Using a logo that resembles the United Nations’ but with a gold overlay, U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday launched a new “Board of Peace” that he initially pitched as a forum to resolve the Gaza conflict but has since described as a general international-relations body. On the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Trump said he will chair the board and allow its members to “do pretty much whatever we want to do.”
At least 50 world leaders have been invited to join, and 25 have accepted, U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff claimed on Wednesday. Officials from 19 countries stood beside Trump at a “signing ceremony” Thursday: Bahrain, Morocco, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Hungary, Indonesia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan and Mongolia. “Few of the countries that have signed up for the board are democracies,” Reuters notes.
By contrast, the UN has 193 members from around the world and was established 80 years ago in the ruins of the Second World War. Since his first term as president, Trump has been openly hostile to what’s often referred to as the U.S.-led “rules-based order” that emerged after 1945, including NATO and the UN.
Corruption watch: Members of Trump’s board can obtain “permanent” status by contributing $1 billion in cash within the first year, ABC News reported Tuesday when White House officials were promoting the organization ahead of Davos. Ordinary members will otherwise enjoy “renewable” three-year terms, which dovetails neatly with the conclusion of Trump’s second term in the White House.
It’s unclear where exactly the board’s money will go or who will oversee it. One U.S. official told ABC, “Funds will sit only in approved accounts at reputable banks,” and claimed “Oversight is enforced through an Audit & Risk subcommittee and an independent annual external audit with published financials.” It’s also unclear how long Trump will serve as its chairman or what its status will be once he departs the White House.
Coverage continues below…
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Russian leader Vladimir Putin offered to join Trump’s board and pay the billion-dollar “permanent” membership fee, but he said he wants to use Russian frozen assets held in the U.S. to cover the cost, Turkey’s Anadolu Agency reported Wednesday from Moscow.
The Brits said they’re not joining yet since Putin may be involved. Norway, Sweden and France also said they’re not interested. And China—like France and the UK, a permanent member on the UN Security Council—has not yet committed to participate either.
And by Friday morning, Trump said he had withdrawn his invitation to Canada. Perhaps that’s because Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a speech at Davos Tuesday: “Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition” in global affairs. “Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited,” he said (emphasis added). Veteran journalist Jim Fallows called Carney’s address “a speech for the ages” and “a memorable discourse on America’s place in the world, by the leader of a U.S. neighbor and former friend.”
Expert reax: The board “appears to be situated to supplant the United Nations, which is sort of a paradoxical situation, because Trump and his supporters tend not to like global government,” Monica Duffy Toft of Tufts University observed in a Defense One podcast interview that will post later today.
Trump and his supporters “don’t like the UN, yet now he’s putting up this sort of parallel structure. So we’re in a liminal moment,” and the world appears to be a bit of a “laboratory” in terms of what international order may look like in the months to come, Toft said.
Here’s some new and unusual reading inspired by Trump’s threats to Greenland and eight of America’s European allies ahead of and during events in Davos. Entitled “Hypothetical Legal Review of Use of the U.S. Military in Greenland,” it’s been drawn up by five experts and posted on Just Security Thursday.
The authors caveat that it is not an official U.S. government document, though it deliberately resembles one—in particular, a “senior staff judge advocate’s legal analysis” that might arrive on the desk of a general at Special Operations Command or European Command. It was drafted and shared “to illustrate the kind of advice they would have given their commanders in each situation” concerning a U.S. military takeover of the Danish island. “We offer it in the hope that everyone who reads it will ask whether current or future uses of the United States military are supported by comparable legal analyses and, if not, why not,” they advise.
In other notable commentary this week, “Don’t mistake Trump’s Venezuela raid for progress on fentanyl,” cautions Jake Braun, former White House acting principal deputy national cyber director, writing Thursday in USA Today. “If we want to stop fentanyl, we have to be honest about where the threat originates and how to defeat it,” he says.
“Venezuelan cartels traffic oil, migrants and cocaine,” Braun writes. But “the center of fentanyl production…is in northern Mexico, particularly the ‘golden triangle’ region, which is the Sinaloa Cartel’s stronghold.” But Sinaloa is not a street gang,” Braun says. “It’s the size of a Fortune 500 company, with global supply chains, chemists, financiers and assassins. In some regions, it can even outfight the government.”
His advice? Treat it like al-Qaeda, and after substantial surveillance, attack its networks and nodes, finances and communications. The U.S. will also need to “confront the Chinese chemical companies supplying fentanyl precursors. Targeting their investors, customers and access to Western markets would force a choice.”
