Trump’s “Board of Peace”: Australia must say no
Any nation that hesitates to repudiate such an idea, even to consider it in all its opacity, is dooming the world to a dark future.
In a bold move that has sparked global debate, US President Donald Trump has invited dozens of world leaders—including Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese—to join his newly formed “Board of Peace”, a body initially tasked with overseeing the reconstruction and governance of Gaza following a fragile ceasefire. The Labor government is considering the invitation, and its decision could shape Australia’s foreign policy in a polarised world.
Defence Minister Richard Marles said he “welcomes” the invitation to join the board, and will discuss it to “properly understand what this means and what’s involved”. This pins an automatic endorsement on Trump’s mysterious initiative without possessing any real knowledge of what the invitation may ask of its members. With a bipartisan political class that has the combined due diligence of an AUKUS, and in the glaringly concerning light of global developments, the open words from our politicians—who lack sovereign certainty at a time of certain upheaval—do not inspire confidence.
What is the ‘Board of Peace’?
Fresh off his gifted Nobel Peace Prize from 2025 winner Maria Corina Machado, Trump has been busy with many things. Not including the kidnapping of sovereign leaders, threats to dispossess sovereign territories, and lethal crackdowns on his own US citizens—the announcement of a “Peace Board” has been added to the frenetic agenda of the White House—and must be taken at arm’s length by all who are expected to pay it any legitimacy for the developments mentioned before it.
A draft charter has been dispatched to around 50 countries, including Australia, that asks for participation in “an international organisation that seeks to promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict”. The founding executive board members include Marco Rubio (U.S. Secretary of State), Steve Witkoff (U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East), Jared Kushner (Trump’s son-in-law and former advisor) and Tony Blair (former UK Prime Minister), as well as billionaires and bank presidents. Many of the same names appear on the “Gaza executive board”, which is looking to be a subsidiary of the global initiative.
The tacky invitation from the White House announced that the signing of the mysterious charter would take place at the World Economic Forum annual meeting at Davos, Switzerland, with invitees expected to rock up and pledge their membership in the blind, including a $1 billion-dollar joining fee for members. The countries that have signalled their intention to join the “Peace Board” include Javier Milei’s Argentina and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, and in the early stages of tentative consideration, there are not enough voices to repudiate the scheme.
Nestled somewhere within Trump’s 20-point plan announced last year for the reconstruction of Gaza, and the infamous Tony Blair-led technocratic panel appointed to the task—which the Albanese government and the Israelis endorsed—lay the seeds of the global initiative. Without any substantial global repudiation, particularly in the West, Trump’s idea that started off in near ridicule has grown momentum, and in the vacuum of political courage, the “Gaza board” has become the global “peace board”.
There is now a skewed assumption that the Board of Peace can tend to conflict zones throughout the world, like Ukraine and Venezuela, setting a dangerous shadow on the infantile idea, questioning the intent of such an organisation, and shoving an awkward elephant in the room regarding the position of the UN.
The board may be looking to provide stakeholders and member states with some kind of benefit from lands it deems peace-worthy, like Greenland or Mexico or Canada, and could provide billionaires and billion-dollar fee-paying member nations with a slice of reconstruction, acquisition and extraction from the pacified territory in question. Today it’s Venezuela and Ukraine, tomorrow Iran, but what next after that?
Running a Gaza “peace board” stacked with Trump people and filled with billion-dollar member nations, operating the Palestinian technocratic administration currently stocked with Tony Blair, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, including representatives from Turkey, Qatar, and the Emirates, and a controversial Israeli real estate tycoon among others—is diabolical enough—but to add the untested prototype to rewrite the essence of global diplomacy is insane.
As all the invitees are stretching their imaginations on what the initiative ultimately involves and how to respond to an increasingly belligerent Trump, France has been one of the few nations that are on the front foot repudiating the board, with critics calling it a “Board of Billionaires and War Criminals”, while other nations including Germany, Russia, and Italy have all noted their invitations, but done so with less enthusiasm than the government in Canberra.
Hungarian President Viktor Orban was quick to offer his support for the insane plan, maybe before or maybe after Richard Marles welcomed it; either way, it is damaging to Australia’s national interest. Does he (Marles) also welcome Trump melting down the rule of law at home and dismantling the rules-based order abroad? Does he welcome the return of Monroe Doctrine and increased imperial aggression? Does he welcome the acquisition of Greenland? After being “full steam ahead with AUKUS”, with no submarines in sight to have the confidence to do so, is there anything Marles wouldn’t welcome from Trump?
Australia’s dangerous dance with Trump’s shadow empire
We live in an era of war, militarism, and conflict backed by an insatiable transnational security elite drunk off profits, addicted on selling weapons to conflict zones real and perceived, and possessed with buying cheap bombed-out assets and resources. In the new millennium alone, every US President has been involved in prosecuting war in contravention of the rules of the world, while every single Australian government has unconvincingly bleated for its importance. At this juncture, for Albanese to even be considering such a ridiculous offer as joining a “board of peace”, offered by a man who has proven he desires everything but, further tramples on the ruptured tenets of international law, and dooms countries like Australia to live in a world without it.
