There is a particular kind of institution that exists not to accomplish its stated purpose but to announce that the purpose has already been accomplished. You recognise it by its ceremony—the signing, the podium, the charter held aloft like a diploma for a course no one has taken.
On 22 January 2026, in Davos, such an institution was born. Donald Trump ratified the charter of the Board of Peace. He called it “the Greatest and Most Prestigious Board ever assembled at any time, any place.” Which is to say, it was announced. Whether it was assembled—whether it could be—remained a question the ceremony was designed to make impolite.
The Board of Peace emerged from something real enough: the Gaza ceasefire agreement of October 2025, a fragile arrangement brokered through exhaustion as much as diplomacy, after a war that killed over 72,000 Palestinians and reduced the territory to a landscape of rubble and grief. United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803, passed in November 2025 with thirteen votes in favor and Russia and China abstaining, authorized the Board to oversee reconstruction and deploy a temporary stabilization force. The mandate was specific, time-limited, and tethered to the desperate practicalities of a shattered place. It was, for a moment, an instrument with a purpose.
But purposes, in Trump’s hands, have a way of expanding until they become indistinguishable from the man who holds them.
Within weeks, the Board’s charter had metastasized. No longer a body tasked with rebuilding Gaza, it declared itself committed to “enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict”—a formulation so expansive it could encompass the entire planet. Trump suggested the Board might replace the United Nations. He installed himself as chairman for life. He renamed the US Institute of Peace after himself. The $1 billion entry fee for permanent membership ensured that the Board’s composition would reflect not international cooperation but the architecture of a transaction. The system was designed not to deceive but to perpetuate itself.
And who answered the call? Of the roughly sixty nations invited, twenty-six signed the founding charter. The roster reads like a catalogue of authoritarian ambition in diplomatic attire: Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan—nations where elections are neither free nor fair, where the press exists to echo power, and where “peace” has long served as a euphemism for silence. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who has dismantled his country’s democratic institutions. Argentina’s Milei, whose contempt for institutional constraint mirrors Trump’s own. Sixteen of the twenty initial advisory members are classified as authoritarian or partly free by Freedom House.
The Guardian described it as a “pay-to-play club.” Perhaps that is too generous. A club implies exclusivity by design. This is exclusivity by default—the democracies have simply declined to come. France declined. Germany declined. The United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Slovenia, and Ukraine—all declined. Canada’s invitation was rescinded after Prime Minister Mark Carney offered mild criticism, which is to say he spoke honestly, which is to say he was punished for it. The European Union sent an observer—the diplomatic equivalent of attending a funeral without signing the guest book. Pope Leo declined, stressing that crisis situations should be managed by the United Nations. Even Netanyahu, who accepted membership, could not attend the Davos ceremony for fear of arrest under the ICC warrant. The Board of Peace’s most prominent member could not safely travel to its founding.
There is something almost Kafkaesque in this. An institution created to bring peace, chaired by a man who suggested it might supplant the body that has maintained—however imperfectly, however infuriatingly—the post-war international order for eighty years, staffed by nations whose commitment to peace within their own borders ranges from questionable to farcical, funded by a mechanism that resembles less a membership fee than a protection payment, and headquartered in a building renamed for its chairman. The system is not designed to keep people guessing. It is designed to keep people paying.
The first meeting, to be held on 19 February 2026 at the newly christened Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, is meant to demonstrate momentum. Trump announced $5 billion in pledged reconstruction funds—a number that sounds impressive until you learn that the United Nations estimates Gaza’s reconstruction will cost approximately $70 billion. Five billion is not a down payment on peace. It is a gesture toward the idea of a gesture. Meanwhile, the ceasefire the Board has created to oversee has continued to fray. Since the agreement took effect, more than 550 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli strikes. The territory remains shattered. The people remain displaced. The Board meets while the ground it claims to stand on shifts beneath it.
Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and executive board member, presented a glossy reconstruction vision at Davos—beach resorts, high-rise towers, and the aesthetic of a luxury brochure applied to a landscape of mass graves. There are no Palestinians on the Board of Peace. There are no Palestinians on the Gaza Executive Board. The people whose peace is ostensibly being brokered exist in this architecture only as beneficiaries of decisions made elsewhere, by others, for reasons that may or may not include their well-being.
The defenders offer a pragmatic argument. The old ways were not working, says Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the UN. Indonesia has pledged 8,000 troops for a humanitarian mission. Some Arab states with genuine stakes—Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, and the UAE—have signed on. The ceasefire, however imperfect, exists. The NCAG, led by technocrat Ali Sha’ath, represents a serious attempt at governance. These are real things, and to dismiss them entirely would be to indulge in cynicism the situation cannot afford.
But the question is not whether the Board of Peace can accomplish something. It is whether the Board of Peace is designed to accomplish anything beyond itself. An institution chaired for life by one man, funded by billion-dollar payments of unspecified use, populated overwhelmingly by authoritarian states, boycotted by every major Western democracy, lacking Palestinian representation in a body that exists to determine Palestine’s future—this is not the architecture of peace. It is the architecture of patronage, dressed in the language of diplomacy.
The Atlantic Council compared the Board to previous transitional administrations—East Timor, Bosnia, and the Quartet’s Road Map. Each offered instructive failures: vague timelines, dependence on foreign oversight, and the entrenchment of divisions under international cover. The Board risks all of these and adds a novel vulnerability: it is tethered not to an international consensus but to a single personality. Its mandate expires in December 2027. Its relevance almost certainly expires with Trump’s presidency in January 2029, if not before.
Perhaps the most honest assessment comes from Slovenian Foreign Minister Robert Golob, who declined membership with the observation that the Board’s mandate is “too broad” and that it could “dangerously undermine the international order.” This is the contemplative position—one that takes seriously what the Board represents beyond its operations: not a supplement to international cooperation but a rival to it, where legitimacy is purchased rather than earned, where the word “peace” floats free of any obligation to the people who need it most.
The Board of Peace will hold its meeting. Speeches will be made. Pledges announced. Photographs taken. And in Gaza, where the buildings are still dust and the dead are still being counted, the old question will persist—the one no ceremony can answer, no charter can resolve: Is this real? Has it happened? Does it matter?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. But the river of human suffering does not wait for boards to convene. It flows regardless, as rivers do, knowing nothing of charters, only of the ground through which it must pass.