23 January, 2026.
Since rightly being denied the Nobel Peace Prize, President Trump has childishly avowed a greater interest in the exciting use of military power, most recently and idiotically in regard to the proposed annexation of Ice … sorry, Greenland, where the USA already has treaty rights to create bases. Perhaps thinking he might need to re-balance and simultaneously come up with another way of keeping the world’s attention, he has launched a ‘Board of Peace’.
The Board of Peace had been gestating for some time but was formally inaugurated – with a family photo garnishing the occasion for the capo di tutti capi – at Davos on 22 January 2026. To be chaired in perpetuity by the mob boss himself, it was first to have Olympian oversight of the development in Gaza made possible by its so-called ‘ceasefire’ but was swiftly to extend its responsibilities for conflict resolution across the whole world; in effect, therefore, completely supplanting the United Nations. Having been shaken down for $1 billion each for the privilege of permanent seats, world leaders were to constitute its membership. However, some of the fifty or so invited (who included indicted war criminal Vladimir Putin but not President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas), sensibly declined the ‘honour’. Prominent among these – chiefly European – was French president, Emmanuel Macron, who was promptly threatened with 200 per cent tariffs on his country’s wine.
The Board of Peace is born not only of Trump’s gargantuan vanity and craving for the limelight but also of his profound ignorance of the history of the United Nations. It has so often failed to resolve large conflicts not because it lacks his ‘genius’ for leadership but because it is the most intractable of them that fall into its lap, while the major powers – which so often have large and opposing interests in those collisions – were given a veto in the Security Council. This, as Inis Claude Jr. once so brilliantly put it, is like the fuse in a domestic electricity system designed to pop in response to a threatening malfunction: a blown fuse causes temporary inconvenience but prevents the whole house from burning down.
I predict that the Board of Peace will soon shrivel and die, and good riddance to it. China is hardly likely to join and, risibly enough, a large proportion of the countries that have signed up are subject to travel bans designed to restrict immigration into America. The trick is to reform the Security Council, not try to replace it with this absurd vanity project.
By the way, boycott the World Cup!