Fresh after admitting that Venezuela was invaded to secure resources for the US, after wars in Iraq and Syria that sought to do the same thing, Washington is no longer hiding its ambitions to establish an open neocolonial domain. The commodification of diplomacy proposed under the “peace board” not only undermines the last functioning systems of the United Nations and international law, but places itself at odds with those existing systems. The country which has overseen war and conflict with a unipolar impunity for decades now wishes to circumvent the UN, and anything but total repudiation is a tacit approval and a cowardly compromise.
Trump’s invitation, like many of his plans, schemes, and ambitions, is centred in a narcissistic self-preservation couched in a reactive and messy American pivot from a semi-sane interlocutor to a discombobulated international bully who seeks to disrupt friend and foe, even his own citizens, to preserve the interests of empire and its ambitions for global hegemony.
The US is doubling its military budget, extra-judicially dealing with matters around the world, and the same war industries that former US President Dwight Eisenhower once warned us about have shaped the world we live in and doomed generations to their unnecessary deaths. The “board of peace” represents the end-stage of a republic shedding the illusion of its claim to uphold liberty, freedom and democracy, and whatever comes next looks a lot like the proposes “peace board”. To even consider this is damaging to Australia’s national interest, and just like the AI-generated slop, the blockchain-operated slave camps, and the casinos and beachside apartments planned for Gaza, the “board of peace” rings of the same tackiness of any Trump business venture, and if not for the horrible ambition and unthinkable consequences of such dystopian ideas—it would be laughable.
Canada (an early supporter of the ‘peace board) has made a historic trade deal with China; Europe is calling America a threat; most Australians polled feel threatened by the US; and the 2025 ederal election was seen as a repudiation of Trumpism by voters: what now then? For Richard Marles it is “full steam ahead with AUKUS”; for Kevin Rudd our entire “pension fund” is up for investment in the US empire, but where does that take us in Australia, being dragged against the grain by a bipartisan political class with an autopilot vassal attitude towards Washington?
The peace board of Trump may be as insane to implement as it sounds, and it may be just another piece of bluster in his chaotic foreign policy agenda—but we can never be sure. Through its recently released 2025 National Security Strategy, the US has openly revived Monroe Doctrine principles, loosened the ambiguity around potential conflict with China, and signalled it will downgrade its rivalry with Russia. This is the clearest signal yet: Washington is turning inward to its own hemisphere. Now is the moment for Australia to readjust our strategic posture in the Asia-Pacific—not to double down on Trump’s “peace board,” but to make our own sovereign pivot to Asia. Obama once walked the corridors of Parliament House announcing the US pivot to Asia; those steps are now being reversed by a Washington obsessed with hemispheric dominance. Australian leaders must seize the opportunity to forge our own independent path in our region—before it’s too late.
The “crocodile will eat us last strategy” is the operational philosophy that now drives the foreign policy of the Albanese government, whether they recognise it or not. And every time Trump plays musical chairs with his allies, he withdraws another seat, and grows more confident watching traditional US allies scramble for a place to rest. With the fear and wishful hope being the drivers of Australian policy, it should be no surprise that the bipartisan political class who brought us AUKUS would be considering such a thing as a “peace board” from someone like Donald Trump.
A neocolonial ‘peace’ that could doom the Rules-Based Order”
Trump has said that the operationally ambiguous and instantly contentious entity will be “the Greatest and Most Prestigious Board ever assembled at any time, any place”, but like so many of his statements, it lacks definition, cohesion, and most importantly, stability. The US president may claim to be the instrument of peace upon this earth, but he has been the total opposite. His grand statements about ending the war in Ukraine have washed away, the cadence of the genocide in Gaza took its sharpest pace after his return to the White House, sovereign leaders have been renditioned, sovereign targets bombed--the rhetoric of this man is becoming more than bluster--and the consequences of his actions are becoming more than concerning.
The people in the world are getting battle sick from the scars of semi-permanent war left on the planet from a flailing unipolar superpower that is losing its influence abroad and its cohesion at home. From Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Venezuela, or Ukraine, the black mark of war has been left on the planet for generations. For a country that has gone out of its way to pressure, critisice and abdicate from the global bodies it helped to create, the ‘peace board’ seems as loaded and disingenuous as the statements coming out of Washington
Just after huffing and puffing about the “peace board”, barely moments after, Trump sent a letter to Norway’s prime minister saying he no longer has an “obligation to think purely of peace” and will prioritise American interests because he was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. A reason, among many, to be cautious of showing too much interest in the board of peace.
Following the renaming of the ‘Department of Defense’ to the ‘Department of War’, all the stated intentions of hemispherical dominance, loose talk about territorial acquisition, and fighting words slurred to friend and foe alike, the “board of peace” is an invitation that must be accepted at the invitee’s own risk. A position on this board can only be met with the assumption that it will involve the application and aftermath of war, circumventing the United Nations, and placing the fate of global peace in the hands of someone like Jared Kushner. Any nation that hesitates to repudiate such an idea, even to consider it in all its opacity, is dooming the world to a dark future.
Australia should not be involved in anything Trump (and Netanyahu and Orban) is associated with- and we should pull out of AUKUS and ask for a refund!
Surely ‘Peace Board’ is almost worthy of oxymoron status given the corrupt and war criminal enterprise behind it. As for Marles with his ‘Shrine-to-America’ collection adorning his office, it appears beyond fawning after anything American, he isn’t the sharpest tool in the box.
https://www.crikey.com.au/2023/08/30/richard-marles-aukus-labor-raaf-flights/
https://openpolitics.au/analysis/how-richard-marles-became-an-easy-mark