Peace with an entry fee: Trump’s blueprint for ending wars

Talk of peace and war has been prevalent of late. In the last few weeks, President Trump’s Board of Peace met for the first time, tasked with securing peace amidst ongoing violence in Gaza.

As we marked the fourth year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, concern over ending the war briefly resurfaced in public debate. And with missiles falling on Tehran and elsewhere in the region, talk here too will no doubt bring a familiar question to the forefront of global debate: how will it end – and who gets to decide the terms of peace? So-called ‘muscular mediation’ by a strong and often partial third party to enforce a ceasefire is hardly unprecedented; neither is bending another to your will using force. The Board of Peace and its approach to Gaza today and, eventually, to Ukraine, Iran, Sudan and other conflict zones tomorrow, however, is less familiar and deserves a closer look.

At its inaugural meeting in February, President Trump made clear what some already feared when he first announced his new model for peace last September. Although the reconstruction of Gaza remains its immediate object, with billions of dollars pledged, its vision is broader: a prototype for intervention in armed conflicts around the world.

This dystopian blueprint for the privatization of peace is unambiguously mirrored in the new entity’s institutional design and ethos. The Board of Peace comes with exclusive membership, access bought or rewarded for fealty to the US President. Personal invitations were sent by President Trump himself, the Board’s self-proclaimed chairman for life, to a number of individuals and state leaders. Those now part of the Executive Board, in charge of implementing decisions, include Tony Blair, former British prime minister, irrevocably associated with the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, a string of regional consultancies funding an entirely unnoteworthy post-government life. Alongside him is a pair of real estate developers: Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, and Steve Witkoff, his close friend, each parachuted into situations of protracted conflict to make profitable deals while masquerading as diplomatic envoys. The governance of Gaza, at least for now, rests in the hands of individuals whose positions and authority derive not from any elected mandate but from their proximity to power and personal access to the President.

This corporate logic extends to the Board’s broader political layer, composed of states, similarly dependent on a personal invitation from President Trump. Around 60 governments reportedly received the nod. Permanent membership demands an eyewatering fee of US$1 billion, with financial contributions following a clear hierarchy: larger capital injections come with greater decision-making. Expectedly, wealthy Gulf states made the cut: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar joined and pledged substantial contributions to “reconstruct” Gaza. Other Muslim-majority governments, like Indonesia and Turkey, proclaiming a concern with representation in deliberations over Palestine, have joined too – thereby legitimizing the structure that now claims authority over those same deliberations. Israel has overcome initial reluctance and decided better to be in than out, especially since membership means buying access to discussions on the very ceasefire its government repeatedly violates.

Fear of diminishing UN influence and asymmetric representation

Cracks opened when European states, including France, Germany, Norway, Poland and the United Kingdom, declined to join, invoking institutional concerns over the initiative’s further undermining of the United Nations’ already fragile hold on world peace governance, as well as political opposition to the White House’s invitation (and general proximity) to Russia. European opposition was fragile enough, though, to not impede some states’ attendance of the Board’s initial meeting as “observers” – a somewhat odd moral stance, halfway between opposition and obsequiousness to President Trump, just in case. Canada was initially invited but prime minister Mark Carney’s speech in Davos caused a rift and President Trump, in a show of his expansive powers, rescinded the offer. The so-called emerging powers – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – were invited but did not take part (nor did they openly decline), signaling strategic prudence toward what is ultimately a U.S.-led entity, where they do not hold the special status they crave. Yet, for all the diplomatic manoeuvring, the model itself remained largely unquestioned. Meanwhile, no sub-Saharan African country appears to have been considered for membership, despite the continent’s disproportionate experience as site of both armed conflict and external intervention.

In both executive and political structures, capital – financial and geopolitical – alongside deference to President Trump, rather than any concern with representativeness, responsibility or legitimacy, has shaped membership and influence and will, necessarily, shape future outcomes. Any resemblance with the corporate boardroom is not purely coincidental. Nor is its intention of a hostile takeover of peacebuilding to be dismissed.

But if the Board of Peace represents the corporatization of peace governance, it is more symptom than cause, less a rupture from past practices as a dramatic escalation. Scholars have traced the privatization of peace in recent years, noting the growing influence of private funders – including foundations, corporations, consultancies, and philanthropists – on peacebuilding agendas already overdetermined by a handful of North Atlantic donor governments. Private power increasingly shapes which conflicts are prioritized and which reforms and peace initiatives are funded, markedly treating peace as a business engineered by those who fund it.

In many respects, then, the Board of Peace is the epitome of this creeping corporatization, if still striking for its brazen monetization of influence and political clout. When states last week pledged contributions to Gaza’s reconstruction, they were buying their seat at the table, but also an asset on which they expect a return: reconstruction contracts, diplomatic capital, and Trump’s ear. While these “shareholders” gathered in Washington, the “stakeholders” – the people of Gaza – were notably absent, little more than liabilities on the Board’s corporate balance sheet. Should the Board’s remit expand to Iran, Ukraine or Sudan, the same transactional logic would apply.

There are at least three profound implications of this new fusion of peace and corporate governance

First, peace is no longer treated as a public good; it has become purely transactional. Turned into yet another investment portfolio – an asset to be bought and sold – it reinforces to an unprecedented degree the abyss between those who govern and those who are governed. With peace understood as a commodity, the idea of peace as a right owed to populations entitled to protection from violence appears to have disappeared from public discourse.

Second, this shareholder club model with its discretionary power significantly erodes the (admittedly flawed) United Nations and its waning multilateral mechanisms as the core institution of peace governance. We thus move from institutionalized inequality to personalized control, from imperfect collective rules to raw individual judgement.

Third, this model reifies patterns of exclusion. Although communities affected by violence are often marginalized in peace processes, the Board of Peace excludes them by design. Grassroots actors have no role in this novel combination of joint venture, in which capital determines access, and technocratic governance, in which peace is, in effect, little more than guardianship. The perversion it produces should be clear: the boardroom architects of peace define their own mandate and control the decision-making and implementation of their plans, accountable only to their checkbooks – as well as the whims of President Trump. The people on whom peace is imposed, who live with its terms but were never party to the arrangements, are a distant afterthought, their say in their own self-determination effectively replaced.

Who benefits from war and peace?

Disturbingly, in Gaza as in Ukraine, Iran, Sudan and beyond, violence continues unabated, while even the discussion of peace remains trapped within a framework in which it is to be administered by the very actors most deeply entangled in the production of that violence in the first place. The same actors who profit from war stand, more than ever, to profit from a so-called peace. This is what makes this moment so chilling. As the world looks to these unfolding conflicts, it must ask who will be allowed to craft that peace – and for whose benefit. The Board of Peace may yet prove a short-lived monument to Trump’s vanity, but it is no aberration: rather, it is a reflection of an international system that appears increasingly to have given up on treating peace as a right and a collective good, preferring, instead, to auction it to the highest bidder as a privilege. The cost of war, meanwhile, is born by those far from the boardrooms in which the latest deal for peace is inked.

• Teresa Almeida Cravo is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra and a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, in Portugal.