At the World Economic Forum this year, the audience of wealthy and powerful was treated to the kind of trash-talking that was once reserved for the likes of the Jerry Springer Show. Powerful leaders boasted, belittled, and threatened. Instead of infidelities and family secrets, the conversations at Davos took place against the backdrop of proposed land grabs and shocking betrayals.
Consider the speech by Volodymyr Zelensky. The Ukrainian leader lambasted European leaders for not standing up to the ayatollahs in Iran, not investigating Russian war crimes, not breaking their addiction to Russian energy, not supplying more advanced weaponry to Kyiv. “Instead of taking the lead in defending freedom worldwide, especially when America’s focus shifts elsewhere, Europe looks lost trying to convince the U.S. president to change, but he will not change,” Zelensky complained. He diplomatically failed to point out where America’s focus has shifted to.
The Ukrainian president was effectively criticizing his most resolute allies in what might have been a bid for Donald Trump’s approval. After all, Trump has also been dumping on Europe even as he has pushed NATO allies to spend more on their own defense. Zelensky, using stirring rhetoric and appeals to high-minded principles, was essentially piling on by urging European countries to get a grip. He received a standing ovation.
Then there was Mark Carney. The Canadian prime minister made a stirring appeal to middle powers to unite against Donald Trump’s assault on the world order, though he never mentioned the U.S. president’s name. Carney said,
If great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from “transactionalism” will become harder to replicate. Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships. Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty. They’ll buy insurance, increase options in order to rebuild sovereignty — sovereignty that was once grounded in rules, but will be increasingly anchored in the ability to withstand pressure.
Here, too, was a threat: that the United States can no longer count on its allies, who are busy making deals with other countries because their relationship with America is no longer predictable or quite so beneficial.
And then there was the main event—the speech by Donald Trump to whom everyone bends toward like plants to the sun. It was in many ways a coming-out party for the U.S. president. For the first time he revealed his true aspiration. He is not content to rule a single country with impunity. He is not satisfied with mere awards, like a ridiculous peace prize from a soccer federation or a regifted Nobel from Maria Corina Machado.
With his new Board of Peace, which debuted at Davos, Trump has announced that he wants to be king of the world.
A Litany of Grievances
Go back to Trump’s speech to Davos in 2018 and you’ll find a fairly conventional offering, at least by Trumpian standards. There are anodyne phrases about U.S. economic growth wrapped around a pitch to invest in the U.S. economy, all delivered in complete sentences. “America first does not mean America alone,” he said in a gesture toward reassurance. “When the United States grows, so does the world.”
Last week, Trump didn’t bother to appear presidential or even coherent. He continued to lambaste “sleepy Joe Biden” even though Trump himself has been caught napping in a number of meetings. He complained that Europe was “unrecognizable.” He criticized the “Green New Scam.” He spouted lie after lie about Greenland, NATO, and the U.S. economy. Some lies—like the claim that China doesn’t have wind farms when it has more such farms than any other country—were so big and gratuitous that it’s surprising that the heads of the audience members didn’t explode.
With incomplete sentences and rambling riffs, Trump spoke as if to an audience of toddlers or as if he were himself a toddler: “when America booms, the entire world booms. It’s been the history. When it goes bad, it goes bad, the whole… You all follow us down, and you follow us up.”
He repeatedly mistook Iceland for Greenland:
I’m helping Europe. I’m helping NATO, and until the last few days when I told them about Iceland, they loved me. They called me ‘daddy’ right, last time. Very smart man said, ‘He’s our daddy. He’s running it.’ I was like running it. I went from running it to being a terrible human being.
It gets worse. Trump threatened U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar: “she comes from a country that’s not a country, and she’s telling us how to run America. Not going to get away with it much longer, let me tell you.” And indeed, during a speech this week in Minnesota, Omar was attacked by a man with a syringe.
The difference between the speech in 2018 and the speech last week could represent a decline in mental functioning. But it also points to something even more troubling. Trump believes himself so all-powerful that he can say whatever he wants on the world stage and still command respect. He can treat world leaders as if they’re an adoring MAGA crowd and no one will challenge him.
And that was how he introduced his new Board of Peace: as if he had been anointed not just a world leader but the leader of the world.
Axis of Autocracy
The Board of Peace is an extraordinary example of a bait-and-switch. Trump billed the institution as a body to oversee the Gaza peace deal. There still is no peace in Gaza to implement, but Trump debuted the Board at the recent Davos meeting nonetheless. In all of the celebratory blather, there was little mention of Gaza.
The countries that have joined Trump’s new initiative include: Hungary, Belarus, Bahrain, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates. Russia will join if it can pay the $1 billion dues out of its assets frozen abroad. Saudi Arabia has accepted the invitation to get on board.
Trump has presented his newest organization as the institutional embodiment of his own peacekeeping efforts. Not surprisingly, the Board members’ commitment to peace is as bogus as Trump’s own diplomatic claims.
Russia has engaged in an imperialist war in Ukraine for more than a decade, supported by Belarus and enabled by Hungary. Israel has fought a war against Palestinians that has stretched back even further and includes the genocide in Gaza. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been at war in Yemen since 2014, backing different sides. In 2011, the government in Bahrain brutally suppressed pro-democracy protests, with the help of troops from both Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Remember when U.S. diplomats helped create the Community of Democracies back in 2000, when the Obama administration boasted of its work promoting international human rights in 2013, when the Biden administration prided itself as being “the most pro-LGBTQ” administration in history?
Today, by contrast, the Trump administration is peace-washing some of the worst human rights violators in the world. With friends like those on Trump’s Board of Peace, who needs a separate axis of autocracy?
The rot is bureaucratic as well. The executive committee of Trump’s Board includes the cream of his cronies: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, billionaire diplomats Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, billionaire businessman Marc Rowan, and Trump security advisor Robert Gabriel.
On top is Trump himself, apparently appointed as chairman for life. This is no ceremonial position. If anything, all the other institutional trappings of the Board of Peace are ceremonial. Trump has already acted as if the UN, international law, and human rights treaties do not exist. He promises to coordinate with the UN even though he hasn’t done so in any of the conflicts he claims to have resolved. The only exception might be Gaza, where the UN approved the creation of the Board of Peace. By expanding the body’s mandate, however, Trump has already nullified that one example of collaboration.
As Mark Carney pointed out at Davos, Trump has ushered in not a transition but a rupture in the world order. International law no longer pertains. As Trump himself told the The New York Times, “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me. I don’t need international law.” That has the ring of a royal decree to it.
Even as protesters in the United States mobilize against Trump under a “No Kings” banner, Trump has moved on. He clearly feels confident about his domestic power base. With his Board of Peace, he’s now bent on conquering the world.