Trump’s end run around the old world order

The fact that it was formally unveiled in Davos, Switzerland, told us everything we need to know about President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace.

The idea was originally presented to the world as part of the ceasefire-hostage release deal brokered by the United States to end the post-Oct. 7 war between Israel and Hamas. But three months later, it’s now clear that its real purpose is something else altogether.

Instead of a mechanism solely concerned with the rebuilding of the Gaza Strip or to ensure that the Islamist terrorists are unable to remain in power there, Trump’s ambitions are far greater. As its charter and the fact that its membership will be a diverse coalition of nations make clear, its purpose is nothing less than to rival the United Nations.

More than that, the president may see it as a potentially effective tool to achieve the overarching goal of his “America First” foreign policy. What he really wants is to overturn a post-Second World War international order that he believes has long since stopped serving the national interests of the United States.

Thwarting the Davos set

Just as important, he wishes to thwart the efforts of the politicians, economists, journalists and celebrities who have used the annual gathering of the World Economic Forum to promote liberal schemes, environmentalist hysteria and globalist economics reviled by Trump and other national conservatives.

Founded by German economist Klaus Schwab, who looked like and often acted as if he were a villain in a James Bond movie, the WEF became a hot spot for the rich and famous to see and be seen. It is also the stage on which the international chattering classes have unveiled their fantasies of a future where national borders will be gradually replaced to implement a raft of radical ideas antithetical to the American values of individual liberty and economic freedom.

So, what better venue could there be for promoting a body that—with Trump as its head—will likely be aimed at torpedoing the fashionable set’s ability to influence global affairs.

Why does the United States need a new international organization?

It’s not because such a body was needed to realize Trump’s vision, whereby Gaza is transformed from a subterranean terrorist fortress into a swanky resort on the Mediterranean. That isn’t going to happen under the aegis of the Board of Peace or by any other means.

The UN is a disaster

It’s needed because the world body that was supposed to be the guarantor of international peace—the United Nations—has long since been captured by the forces of the left. Indeed, it works to promote the agendas of those individuals and entities primarily interested in undermining the security of the West, not to mention its use as a weapon against Israel. In the Middle East, the United Nations, through its agencies like the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), has become an engine for perpetuating the conflict between Israel and its opponents, and for isolating the Jewish state. Instead of promoting Western notions of freedom and collective security, the world body is the tool of those who seek to undermine them—the very antithesis of the ideas that led to its founding in the aftermath of World War II.

Like most of the institutions created in that era to deal with the aftermath of the struggle to defeat the Nazis and Imperial Japan, and then to cope with the Cold War, the United Nations is now largely obsolete. Yet it is so large and enmeshed in international diplomacy and global discourse that the idea of America simply throwing it out of its New York headquarters along the East River and going alone has been dismissed as inconceivable, even by its harshest critics. Trump knows he can’t abolish it on his watch. Instead, he seems to think that if he can create an alternative, it just might be possible to bypass it and give the United States greater freedom to act to promote its interests.

Some American presidents, such as Barack Obama and Joe Biden, believed in multilateralism and the United Nations as a matter of political faith. Others, like George W. Bush, felt frustrated by the world body, but was too much the product of establishment thinking; they also lacked the will or the vision to try and do something about it. Trump doesn’t have that institutional knowledge and diplomatic nuance. He speaks, often deliberately, in a manner designed to offend both allies and foes of the United States. Still, he is determined to break the institutions that allow a corrupt and malevolent global establishment to continue to undermine America in the first quarter of a century defined by new international challenges.

Can the Board of Peace achieve such a lofty ambition?

That’s far from clear. The resistance to its creation coming from erstwhile American allies led by liberal leaders, such as Emmanuel Macron of France and Mark Carney of Canada, shows that the old world order won’t go down without a fight. Yet the sullen outrage of “the Davos set” about Trump’s appearance there as he promoted his Board of Peace and his much more fear-engendering Greenland initiative should not be interpreted as an indication that he is failing. To the contrary, as historian Niall Ferguson noted in The Free Press, Trump won Davos hands down by making his ideas and order-wrecking agenda the sole focus of the conversation.

Seizing the global initiative

As the second year of his second term begins, Trump has seized the global initiative and won’t let it go. In his signature style, he leaps from issue to issue—provoking outrage from opponents and accomplishing some of what he wants—and then moves on to the next thing. In this way, in consecutive weeks, Trump put Venezuela, Iran and Greenland at the top of the international agenda. Who knows what we’ll be talking about a month from now, though the odds are it will be whatever is on Trump’s mind.

And by creating an international organization that, despite the presence of scores of global leaders among its membership, Trump will control, the Board of Peace will give him another tool in which he can work his will.

That said, its existence is no guarantee that, contrary to his assertions, peace will be breaking out everywhere. The Gaza Strip, the reason for its creation, is proof of that.

Despite Trump’s promises, the Board of Peace and the team of supposedly apolitical technocrats working for it won’t ensure that the coastal enclave can be turned into something other than a Hamas stronghold and a platform for continuing the Palestinian war on Israel’s existence. That’s not just because the board will count among its members the leaders of Turkey and Qatar (and others who support Hamas), although that in itself is a deal-breaker when it comes to any kind of realistic settlement of the dispute.

Simply put, Hamas won’t disarm or give up control of the 47% of Gaza it still holds. And the International Stabilisation Force that is supposed to police the Strip and ensure that the terrorists abide by the terms of the ceasefire agreement will be composed of soldiers from nations that have no intention of fighting Hamas terror operatives. The only way to do that is to give a green light to the Israel Defence Forces to finish the job. The gap between the reality of the Middle East and the fantasies about rebuilding a peaceful Gaza that was also unveiled at Davos by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, remains vast.

Which means that the Board of Peace is likely to fail unless or until the war against Hamas resumes—something Trump hopes to avoid since it will puncture his claim to be a uniquely successful negotiator, even in a region marked by turmoil.

Smashing an obsolete and harmful establishment

Even if it doesn’t succeed, the board’s creation will provide the president with yet another tool to push aside the United Nations and marginalise the international foreign-policy establishment.

The chattering classes are deeply unhappy about what has transpired, as one can read in the various accounts of Davos published in The New York Times. They believe that Trump is undermining all they hold sacred. Yet it’s necessary to look beyond the issue of whether the president is playing nicely or by the rules of diplomacy, and offending the sensibilities of the self-important celebrities of Davos and the international bureaucrats associated with the United Nations.

Trump might not succeed on every issue, and he may not behave in a manner that engenders the affection or respect of the educated classes that look up to these institutions. But he is right about one thing, above all. The basic truth at the heart of all of his efforts to smash the postwar order is that the United Nations, as well as the Davos set, must be trashed and bypassed if the West is to be saved from the Marxist and Islamist foes that threaten it in the 21st century. America’s geostrategic enemies in China and Russia also depend heavily on preserving the existing international establishment.

In taking up this struggle, Trump is taking aim at institutions that are causing real harm and seeking to address the most important threats to America, Israel and the West. Rather than deride him as a buffoon or a vandal, he should be applauded for defying the suits in Davos and all they stand for.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.