little doubt that these derogatory references are aimed at the UN.
The use of the word “charter” itself is an echo of the UN Charter. That 1945 document, however, was anchored in a set of principles which were hard-earned lessons of the second world war: the primacy of non-aggression, self-determination, fundamental human rights, and the “equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small”.
The Trump board charter uses no such language. Most of the text is devoted to the club rules, which make the chairman (Trump himself – the only person mentioned by name) all-powerful. All other members are selected by him and can be terminated by him. The chairman (mentioned 35 times in the document) can choose when the board meets and what it discusses. He can issue resolutions off his own bat.
All other members come and go under the rules, unless they buy a life-membership for $1bn “in cash funds”, and even that does not appear to offer a guarantee against being ejected by Trump.
The inequity represented by the five permanent members of the UN security council, the victors from the second world war, has long rankled the rest of the world. The use and abuse of the permanent members’ veto privilege, particularly by Russia and the US, has long paralysed the council as a body for global governance.
The board of peace swaps this inequity for another that is even more unjust – a permanence of a sort that can only be afforded by rich countries with a billion dollars to spare. And in this new forum, Trump alone would have an absolute veto.
While the charter has nothing to say about Gaza, the board will oversee a general executive board, and a Gaza executive board, and beneath that a “national committee for the administration of Gaza”, the highest level in which Palestinians themselves are permitted to participate. There is also to be an international stabilisation force (ISF), overseen by a US major-general.
The board will therefore have mechanisms to further the ceasefire in Gaza, and in theory to bring peace, governance and reconstruction to the territory. But all the signs are that these mechanisms are also aimed at displacing UN agencies that have historically gone into post-conflict zones to stabilise and help rebuild stricken societies, and replacing them with profit-driven business ventures.
Nickolay Mladenov, the board’s would-be “high representative” in Gaza, is a well-respected, veteran UN diplomat, but he alone will find it a hard fight to keep the UN at the heart of the process. He will be hemmed in on all sides by the money people – Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner and the other billionaires brought in from the region.
It is anyway unlikely that the Gaza arm of the board – the executive, the national committee and the ISF – will have much to do in the foreseeable future. The Israeli government is resolutely opposed to moving forward with any element of the second phase of the Trump ceasefire that would bring Palestinian governance back to Gaza or give any other nation a stake or a role in the territory. For example, it has sought to rule out Turkish or Qatari participation in the ISF.
The limbo between the first and second phase of the ceasefire suits Israel. It has its hostages back, the UN agencies are being squeezed out, and it can strike any time and anywhere but without the unsustainable costs of full-scale war.
For more than two million Palestinians it is an unbearable purgatory. They are still exposed to Israeli bombardment and to the elements, marooned in tents and flimsy shelters with little prospect of going home or rebuilding.
A board of peace with Vladimir Putin as a candidate member is also very unlikely to stop the bloodshed in Ukraine. Its most likely fate is to remain a vanity project, while the rest of the world is stuck with the invitation from hell. Refusal to join, as France has tried, is punished by vengeful tariffs from a petty president.
Joining the board, on the other hand, involves undermining the UN, submission to Trump’s will and acquiescence in his vision of future of world governance – an imperial court where vassal states pay cash and vie for the ear of the orange emperor.
