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Donald Trump has long had a competitive relationship with the United Nations. In the early 2000s, when he offered to renovate the New York headquarters, UN officials turned him down. Always one to hold a grudge, Trump retaliated in his book “Trump: Think Like a Billionaire” and in a congressional hearing. It was not his only early effort to challenge the institution. By 2001, he had built a huge apartment building — Trump World Tower — that towered over the UN.
John Feffer directs Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies.
In many ways, Trump’s Board of Peace is a similar effort to overshadow the cornerstone of the international order. The Board was established under UN auspices in Security Council Resolution 2803, which passed unanimously in November 2025. At the time, the United States pitched it narrowly as an instrument to implement the peace deal for Gaza.
It was not long before Trump’s proposal began to resemble a classic bait-and-switch scheme. When he officially launched the Board of Peace at the World Economic Forum in January 2026, Trump had expanded the remit of the organization beyond tiny Gaza to encompass the entire world. Also, though he had promised to work with the UN, he had no intention to do so.
After all, Trump did not coordinate with the UN around any of his other self-proclaimed peace deals and indeed boasted of this lack of cooperation. Nor did he attempt to gain UN approval for any of the attacks — against Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela — that he launched during the first year of his second term. The most recent illegal attack on Iran and assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei (among others) is just the latest assault on the foundations of international law, giving his definition of peace a truly Orwellian cast.
Perhaps the truest measure of Trump’s disgust for the UN can be found in all the withdrawals from UN organizations that he has executed since returning to office. Early on, he withdrew (for the second time) from the Paris Agreement on climate as well as the UN Human Rights Council. Even as he was pushing forward with the Board of Peace in early 2026, he pulled the United States out of 66 international organizations, half of them connected to the United Nations.
With his Board of Peace, Trump clearly intends to relegate the United Nations to the shadows. The only outstanding question is whether he intends to replace international law with US unilateral action based on little more than his own personal whims — “I don’t need international law”, he told The New York Times because his own “morality” sufficed — or whether he plans to invest more authority in a collective body like the Board of Peace that establishes rival principles to govern international relations. The answer lies at the intersection of great power interests, authoritarian aspirations, and residual adherence to collective norms.
Challenging International Law
Trump is certainly not the only person whose fingerprints can be found on the murder weapon used against the body of international law. Other countries have asserted their great power interests over the last three decades, which has subjected the international order to a “death by a thousand cuts”. Russia seized Crimea in 2014 and then launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Israel has consistently violated the sovereignty of its neighbours (Lebanon, Syria, Iran). China has claimed the entirety of the South China Sea, constructing artificial islands that impinge on the sovereignty of other countries bordering the body of water. International organizations have passed judgements and issued condemnations of these violations. All of those words have not credibly affected the facts on the ground.
One reason for the weakness of such international institutions is the intermittent commitment of the United States to the rules-based order. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton declared that US adherence to international norms would be à la carte — multilateralism if we can, unilateralism if we must. George W. Bush put that principle into practice when he won UN approval for the US invasion of Afghanistan but disregarded UN concerns when he attacked Iraq. Barack Obama clothed US intervention in Libya in the UN language of “responsibility to protect” but was meanwhile using more than 500 drone strikes — in territories outside the principal battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq — to commit extrajudicial murder.
More generally, the United States expressed its animus toward international law through its non-payment of UN dues, non-support for human rights instruments like the UN convention on disabilities, and non-enthusiasm for global institutions like the International Criminal Court. For every violation of international law that the United States condemned (by Russia, by China), there was a violation that it supported (by Israel, by Saudi Arabia).
In general, US leaders paid lip service to international norms. This is what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney meant when, in his speech at the World Economic Forum this year, he invoked Czech playwright and president Vaclav Havel’s famous sign-in-the-window example. The shopkeeper puts a communist placard in his window, Havel wrote, not because he believes the slogan but because he must signal his support for the existing order. Likewise, US leaders — and other heads of state of powerful countries — never really believed in the UN-speak that they parroted. Trump simply removed the sign from the window. In response to Carney’s speech, he also rescinded Canada’s invitation to join the Board of Peace.
Small and medium-sized countries continue to champion international law because the system was designed to protect them from apex predators. But they too will violate international law on an à la carte basis to protect “national interests”. A number of European countries are now actively violating the principle of non-refoulement — the return of refugees to places where they face harm. To complicate matters, Russia and Belarus have weaponized immigration by soliciting desperate people from the Global South to cross the border into Poland and the Baltics to create a political crisis, bolster support for the xenophobic far right, and further undermine the rules-based order.
