By Ephraim Agbo
The launch of President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” at Davos was met with a mix of curiosity and profound unease. More than a policy initiative, it represents a direct, institutional challenge to the very architecture of post-1945 multilateralism. Framed by its architects as a nimble, results-driven alternative to a sclerotic United Nations, the Board is a political gambit that asks a fundamental question: In a world of complex crises, does legitimacy derive from inclusive, rules-based process, or from the power and resources of a leading state and its chosen partners?
This is not merely a theoretical debate. The immediate laboratory is the devastation of Gaza, but the ultimate subject is the future of how humanity governs its common problems.
Deconstructing the Instrument: A Hybrid of Statecraft and Capital
The Board’s structure is its first clue to its intent. Chartered as an independent body, it reportedly proposes a $1 billion “permanent membership” tier, blending sovereign states with private capital and high-profile individuals on its executive committee. This creates a hybrid entity: part diplomatic forum, part venture fund for stabilization projects.
The White House narrative emphasizes strategic oversight and operational speed, contrasting it with UN bureaucracy. For certain governments—frustrated by Security Council paralysis or hungry for rapid reconstruction funds—this is powerfully attractive. Yet, this very design is what alarms defenders of the multilateral system. It establishes a selective club, bound by a U.S.-drafted charter, where influence is explicitly tied to financial contribution and political alignment. It replaces the principle of sovereign equality with a hierarchy of donors and beneficiaries.
The Core Contest: Eroding Legitimacy Through Substitution
The UN’s foundational power has never been its efficiency, but its legitimate universality. Its maddening processes are the price of its inclusive mandate, giving its actions a collective imprimatur no single nation can claim. The Board of Peace inverts this model. It offers a fast lane: money and results, but with conditions set largely by Washington and its core allies.
This poses an existential threat not of immediate replacement, but of gradual erosion. As Secretary-General António Guterres recently warned, we are witnessing a dangerous shift where international law is seen as “secondary to power.” When politicians under acute pressure repeatedly choose the fast, well-funded lifeline offered by parallel mechanisms, they slowly drain the political and financial capital from universal institutions. Each “success” for an ad-hoc body can simultaneously be a failure for the principle that global problems require collectively agreed solutions.
Gaza: The First Battlefield of a Larger War
The Board’s focus on Gaza is strategically astute. It enters a space where UN agencies are financially strained and where Security Council resolutions have been systematically vetoed or diluted. By positioning itself as the vehicle for a “20-point plan” and future reconstruction, it seeks to capture the agenda-setting and resource-distribution functions traditionally managed through UN coordinated appeals and bodies.
If the Board becomes the primary conduit for Gaza’s rebuilding, it would achieve a profound shift: determining priorities, choosing partners, and setting standards outside the UN’s normative frameworks for human rights, procurement, and humanitarian principle. The message to the Global South would be clear: alignment with U.S.-led initiatives yields tangible dividends faster than appeals to universal rights or UN committees.
Geopolitical Ripples and the Fragmentation of Order
The geopolitical implications extend far beyond Gaza.
1. Coalition Reshuffling: The Board provides Washington a new tool to build coalitions of the willing—and the funded—outside formal UN channels. This can fracture existing blocs, pulling some developing nations toward a results-oriented partnership with Western capital, while leaving others behind.
2. The Hypocrisy Card: Adversaries, notably China and Russia, will weaponize the Board’s existence. They will cite it as definitive proof that the West abandons rules-based multilateralism when it suits them, using this perceived hypocrisy to justify their own parallel institutions (like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation) and further Balkanize global governance.
3. The Accountability Vacuum: Critical questions remain opaque. What human rights due diligence will govern Board-funded projects? What legal recourse do affected populations have? The UN, for all its flaws, operates within a web of public debate, treaty law, and administrative rules. The Board’s blend of private actors and political appointees risks creating a zone of selective accountability, where oversight is internal and discretionary.
Can the UN Respond? The Path of Reform Versus Irrelevance
The UN is not powerless, but its response must be strategic. Guterres’s toolbox is limited, but he holds unique assets: convening power, normative authority, and a vast operational footprint that no ad-hoc board can quickly replicate. The practical task is to relentlessly demonstrate this comparative value: delivering aid in impossible conditions, insisting on international humanitarian law, and documenting violations with impartiality.
The political task is more urgent. The Board of Peace is a symptom of the UN’s democratic deficit—most glaringly, an unrepresentative Security Council. To compete, the UN must accelerate reform: modernizing its financing, making the Council more equitable, and tightening accountability for veto use. It must prove that reformed multilateralism can be both legitimate and effective.
The Fork in the Road
Trump’s rhetorical flourish that the Board “might” replace the UN is a distraction. The real danger is coexistence and corrosion. The likely outcome is a more fragmented world, where forum-shopping becomes the norm, international law is applied inconsistently, and global public goods are weakened.
The Board of Peace presents a stark, pragmatic choice: efficiency and speed under a hegemonic umbrella, versus the slower, messier, but more legitimate pursuit of inclusive agreement. The UN’s mission now is to modernize with such purpose that it reclaims the mantle of effectiveness, proving that in the long run, justice and durable peace cannot be built on selective clubs, but only on foundations of universally agreed law.
The bottom line for all of us: Watch the Board not just for its impact in Gaza, but as a live experiment in rewriting the rules of global engagement. Its short-term gains may be real; its long-term cost may be a world less able to cooperate collectively in the face of shared existential threats. The coming year will test whether the international community chooses the path of reformed universality or accelerated fragmentation.
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