Is Trump’s Peace Council an Opening for the Unleashing of International Conflicts
- sara john
- Jan 31
- 5 min read
Samir Altaqi
Dag Hammarskjöld, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, says—as if it were written for our time: “The United Nations was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.” The function of international institutions is not to beautify the world, but to reduce the cost of its worst elements: wars, misunderstandings, and deals that are struck over the heads of those affected by them. And when institutions become mere décor for deals, their preventive role recedes, and the price of risks rises.
In international politics, institutions are not born from an innocent void. They are most often born from an open wound, or from a war whose doors have not yet been closed, then they expand—under the pressure of interests—until their name becomes larger than their mission, and their form broader than their mandate.
Thus appeared the “Peace Council” proposed by President Donald Trump: it began, ostensibly, as a tool for managing the post-war period in Gaza, then it started to turn into a parallel platform through which international legitimacy is re-engineered from a legal legitimacy of equal (theoretically) sovereign states, so that legitimacy transfers to a limited-membership “club,” headed by Washington, in which the voice of power rises above the logic of law.
The story begins with Security Council Resolution No. 2803 concerning the arrangements for Gaza. From a purely legal standpoint, there is nothing surprising in that: the United Nations has, throughout its history, authorized transitional arrangements in exceptional crises. But the issue here is not about the principle of “arrangements,” but about what can be built on top of them.
If the Gaza mandate is used as a bridge to launch a new charter that goes beyond Gaza, then we are facing a shift from an “ad hoc solution” to a “model of governance,” and from a “mechanism” to a “system.”
And when mechanisms turn into systems, the heavy questions begin: who has the final word? Who holds the right of entry? Who sets the borders and then redraws them?
It is no secret that Trump himself hinted, on more than one occasion, at the possibility that the council could assume functions traditionally attributed to the United Nations; he even expressed—bluntly—the council’s ability to “do, to a large extent, what we want… in conjunction with the United Nations.”
The phrase is not merely campaign rhetoric; it is a key to understanding the dilemma: are we facing an institution “nested” within a limited UN mandate, or an attempt to redefine the mandate from within, then go beyond it in the name of speed and effectiveness?
The legitimacy of the post-1945 international system rests on a well-known triangle: international law that restricts the use of force and affirms sovereignty and self-determination; multilateral institutions that make solutions less unilateral and more generalizable; and procedural legitimacy that produces trust through inclusivity, transparency, and official mandate. The problem with the “Peace Council,” in the form being discussed, is that it puts this triangle under a harsh test: it borrows legitimacy from a Security Council resolution, but it seeks—according to circulating concerns—to keep executive decision-making away from UN constraints, and to open the door to a “club-governance” run by the logic of the deal rather than the logic of the rule.
What stands out most in this new governance is the idea of “entry in exchange for payment.” If membership is granted for fixed years, and its continuity is conditional on massive financial contributions, then we are practically moving from the logic of “one state, one vote,” to an old logic of dominance: influence is weighted by financial capacity and by the degree of proximity to the center of power.
The question then becomes: effective for whose benefit? And does reconstruction and stability turn into a financial–security package negotiated by external actors, while “local agency” is left at the bare minimum: symbolic presence, or participation that is summoned when needed and then excluded at the moment of decision?
And while we all agree that the United Nations has suffered chronic structural imbalances: the veto, unequal enforcement, limited resources, and the politicization of funding. But the institution’s poor performance was, in essence, due to the bad use by the United States and its allies of veto rights and of their financial power. International law is not a moral luxury; it is a condition for reducing the risks of global wars. And when constraints recede, the cost of deviation falls, and decisions become arbitrary, so that international conflicts explode more broadly than what we see today.
Researchers here follow three paths that could make the “Peace Council” more than just a headline: first, that it begins by displacing the role of the United Nations in practice, so disputes are referred to the council rather than to UN tracks, and money and political attention shift toward the new channel. Second, that the legal constraint weakens, so a precedent is normalized that “legitimacy is bought,” or that trusteeship is managed as a political–financial contract, not as a path governed by peoples’ rights and guarantees of self-determination. Third, that a pattern of competing “clubs” is normalized, so major powers choose the decision platform according to their desire, and the United Nations becomes one arena among arenas, not a unifying center.
This scene calls up the memory of the 1930s, not as a prophecy that history will repeat itself, but as a warning about dynamics that return when incentives resemble one another: bypassing inclusive institutions, selective enforcement of international law, rising fragmentation and economic protectionism, then an arms race that precedes the explosion and does not prevent it.
True, today’s world is different—nuclear deterrence, broader institutional networks, greater economic interdependence—but the structural similarity appears in extremely worrying points!: a ravenous desire by Trump to produce formal legitimacy, a tendency toward temporary arrangements that bypass inclusive institutions, and a growing institutional and economic fragmentation.
To ward off these risks, Europe moves on two axes that appear contradictory, yet together they form a kind of division of roles: some of its states refuse to engage so as not to grant legitimacy to a competing structure, while others engage conditionally to impose governance guarantees that return the council to the limits of the Gaza mandate, prevent the concentration of power, and require transparent reports and real UN oversight. It is an attempt to keep the “new institution” inside the old house, instead of turning into another house at its expense.
In such an environment, “unrestrained institutional experimentation” becomes closer to playing on the edge of war. It is a very dangerous path for all of humanity:
A quiet transition from a world of rules to a world of clubs—and from legitimacy made by procedure to legitimacy rented by the deal. And in international politics, before World War II, the most dangerous transformations are those that happen without noise.
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