Our unofficial award for the most curious read of the week goes to “Betting on War: Prediction Markets and the Corruption of National Security,” written by Alex Goldenberg of the Rutgers University Miller Center on Community Protection and Resilience and published Wednesday at War on the Rocks.
In additional commentary: “Bombing Iran would shore up its regime,” since such attacks have been shown to stir up nationalism and redirect public anger outward, warns Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East Program at the Defense Priorities think tank.
Additional reading:
Around the Defense Department
As the White House prepares nearly 2,000 active-duty troops for possible deployment to Minneapolis, Vice President JD Vance visited the city rocked by violent and aggressive immigration raids and blamed the “far left” for unrest, AP reported Thursday.
Despite calm in the city before ICE agents flooded the region with five times as many agents as police, Vance claimed Thursday, “We’re doing everything that we can to lower the temperature.” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz disagreed, and wrote on social media, “Take the show of force off the streets and partner with the state on targeted enforcement of violent offenders instead of random, aggressive confrontation.”
AP reminds readers the Justice Department has launched an investigation into Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey “over whether they have obstructed or impeded immigration enforcement through their public criticism of the administration. Walz and Frey have described the investigation as an attempt to bully the political opposition.”
Regarding Trump possibly invoking the Insurrection Act for those 2,000 or so troops, “Right now, we don’t think that we need that,” Vance said Thursday.
Survey says: 63% of Americans say they disapprove of how ICE is doing its job, and only 36% approve, according to new polling published this week from the New York Times. That includes 70% of independent voters who disapprove of ICE’s tactics in the wake of Renee Good’s death, a 37-year-old woman killed in Minneapolis by an ICE officer earlier this month.
Trump attacked the survey results on social media, writing, “Fake and Fraudulent Polling should be, virtually, a criminal offense.” He also claimed he would sue the Times for publishing the survey.
Additional reading:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is visiting Arkansas today while Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is in the Middle East helping negotiate next steps in the White House’s talks involving Ukraine and Russia, Politico’s Paul McCleary reports. Driscoll is in the UAE along with real estate billionaire and U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff; Witkoff reportedly requested Driscoll’s participation. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is tagging along as well.
Hegseth is stopping by Camden, Arkansas, to deliver remarks and take photos as part of his “Arsenal of Freedom” tour across the states. “The tour will highlight the urgent need to rebuild our Defense Industrial Base (DIB) to ensure that we continue President Trump and Secretary Hegseth’s peace through strength agenda,” Hegseth’s office said in a press release.
By the way: Camden is where L3Harris’s solid rocket motor development takes place.
Meanwhile at Georgia’s Fort Benning army base, U.S. military leaders at the forefront of troops’ training, health, and readiness are shifting their focus from creating “super-athletes” to building and maintaining the ability to wield the weapons and systems of an ever-more-robotified battlefield, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported this week on location.
“We’re moving away from this kind of antiquated idea of very visceral combat experiences” that turn on “the ability to run and ruck,” said Drew Hammond, a human-performance specialist who has worked extensively with U.S. Special Operations Command. Hammond spoke at the Human Performance Symposium, which gathered human-performance leaders and experts at this Georgia base long known as the home of the infantry and more recently as the center of Army training for maneuver—the tactical movement of soldiers and equipment to gain an advantage over enemies. (The conference was organized by FBC, a corporate sister of Defense One.)
Why Fort Benning? All future company and troop commanders, as well as about two-thirds of platoon leaders, come through the base for training. That’s one reason why the fort is also the home to the Army’s Holistic Health and Fitness Academy, which is to dramatically expand in the coming year. Continue reading, here.
And lastly this week: The U.S. is looking for batteries with at least four times the juice. The Department of Energy’s research arm is giving six teams up to $15 million to produce prototypes of manufacturable next-generation energy storage within two years, Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reported Thursday.
“We want to develop a system, a battery system or an energy system, that has four times the energy density of lithium ion batteries that we have today,” said James Seaba, program director at Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E.
If successful, the technology could enable military drones, robots, and aircraft of far greater capability and use, Williams writes. Batteries have become indispensable on the battlefield, powering troop-carried systems, drones, and more. But many are made of materials and components from China, which is working on next-gen batteries of its own; and so the Pentagon is seeking new energy-storage technologies that can be made closer to home.
The competition includes teams from Johns Hopkins University, University of Maryland – College Park, Illinois Institute of Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Connecticut-based Precision Combustion, and more. Read more, here.
That’s it for us this week. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you again on Monday!
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