Irregular: Board of Peace

All or nothing?

Chair, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888, oil on canvas, the National Gallery, London.

In today’s Irregular, I want to offer a sober assessment of Donald Trump’s new Board of Peace: what it is, what it is not, and what it means, if anything, for global governance and international peace-building.

Among so much else this week, the announcement has triggered a wave of commentary that sits along a familiar spectrum.

At one end is the nothing-burger view: that the Board of Peace has little mandate, limited political backing, and will run aground on the same institutional and operational constraints that have plagued international peace-building efforts for decades. At the other end — the view that has so far dominated much of the media discourse — is the sky-is-falling interpretation: that Trump’s Board of Peace represents a form of American overreach, an attempt to sideline the United Nations Security Council, and a step toward dismantling the international order as we know it.

The reality, predictably, is more prosaic. The Board of Peace is neither an empty gesture nor a revolutionary overhaul of the international system.

Much of the more alarmist commentary rests on the claim that the Board of Peace is designed to circumvent the UN Security Council and replace it with a personalised “concert of nations” operating outside international law. On this view, the initiative signals the effective end of the rules-based order and the beginning of a Trumpian parallel system for global security.

A close reading of the Board of Peace charter does not support this interpretation.

Unlike the United Nations — and, in particular, its primary organ, the Security Council — the Board of Peace is assigned a narrow and clearly circumscribed mandate. Its stated purpose is peace-building, not the maintenance of international peace and security in the broader sense. It makes no claim to the core and exceptional authorities that define the Security Council: it cannot declare threats to international peace, impose binding sanctions, authorise peacekeeping operations, or legitimise the use of force.

Nor does the charter assert any form of legal primacy over international law. This is a critical distinction. The UN Charter is a constitutional instrument: it establishes a comprehensive institutional architecture, including the Security Council, the General Assembly, and the International Court of Justice. The Board of Peace charter does nothing of the sort. It creates no judicial arm, no parliamentary body, and no claim to systemic authority. It situates itself — explicitly and implicitly — within the existing framework of international law rather than above it.

In this respect, the Board of Peace is, at least formally, just another international organisation among the hundreds that already exist: task-specific, limited in scope, and legally subordinate to the UN Charter. It is not a proto-parliament, nor a shadow Security Council, nor a rival constitutional order.

Where the Board of Peace does depart sharply from precedent is in its institutional design.

Trump towers

Most international organisations define membership according to objective criteria: geography, economic status, treaty obligations, or voting rules agreed by the members themselves. By contrast, membership of the Board of Peace is discretionary. Invitations are issued at the personal direction of its chairman for life — Donald Trump — and membership can be revoked by him alone.

This is highly unusual. Almost all international organisations rely on rotating leadership, fixed terms, or collective decision-making processes, often governed by elaborate procedural rules. Even where informal conventions exist — such as the United States appointing the World Bank president or Europe nominating the IMF managing director — these practices operate within multilateral consent and institutional constraint.

Here, authority is vested personally and indefinitely in a single individual. The chairman sets the agenda, controls membership, and remains in office without term limits. We are not aware of a meaningful precedent for this arrangement in modern international institutional design. It’s also hard, in fairness, to find parallels in domestic systems outside the most authoritarian regimes. It most resembles, perhaps unsurprisingly, a corporate constitution — not of a publicly listed Fortune 500 company, but a privately held family office.

These features undoubtedly create scope for mission creep, politicisation, and institutional fragility. The charter is short, deliberately flexible, and open-ended. Much will depend on how those ambiguities are exploited (or restrained) in practice.

Still, the most useful international analogy is not the UN Security Council, but crisis-driven coordination mechanisms created to bypass institutional paralysis. In this sense, the Board of Peace resembles ad hoc leadership forums convened during moments of perceived systemic failure: born out of frustration with existing bodies, justified by urgency, and designed to privilege decisiveness over inclusiveness — such as the G20 in its early days, conceived to resolve the Global Financial Crisis, convening the largest nations by economic weight, and operating at the leader level.

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We, some of the people

If the Board of Peace does not replace the Security Council, then what does it seek to displace?

The answer is more modest. In functional terms, the Board of Peace appears to encroach most directly on the UN’s peace-building architecture: the Peacebuilding Commission, its associated funding mechanisms, and its support office. These bodies, established in 2005-06 in the Kofi Annan era, were designed to address precisely the gap between peacekeeping and long-term stability in post-conflict states. They are technocratic, under-funded, and politically marginal. Indeed, who really has heard of them?

Trump’s proposal is, in effect, a blunt critique of that ecosystem. It assumes that peace-building has failed not because of insufficient expertise, but because of weak political ownership, inadequate resources, and diffused accountability. The Board of Peace addresses these problems in characteristically Trumpian fashion: by centralising authority, elevating engagement to the head-of-state level, and — at least in theory — mobilising substantial funding through large entry contributions.

