When nations decide to create international organizations, they usually take some time to work out the details. The United States and its allies spent four years gradually laying the groundwork for the United Nations during the Second World War. But President Donald Trump is not a fan of such drawn-out processes.
Last week, two months after the U.N. Security Council authorized the creation of a “Board of Peace” to oversee the U.S.-brokered cease-fire in Gaza, the White House sent invitations to about 60 governments to join the new “nimble and effective international peace-building body.” Washington also shared a draft charter for the board that expands its scope from Gaza to addressing conflicts everywhere. Recipients had a week at most to decide whether to sign on. By Jan. 22, when Trump held a signing ceremony to launch the board at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, more than 20 states ranging from to Albania to Vietnam had volunteered to participate.
The speed with which the new organization emerged is not its only remarkable feature. It is also one of the most lopsided international political structures imaginable. The charter, which makes no reference to the Security Council resolution that gave the board its Gaza mandate, much less to the U.N.’s founding documents, contains many of the features common to such international agreements, such as details of its legal status and voting procedures. It even declares that board will have its own seal.
But it also stipulates Trump, appointed as the inaugural chairman of the board in his personal capacity, will have near-total power to veto its decisions. It then offers states the chance to pay at least $1 billion to secure permanent membership of the organization’s decision-making executive board as opposed to a standard three-year term.
While some analysts have written this off as a vanity project or baroque money-making scheme, others see it as a malign effort to reshape the international system by creating an alternative decision-making forum to the Security Council.
Trump has done much to weaken the U.N. over the past year, by freezing funds and boycotting many of its agencies. He has said that he wants to see the world organization do more to maintain international peace and security, but told journalists earlier this week that the board “might” replace the U.N., which “just hasn’t been very helpful.” Several European countries, including France, Norway, and Slovenia, have declined invitations to join the board in part because of its potential for weakening the U.N. further.
Whatever challenges that the Security Council faces, Trump’s Board of Peace will not be able to replace it. But this does not mean that the new organization can be written off or ignored. Rather, its impact will be to deepen the fragmentation of the international system and further damage U.S. interests.
Ironically, the Board of Peace is the byproduct of robust U.S. diplomacy at the U.N. In November 2025, Washington pushed the Security Council to endorse Trump’s proposals for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, which included establishing the board to oversee security and governance in Gaza. The United States offered little clarity on the composition of the board or its structure, and it did not suggest that it would have a role beyond Gaza. U.S. diplomats in New York told counterparts that they could not offer more details. While other Security Council members expressed qualms about endorsing such a nebulous entity, they went along with it to end almost two years of angry diplomacy over Gaza.
It was only earlier this month that U.S. officials started to roll out details of how the board—and a series of additional committees—will oversee Gaza. The new body faces severe tests stabilizing the Gaza Strip, which is currently divided between areas under Hamas control and areas under Israeli occupation. The board is meant to oversee an international security force in Gaza, but the United States has been finding it difficult to get the necessary troop commitments to turn this into a reality.
A significant number of Arab and Muslim nations are among the signatories of the Board of Peace charter, presumably to gain a seat at the table in discussions of Palestine’s future. Israel has also agreed to participate. If the board struggles to make progress on reconstructing Gaza, then the whole enterprise will lose credibility.
The new charter nonetheless makes it plain that the institution will have a wider remit to “secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict.” There is no basis for this in the U.N. resolution underpinning the board’s role over Gaza, and the details of its potential global functions are hazy.
The charter refers to the “development and dissemination of best practices” around peacemaking, which makes it sound like a glorified think tank. There is no suggestion that, outside Gaza, the new body will have the legal authority or organizational capability to oversee military stabilization operations.
Nor does it seem likely that it will build up the sort of institutional apparatus for supporting mediation and peacekeeping efforts that the U.N. has built over decades, as the preamble to the board’s charter criticizes bodies that “institutionalize crisis” indefinitely. It will also be hard to convince countries that did not get board invites that this is a legitimate peacemaking body. No government in sub-Saharan Africa appears to have been invited at all.
These gaps are unlikely to worry Trump, who has underlined his lack of interest in international law. While the president has thrown himself into an unusual number of peace initiatives, claiming to solve wars from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Southeast Asia, he has a tendency to push for quick bargains and not worry about their implementation. A number of the wars that he has claimed to end quickly reignited. The Board of Peace looks like a framework for his freewheeling diplomacy, not the painstaking business of making peace deals stick over time.
The board—which is supposed to meet at the leaders’ level at least annually—could prove to be a useful space for its members to kick around solutions to some conflicts that the U.N. has been unable to handle, particularly in regions that are well-represented on the board. The countries signing on to the new institution in Davos include some—such as Egypt and the United Arab Emirates—that have backed different sides in Sudan’s grim civil war. If Trump uses the Board of Peace as a framework—or a diplomatic fig leaf—for these powers to de-escalate the Sudanese war or other proxy conflicts, then that would be a diplomatic and humanitarian coup.
But the board will be handicapped when it comes to dealing with other major conflicts, especially those involving major U.S. competitors. Washington invited both Russia and China to join up, and Moscow has said that it is studying the proposal. Trump claimed on Jan. 21 that Russian President Vladimir Putin had accepted but this remains uncertain; Putin has floated the idea, perhaps mischievously, of paying $1 billion for membership out of frozen Russian assets.
Even if Beijing and Moscow do sign up, however, neither is likely to want to resolve conflicts that touch on their core interests through a body where Trump has unique veto powers, as opposed to the U.N., where all three sit as veto-wielding equals in the Security Council. That means that the new institution is unlikely to be a durable basis for ending Russia’s all-out aggression against Ukraine or the civil war in Myanmar on China’s border.
If the board could be a space for brokering a few individual deals, then it will nonetheless fuel the broader fragmentation of international security cooperation that is already well underway. As the U.N. and other formal multilateral institutions have struggled in cases such as Sudan, states large and small have increasingly worked through “minilateral” alternatives, such as the G-7 and the Chinese-backed Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. As international relations scholars John Karlsrud and Malte Brosig have argued, the world is going through a process of “deinstitutionalization” as different powers and blocs work around established institutions to deal with security threats.
Even if the Board of Peace is not a credible institutional alternative the U.N., the mere fact that Trump created it is likely to hasten this trend. The board’s very existence confirms that the United States, the primary founder of the U.N. system eight decades ago, is no longer committed to it. This is bad news for U.S. diplomats in New York City, who may find it harder to persuade other powers that there is much point in bargaining about problems such as stabilizing Haiti—where the administration does want U.N. help—if Washington’s attention lies elsewhere. Some may further feel that the United States conned them when setting up the board last year. Beyond New York, more powers may see incentives to set up minilateral counterweights to the board that would exclude the United States.
Given the Trump administration’s general skepticism toward international institutions, Washington may actually welcome some of this disruption. As senior Trump advisor Stephen Miller told CNN after the U.S. raid on Venezuela at the start of January, the administration sees a world that is governed by strength and power, not laws and institutions.
The Board of Peace may have many of the formal features and protocols of a standard multilateral institution, but it may ultimately be a symptom—and an accelerant—of the decline of the multilateral security system.