To extend the earlier analogy, if shopkeepers no longer have faith in the protections of civil law, they will be prey to the coercive tactics of corrupt police and the protection rackets of organized crime. Today, no longer confident about international law, countries are turning to powerful patrons (Russia, China, the United States) as well as protection rackets like the Board of Peace, which requires a USD 1 billion entrance fee.
The Board of Peace is operating with high-level support — 27 countries have joined, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Vietnam, Bulgaria, Indonesia, and Israel — because no other credible institution has stepped into the void created by the actions of Trump and his ideological allies. Canada has yet to rally the disgruntled. The European Union is too divided and insufficiently armed. The BRICS are too heterogeneous and under-institutionalized to forge a consensus around an alternative illiberal order.
The Board of Peace, with its cross-cutting membership, offers not so much an American security umbrella — Trump is reluctant to maintain such structures even for allies like NATO and Japan. Rather, the Board offers a kind of loyalty programme for all those who fly on Trump Air. Each member acquires loyalty points that they can trade in at some point for lower tariff rates, investment opportunities, perhaps priority treatment if there is a security emergency.
Or, at least, that is what Board members are betting on. In their heart of hearts, they know it is just a scam, just another sign they must put in their windows to avoid the retaliation of the vindictive.
The Future of Internationalism
The left has taken the United Nations for granted. Even when criticizing the inadequacy of the institution, the left has acknowledged that international law depends on UN institutions and agreements.
For a time, the idea took hold that some part of international law — expansion of human rights, creation of a new ecosocial order — could be undertaken by an organ of civil society like the World Social Forum (WSF). Such a global civil response was, as The New York Times suggested in 2003 around the global protests against the impending Iraq War, the “second superpower”. It challenged aspects of international law like repayment of odious debt even as it pushed to expand international law, for instance to grant legal rights to nature. Either way, the WSF and similar efforts embodied that favourite progressive notion of a counterforce — to the West, to capitalism, to militarism — that the Non-Aligned Movement once represented at the level of nation-states.
The chief opponent that global civil society faced was ideological: neoliberalism, which imagined a world of frictionless trade and minimal government, unregulated business and disempowered workforces. Both of these combatants — global civil society, neoliberalism — have been suspicious of the state, either its repressive apparatus or its regulatory power. And both have believed in opposing forms of globalization, one from below and the other from above. In the heavyweight fight between global civil society and global neoliberalism, the two boxers quite nearly managed to knock each other out.
Today, a third contestant — authoritarian nationalism — has entered the ring. This ideology of power reigns supreme in Russia, China, India, the Oval Office, parts of Europe, most of the Middle East, throughout Latin America, and in sections of Asia and Africa as well. It can be found in democracies and dictatorships. It claims to be on the right, occasionally on the left, and sometimes in the centre. Even the most libertarian versions, like Javier Milei’s Argentina, rely on strong states to push through their agendas.
This third contestant is suspicious of international authorities spouting human rights and international agencies peddling austerity measures. Trump and his Board of Peace are the geopolitical expression of that triumphalist ideology. Most members of the Board embrace authoritarian nationalism, while those who reject this ideology — Canada, much of the EU — are keeping their distance.
How can the left navigate this new environment? Certainly it can still rail against both nationalism and authoritarianism. It can take advantage of the weakness of neoliberalism, rejected by voters who have had enough of the consequences of economic globalization, to promote a more equitable global economy. This strategy has worked in a few places.
The hard part will be the left’s attitude toward the state. Traditional progressives believe in a strong democratic state that intervenes in the economy. Other elements of the left, however, remain sceptical of the state — its repressive apparatus, its military-industrial complex, its corruption, its relentless push for economic growth at the expense of planetary limits. But without state power, the left cannot implement a national agenda much less push for new forms of internationalism. Voters, though deeply worried about international issues, vote according to more parochial concerns.
The good news is that the authoritarian-nationalist project is precarious. It has no cohesive plan to construct an illiberal order. The Trumps and Putins and Bukeles of the world have no persuasive answers to the big problems facing the world, from climate change and technology run amok to security dilemmas and global economic inequality. Indeed, these leaders are aggravating all of these problems. And where authoritarian nationalists have overreached in Brazil and in South Korea, they have been rejected by voters and jailed for their transgressions. But the left cannot count on such scenarios to regain power. Nor can it win on the correctness of its programme. Its view of a reformed state and a new internationalism must be compelling as well.
Trump is not an institutionalist. He thinks only in terms of personal enrichment and legacy. The Board of Peace is an instrument of personal power, not a true ideological challenge to the UN. The greater danger lies elsewhere, that Trump and company will undermine principles of international law to such a degree that the UN will wither away and nothing will replace it.
Trump has indeed taken the sign of liberal internationalism out of the window. In response, the rule-breakers are beginning to pick up rocks and readying them to let fly.