There are, undeniably, potential merits here. Peace-building efforts often falter because they lack sustained political attention. Head-of-government involvement can shift incentives, cut through bureaucratic inertia, and force compromises that lower-level bodies cannot. A governance structure that allows for swift exclusion of non-performing members may also increase discipline, though at the obvious cost of accountability. And having well-stocked coffers and the President of the United States driving outcomes on neglected and politically intractable issues may lead to faster progress on important matters of life and death.

This trade-off — between effectiveness and legitimacy — is the central gamble of the Board of Peace. Trump has weighted the design heavily toward the former.

“It’s a very good business being the house”

Whether that gamble pays off will depend principally on precisely those two things. First, effectiveness: can the Board deliver tangible outcomes, beginning with its initial focus on Gaza? Can it contribute to a durable ceasefire, reconstruction, and post-conflict governance without becoming another stalled international initiative? And, over time, will the Board rack up more wins? Second, legitimacy: how many states join, which states join, and whether they commit meaningful resources and political capital.

These two variables are mutually reinforcing. Effectiveness breeds legitimacy; legitimacy enables effectiveness. Failure on either front, as for any international organisation, will undermine the project. So too will skewing too far in one direction.

There is, however, a further dimension to this gamble that is too often overlooked: what happens once Trump is no longer president. The Board’s effectiveness will rest heavily on Trump’s personal authority and his capacity to impose high-level political engagement — a genuine advantage in peace-building — but that advantage will likely disappear the moment his centrality fades. The degree of reversal will depend on who succeeds him, but it is hard to imagine a Democratic administration treating an international organisation chaired for life by Donald Trump — or anyone he nominates as successor — as anything other than politically toxic.

For accountable governments with electorates to answer to, Board participation will be both difficult to stomach and difficult to sell to voters. That creates a problem for any state contemplating a billion-dollar commitment: why buy a permanent seat in an institution that may simply die the moment the political logic of engaging Trump disappears? Breaking things can have long-term consequences; building things rarely does when they are so tightly bound to one man. Outside a small group of states with unlimited resources, limited domestic accountability, or a willingness to humour Trump regardless of who governs next in Washington, the rational calculation may be that participation makes sense only while Trump is in power, but a permanent seat, with a $1 billion price tag, is simply a bad bet

Either way, it’s also a gamble that many nations are at least willing to consider. Already, some twenty or so states have signalled their intention to join the Board. Others, like Germany and Italy, have said they would like to but cannot for constitutional reasons. Most invitees, however, have so far kept mum. And only a handful, including UN Security Council permanent members France and the UK, have ruled out participation, citing, respectively, contradictions with international law and concerns about Putin’s potential involvement.

Whether China and Russia will participate will also test both the Board’s legitimacy and its effectiveness. It’s hard to imagine Xi and Putin being anything other than unwillingly to subordinate themselves to Trump to earn his favour, to carry out his agenda without shaping it, or to risk the ignominy of being summarily “fired” like Canadian prime minister Mark Carney was after his call to arms for middle powers at Davos — although they may assess it’s better to be in the room than on the outside and that humouring the mercurial Trump is better than needlessly insulting him.

In some ways, the bar for success is low. Even if only twice as many states ultimately sign up as have this week at Davos, the Board of Peace would have more members than the UN Peacebuilding Commission, which has thirty-one, represented at officials-level. If only two of those nations join as permanent members through the $1 billion commitment fee, the Board would become better funded than the UN Secretary General’s Peacebuilding Fund. And if the Board brokers just one peace deal, it would have a stronger record than UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who began in the role in 2017.

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Construction ambiguity

That leaves the question of whether the Board of Peace poses a threat to the international order?

There are legitimate grounds for unease. Never before has an international organisation concentrated such authority in a single individual. Nor is it clear that the Board will attract sustained, broad-based international support. It may yet collapse under the weight of its own design. And, most fundamentally, there are very real reasons to question Trump’s motives.

Just this week, Trump advised the Norwegian prime minister he was not so interested in peace after not receiving the Nobel. Trump’s complex psychology — as Michael Feller explored in yesterday’s Week Signals — suggests vanity and an insatiable drive to accumulate power may well be driving factors. And the board’s composition as well as Trump’s penchant for a deal raises questions that the Board is nothing more than a real estate consortium wanting to monetise post-war construction while masquerading as a diplomatic initiative.

Be that as it may, what seems unlikely is that the Board’s mere existence — or participation by unsavoury characters, real estate shonkies, or autocratic leaders with questionable motives — constitutes a fundamental challenge to international law or the United Nations system. The Board remains subordinate to international law, politically optional, and operationally narrow. It does not displace the UN Charter and it cannot replicate the Security Council’s unique authority. And the Board of Peace is hardly the only international organisation to have authoritarian leaders — the whole system of international relations is predicated on sovereign equality and participation by all states no matter their political complexion.

What it does demonstrate, however, is something else: that Donald Trump, even after leaving office, is likely to remain an actor in international life. Through the Board of Peace — and through the eventual designation of a successor — he appears intent on extending his personal imprint on global governance beyond his formal presidency.

Whether that imprint proves consequential, ephemeral, or quietly irrelevant is a question that only practice, not theory, will answer.

Whatever happens, it will make good television.

Best wishes

Damien