President Trump’s “Board of Peace,” formally launched at the annual confab of the world’s elite at Davos, amounts to little more than perhaps the most ambitious pay-to-play scheme in history.
Originally a part of last October’s Gaza cease-fire plan, the Board of Peace has since evolved into a broader scheme that holds enormous potential for corruption. According to its charter, nations wanting a permanent seat on the body must give it “more than USD $1,000,000,000 in cash funds to the Board of Peace within the first year of the Charter’s entry into force.” Trump himself serves personally as chairman for life and holds more or less total authority over the board’s composition and activities — right now, it includes such luminaries as Secretary of State-slash-National Security Adviser Marco Rubio, the apparently omnicompetent special envoy Steve Witkoff, and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner. What’s more, Trump will also be able to handpick his own successor.
Never mind that violence continues to plague Gaza, meaning the Board of Peace doesn’t have much real peace to keep. Even the most seemingly easy parts of the ceasefire plan — the return of Israeli hostages, living and dead — have taken longer than initially envisaged, with far more difficult steps like the disarmament of Hamas and the assembly of an International Stabilization Force for Gaza yet to get underway. Jared Kushner’s fantasy of gleaming, redeveloped luxury Gaza will likely remain just that — a fantasy.
Beyond the rather obvious corruption risk that gives foreign potentates the opportunity to buy Trump’s favor, the Board of Peace is also a bid by Trump and his cronies to usurp or circumvent the functions of existing international bodies and institutions like the United Nations. Flawed as they may be in many respects, these institutions do possess widespread legitimacy: virtually every nation on Earth belongs to the UN. We don’t need to romanticize these institutions or pretend that they’re better and more effective than they really are — in far too many cases, they even wind up prolonging conflicts and issues they intend to resolve — to recognize they often have practical value as forums for discussions among nations and, in some cases, mechanisms for action on pressing international problems.
As a pay-to-play scheme with its membership determined by Trump himself, the Board of Peace will lack even a patina of legitimacy — and it may find it impossible to achieve anything aside from its primary function of enriching Trump himself or its original purpose of supervising the Gaza ceasefire plan.
Indeed, the board’s membership remains far too narrow to command anything resembling widespread and lasting legitimacy. Right now, the board consists of a handful of governments already politically aligned with Trump or seeking to curry his favor in one way or another: countries like Argentina and Hungary run by Trump allies Javier Milei and Viktor Orban, as well as Middle Eastern states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey that combine ties to Trump with their own national interests in Gaza’s stability. All told, around thirty-five countries out of the fifty or so Trump invited to join the Board of Peace have said they’ll sign up, with only Vladimir Putin promising to pony up the $1 billion payment required for a permanent board seat — funds the Kremlin says will be drawn from Moscow’s frozen assets. If Trump were to accept Putin’s offer, he would effectively be comping the Kremlin for its membership.
It’s also telling that some of America’s closest and longest-standing allies have rejected Trump’s invitation to join his Board of Peace. France, Germany, and Italy have all signaled that they will not sign on, while Trump himself petulantly revoked Canada’s invitation after Prime Minister Mark Carney’s sober call at Davos to recognize that the so-called rules-based order no longer governs the affairs of nations — due in large measure to Trump’s bristling hostility toward America’s NATO allies and chronic threats to tariff America’s closest trading partners. This sort of mercurial behavior offers another in a long line of stark warnings to other nations: humor Trump and join the Board of Peace at your own peril.
As a result, it seems unlikely at the moment that the Board of Peace will succeed either as a mechanism to enrich Trump himself or as a substitute for the existing international bodies like the United Nations. It lacks the basic legitimacy that the UN, for all of its often severe flaws and failings, possesses by virtue of its near-universal membership. Only the most corrupt and undemocratic of nations will shell out the billion dollars demanded for the permanent opportunity, as the Washington Post columnist Max Boot put it, “to volunteer to be bossed around by Chairman Trump.”
For its part, Congress should refuse to appropriate or authorize any funding for the Board of Peace that goes beyond the role specified for it in Gaza under UN Security Council Resolution 2803. Indeed, Congress should hold Trump’s feet to the fire and require him and his Board to actually come up with a workable plan for Gaza lest the cease-fire, such as it is, unravels. The Trump administration, having demolished USAID and no doubt highlighting the UN’s shortcomings, will likely insist that American taxpayers foot part of the board’s bill. Outside of possible funding for Gaza, however, Congress should answer any request to do so with a firm and resolute no.
Of course, this could all be much ado about very little if Trump fails to make any money from the Board of Peace over the next year. It will stagger on as a zombie institution through the remainder of Trump’s term, remembered as nothing more than a colossal exercise in vanity and corruption.
