Donald Trump’s Pantomime United Nations
The current composition of the board of directors is heterogeneous. It includes important countries already invested in the stability of Gaza: Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf monarchies. The White House also implicated governments involved in other peace initiatives allegedly led by Trump, such as those in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Pakistan and Kosovo. The governments of participating countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Kazakhstan and Indonesia may view membership as a low-stakes way to increase their geopolitical influence. And then there are Trump’s fellow travelers who have no obvious choice other than the desire to please the president, like Argentine President Javier Milei, a staunch libertarian, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Europe’s most prominent illiberal nationalist.
Trump has sent invitations to dozens of countries to join the Peace Council, but he has been mostly rebuffed or kept at arm’s length by traditional U.S. allies. European skepticism deepened further after Trump sought to include Russia and Belarus in the project. (Russia has not yet announced its decision, while Belarus agreed, although Belarusian officials said they had not received visas from the United States to attend Thursday’s meeting.) In January, French President Emmanuel Macron and his Brazilian counterpart Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva issued a joint appeal to defend and strengthen the UN against Trump’s ventures. Pope Leo XIV made a similar argument to the UN in declining Trump’s invitation.
Sitting in the room during Thursday’s meeting, a European official in attendance was perplexed by the succession of leaders expressing admiration for Trump, particularly after a number of top European politicians were mocked for their own attempts to curry favor with the U.S. president over the past year. “We can’t just blame Europeans for pandering to you-know-who,” the official told me. “We’re not even the worst.”
Board member terms last three years (conveniently expiring like Trump’s term). A government can pay a billion dollars for a permanent seat, but most diplomats are unsure whether that experience will exist or matter beyond Trump’s term. Two presidents I spoke with in the aftermath of the Davos ceremony downplayed any expectations of financial contributions or commitments. Kosovo President Vjosa Osmani instead framed her small nation’s participation as an act of historic redemption, thanking Washington for its leading role in Kosovo’s fight for independence from Serbia. “It was the helping hand of the United States of America that came to our rescue,” she told me. “Today, twenty-six years later, we are giving back and helping to advance this peace. »
Armenian President Vahagn Khachaturyan told me he hoped the council could help “build confidence” in the United Nations system by strengthening peacemaking efforts. He lamented that “the principles of coexistence are very often violated and that the United Nations is often not able to prevent these violations,” referring to the recurring problem of the Security Council, where any of the five veto powers – in recent history, mainly Russia and the United States – can block important resolutions to resolve conflicts such as Russia’s war in Ukraine or Israel’s war in Gaza.
But Trump and his lieutenants rarely talk about principles and seem far more interested in creating an arena where only the U.S. veto counts. Their ideological animosity could be heard last weekend, during a major security conference in Munich. Elbridge Colby, the US deputy secretary of defense for policy, mocked the “hosannas and shibboleths” that constitute speeches about shared values and paeans to rules-based order. Rubio has scorned the UN, saying that “on the most pressing issues 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 third secretary-general of the UN, said that, “despite all its failures”, the UN “played an important role in eighty years of peace and prosperity unprecedented in human history”. He warned that if the Peace Council gains momentum, it could “open the way to a much broader collapse of the entire UN architecture that we have had since 1945.”
There are many reasons to believe that the board may be nothing more than a Trump vanity project, made up of dissonant parts and vague goals that will disappear amid the drama of his presidency. But with the United States playing the role of spoilsport in an international system of which it was once the lynchpin, no other world power seems particularly eager to take over. Thant Myint-U said: “At a time when Washington is questioning the fundamental principles of the UN, both through the Peace Council, but also through cuts in aid and funding and everything else, no other country is saying: either we are going to compensate financially for the missing US contributions, or we are going to really invest politically in renewing and strengthening the UN. »
