IRS EIN 52-1503251, 501(c) (3) Public Charity

The Donald J. Trump Board of Peace 

 

What might possibly go wrong? See USIP.

 

 In the New Yorker,

It didn’t take long for the flattery to begin. On Thursday, the Board of Peace, an entity set up by President Donald Trump, held its first formal meeting, in Washington, D.C., at the newly rebranded Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. At the event, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, the President of Kazakhstan, proposed that the board administer “a special President Trump award,” to recognize its namesake’s “outstanding peace-building efforts and achievements.”

If the moment felt too on the nose, too fawning and obsequious, no one seemed to bat an eye; Tokayev was just one of numerous foreign dignitaries and U.S. officials to heap praise upon Trump at the event. Also in the room was Gianni Infantino, the head of fifa, soccer’s global governing body and facilitator of the World Cup, who, in December, had awarded Trump with the newly manufactured fifa Peace Prize, during a ceremony at the nearby Kennedy Center, which Trump, for good measure, has also rebranded with his name...

...A lot remains confusing and uncertain about the Board of Peace. Thursday’s event produced apparent pledges of about seven billion dollars from nine countries for the reconstruction of Gaza while Trump has separately suggested that the U.S. would muster ten billion dollars on its own for the board, though it was unclear where that money was coming from and whether it would pass congressional scrutiny. There were also offers of thousands of military personnel from countries including Indonesia and Morocco to compose an “international stabilization force” to police the territory. And yet details are sketchy on where such a force would be deployed and how all the money earmarked for it will be tracked and disbursed. A video presentation shown at the meeting touted A.I.-generated images of skyscrapers and luxury beach resorts in Gaza and proffered airy visions of the enclave turning into an “Abrahamic gateway,” a hub for trade networks that would span Europe and India and thread together the Middle East. Less was said about the bleak facts on the ground in Gaza, where Hamas refuses to fully disarm, humanitarian organizations are being denied access by Israel, and civilians languish in limbo, as well as unresolved political questions surrounding the conflict, including the fading prospects of a viable, independent Palestinian state. Among the officials at the Board of Peace meeting, mentions of the need for a two-state solution were scarce.

In November, the United Nations Security Council endorsed a U.S.-backed resolution that authorized the creation of the international force and gave its blessing to the Board of Peace’s stated mandate to aid in Gaza’s redevelopment. But, when the board’s charter emerged, it did not include a word about Gaza. Instead, analysts and diplomats see a far more ambitious project in motion: that Trump is seeking to create an entity that only he controls and which can supplant the work of the Security Council—or, as the board’s charter itself puts it, “depart from approaches and institutions that have too often failed.”

This is the “world order Trump prefers,” Phil Gordon, a former White House coördinator for the Middle East in the Obama Administration and former national-security adviser to Vice-President Kamala Harris, told me. “It’s not a genuinely multilateral one where others have a say, or the United States is constrained,” he said, but one where “the United States, and Trump personally, is at the center of everything.”...

On deck...