Year XXXIX, Number 1, July 2026

Fausto Correra

Graduate in Strategic Sciences from the Italian Army's School of Applications and in International Sciences from the University of Turin.

The 21st century's most audacious challenge to the post-1945 international order emerged not from a revolutionary manifesto but from a UN Security Council resolution. On November 17, 2025, Resolution 2803 authorized the creation of a Committee for the Administration of Gaza, inadvertently providing the legal foundation for Donald Trump's Board of Peace. What began as a technical mechanism for post-conflict stabilization in Gaza has metamorphosed into a global governance experiment that fundamentally questions the principles of multilateralism, sovereign equality, and international law. This is not merely an institutional innovation but a deliberate assault on the United Nations system and the very concept of collective security.

UNSC Resolution 2803 (Nov. 17, 2025) endorsed Trump's 20-point Gaza plan, authorizing a stabilization force but ambiguously allowing a supporting body alongside the Palestinian-led NCAG. Trump seized this to create a permanent global institution. His inner circle launched it at Davos on Jan. 16, 2026, with fewer than 20 states. The Board institutionalizes inequality through pay-to-play membership, lacks judicial independence, and weights power by financial contribution: a corporate governance that commodifies peace and monetizes sovereignty.

Trump's Board extends America First to global governance, embodying Trumpism's ideals: the rejection of constraints on American power, the belief that international cooperation should serve narrow national interests, and the conviction that traditional allies are free-riders. It represents unilateral multilateralism: a system where the United States sets the rules, selects the participants, and retains ultimate authority. Whether the Board is a tool for U.S. hegemony or a genuine alternative to multilateralism is a false dichotomy. It is both. The Board enables Trump to project leadership while bypassing UN constraints, coinciding with $2.2 billion in US UN arrears, a deliberate financial squeeze. The message is clear: serve American interests efficiently or be replaced.

Permanent membership requires a $1 billion contribution, a sum that effectively excludes most of the world's states. The 28 members include the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Hungary, Israel, but no Palestinian entity of any kind is invited to this Gaza-focused body. The Executive Board includes Trump loyalists (Rubio, Kushner, Witkoff) alongside international figures like Tony Blair, former UN mediator Nickolay Mladenov, World Bank President Ajay Banga, and billionaire Marc Rowan. Trump is lifetime chairman with absolute veto and the unelected Board faces no accountability. The Board's mandate has expanded to promoting stability and durable peace in all conflict-affected regions. An International Stabilization Force (20,000 troops, 12,000 police) enforces decisions, with Mladenov as on-ground coordinator.

The Board of Peace directly challenges multilateralism's foundations. It inverts the UN's collective decision-making by replacing egalitarian deliberation with financial capacity as the primary criterion for influence, unlike the WTO's most-favored-nation treatment or the ICC's legal universality. It undermines Westphalian sovereignty, transforming states from equal legal entities into shareholders with voting rights proportional to capital contribution. With a private charter, opaque processes, and undefined relationship to international law, the EU has questioned its UN Charter compatibility, while legal scholars argue it operates in a normative vacuum, unconstrained by international humanitarian or human rights law.

The Board of Peace does not appear to be a replacement for the UN, but rather a rival governance model that seeks to render the UN obsolete. Where the UN's universal membership ensures legitimacy but slows decision-making, the Board's exclusive membership promises speed at the cost of representativeness. While the UN derives its authority from near-universal participation and the principle of sovereign equality, the Board, by contrast, lacks democratic credentials. Its members are self-selected based on financial capacity and political alignment with Washington. The absence of major powers like China, Russia, and most European states underscores its limited global acceptance.

The Board of Peace exposes a central geopolitical paradox: the liberal order's leading critics are simultaneously its greatest beneficiaries and most determined underminers. Trump, Putin, and Xi each present distinct yet complementary challenges. Trump's transactional, US-centric approach treats international institutions as mere instruments, with his Board of Peace embodying a club-based model where members pay for influence and America retains ultimate control. His invitation to Putin despite the Ukraine war reveals a realpolitik worldview: peace as financial transaction, not as a moral condition. Putin and Xi, while critical of Western-led multilateralism, offer regional alternatives (BRICS expansion, Belt and Road) rather than global governance reform, and both remain cautious about Trump's initiative. All three undermine multilateralism without providing viable alternatives that preserve collective security. Their respective models (Trump's Board, Putin's spheres of influence, Xi's regional hegemony) represent imperial governance, concentrating rather than sharing power. The result is a world shifting from multilateral cooperation toward multipolar competition, with each pole seeking to maximize its own advantage.

From a federalist perspective, the Board of Peace represents the antithesis of democratic governance, systematically violating its core principles. Subsidiarity gives way to centralized control, democratic representation to financial contribution, and the rule of law to the rule of power. The federalist critique extends to systemic implications: by operating outside international law, the Board accelerates fragmentation and legitimizes powerful states opting out of collective systems, undermining the universality that gives multilateral institutions their moral authority. Yet it also presents an opportunity by exposing real crises: the UN Security Council's veto system does paralyze collective action, and the organization's bureaucratic structures are often ineffective. The federalist response is reform, not abandonment: completing the EU federalization, demanding UN Charter amendments for a Parliamentary Assembly, reforming Security Council veto powers, and establishing regional federations to counterbalance great powers. Money buys participation but not legitimacy, which requires democratic consent, legal consistency, and moral credibility. The federalist path is democratic power distribution through reformed multilateralism, not concentration in imperial structures.

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