To hear the president and his allies speak of it, it is a United Nations in miniature — one under the president’s control.
To hear the president and his allies speak of it, it is a United Nations in miniature — one under the president’s control.
J ared Kushner had some good advice for attendees at this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos: “Calm down.”
“I see people criticizing Israel, or Israel criticizing Turkey and Qatar,” the president’s son-in-law said at a ceremony celebrating the founding of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace. Kushner urged all parties to this organization to maintain some perspective and “work together” for the next month. “Everyone wants to live peacefully,” he claimed. “Let’s focus on the positive story, let’s calm down, turn a new chapter. If we believe peace can be possible, then peace is possible.”
Therein lies the problem: “everyone” doesn’t want to “live peacefully” if the predicate for peace departs from their own terms for it. Hamas’s remnants — a denuded but still armed, dangerous, and operational force on the ground, as Trump himself conceded — do not want peace at the price of their own power. The outfit’s sponsors in the Muslim world are content to allow the region’s terrorist entities to pursue their lunatic vision of a future in which the “Zionist entity” has been wiped from the map. Peace for its own sake is not a universal aspiration.
Kushner’s sunny outlook may be informed by his experience forging the Abraham Accords. That background has earned him the benefit of the doubt. But the comprehensive vision of a better future for Gaza that Trump and his allies promulgated last year will take a lot of work to make manifest. In a region defined by cynicism, transnationalism, and the shibboleths of the sclerotic peace processors, the Trump administration’s creativity and ambition is a breath of fresh air. Its approach has helped unlock new possibilities for a prosperous and stable Middle East, and the Board of Peace could lay a new foundation on which to build an alternative to the social contract that has so far prevailed in the region.
Or, at least, it might if the Board of Peace were still focused on Gaza. It’s not.
As envisioned in the president’s original multipoint peace plan for the region that the United Nations Security Council ratified, the Board of Peace makes its debut at step 9 — after Hamas has committed to verifiable disarmament (which has not yet happened) but before Gaza is to be transformed into a “special economic zone” overseen by international developers and financiers.
That body, over which Trump himself is to preside, for life, would “set the framework and handle the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza” until the Palestinian Authority had successfully implemented its “reform program.” The Board of Peace would oversee a “committee [that] will be made up of qualified Palestinians and international experts,” which would manage the day-to-day administration on the ground in Gaza, all of which was to be safeguarded by an “International Stabilization Force” that would supplant the Israel Defense Forces’ presence in the strip.
Again, ambitious. But the organizational structure as proposed so far bears little resemblance to its implementation.
The International Stabilization Force — without question, the most important element of any plan to demilitarize Gaza — has become an afterthought. The president has appointed the eminently qualified Major General Jasper Jeffers to lead it, but it’s unclear what forces he is meant to command or what countries will contribute troops to it. The committee of experts Trump envisioned, since deemed the “the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG),” also has a leader: Ali Shaath, a Western-educated engineer and native Gazan currently based in the West Bank. But as Shaath himself conceded, his “commission is not an army.” Rather, it’s “15 Palestinian experts in reconstruction, assisted by staff — brains more than weapons.”
These two skeletal institutions will need robust, dedicated leadership from the president’s Board of Peace. And yet, it seems increasingly that the board, as Trump envisions it, seems to regard Gaza as too small a project. To hear the president and his allies speak of it, it is now a United Nations in miniature — one under the president’s control.
“Once this board is completely formed, we can do pretty much whatever we want to do,” Trump told the assembled Davosie. For the low, low price of $1 billion, nations can purchase permanent membership on the body. Lower-tier members “shall serve no more than three years” before re-upping their dues. In Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s words, the body’s work in Gaza will “serve as an example of what’s possible in other parts of the world.” All this talk has unnerved the global diplomatic class, who fear, Reuters reports, “that it could undermine the U.N.’s role as the main platform for global diplomacy and conflict resolution.”
If only. As the ever-astute Douglas Murray recently wrote, no one should lament the development of an international diplomatic institution that might compete with the United Nations and its appendages as an alternative venue for international conflict mediation. The U.N. does a terrible job in that role, in part, because membership in it is extended to every country on earth that the great powers deign to recognize as nations. A genuine improvement to the odious United Nations General Assembly would be more selective.
But Trump has displayed little interest in that kind of discretion. Its founding members include representatives from the governments of Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bulgaria, Hungary, Indonesia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Morocco, Mongolia, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Uzbekistan. Whatever one thinks of this collection of states, it is not a list of nations capable of sustained power projection. Nor is this club based on a set of shared values, to say nothing of liberal ideals. America’s closest allies in the democratic world have declined to participate. Worse, the president has extended membership to some of the world’s worst actors: the despotic Belarus, Vladimir Putin’s expansionist Russia, and the equally irridentist People’s Republic of China. Murray concedes that this is a “worrying sign,” but “if the Board can be a counter to the UN? Then good.”
But it will not become a counter to the U.N. if it preserves the U.N.’s fatal flaw, which is that it is primarily composed of tinpot autocracies, socialistic backwaters, and solicitous developing nations, few of which are invested in the preservation of the U.S.-led global order. Indeed, that order is routinely undermined by the UNGA. Why would the United States want to lend its imprimatur to such an obviously duplicative experiment?
The Board of Peace and the institutions it was established to oversee hold much promise. But the president and his allies need to be more circumspect about what it can achieve or even what its goals should be. The world can wait. If the effort to engineer a new future for Gaza succeeds, the body’s success will speak for itself. If it fails, it will be remembered as just another multilateral talk shop whose only success was as an investment vehicle for the president’s friends and family. We have enough of those already.