SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
political violence
Trump's Board of Peace Fits Into a Long, Ignoble US Foreign Policy Tradition
When existing international mechanisms fail to serve US political objectives, new structures are invented; old ones are bypassed; and power is reasserted under the guise of peace, reform, or stability.
Jan 30, 2026
The history of American power is, in many ways, the history of reinventing rules—or designing new ones—to fit US strategic interests.
This may sound harsh, but it is a necessary realization, particularly in light of US President Donald Trump’s latest political invention: the so-called Board of Peace.
Some have hastily concluded that Trump’s newest political gambit—recently unveiled at the World Economic Forum in Davos—is a uniquely Trumpian endeavor, detached from earlier US foreign policy doctrines. They are mistaken, misled largely by Trump’s self-centered political style and his constant, though unfounded, claims that he has ended wars, resolved global conflicts, and made the world a safer place.
At the Davos launch, Trump reinforced this carefully crafted illusion, boasting of America’s supposed historic leadership in bringing peace; praising alleged unprecedented diplomatic breakthroughs; and presenting the Board of Peace as a neutral, benevolent mechanism capable of stabilizing the world’s most volatile regions.
What is truly extraordinary is that even in its phase of decline, the United States continues to be permitted to experiment with the futures of entire peoples and regions.
Yet a less prejudiced reading of history allows us to see Trump’s political design—whether in Gaza or beyond—not as an aberration, but as part of a familiar pattern. US foreign policymakers repeatedly seek to reclaim ownership over global affairs; sideline international consensus; and impose political frameworks that they alone define, manage, and ultimately control.
The Board of Peace—a by-invitation-only political club controlled entirely by Trump himself—is increasingly taking shape as a new geopolitical reality in which the United States imposes itself as the self-appointed caretaker of global affairs, beginning with genocide-devastated Gaza, and explicitly positioning itself as an alternative to the United Nations. While Trump has not stated this outright, his open contempt for international law and his relentless drive to redesign the post-World War II world order are clear indicators of his true intentions.
The irony is staggering. A body ostensibly meant to guide Gaza through reconstruction after Israel’s devastating genocide does not include Palestinians—let alone Gazans themselves. Even more damning is the fact that the genocide it claims to address was politically backed, militarily financed, and diplomatically shielded by successive US administrations, first under Joe Biden and later under Trump.
It requires no particular insight to conclude that Trump’s Board of Peace is not concerned with peace, nor genuinely with Gaza. So what, then, is this initiative really about?
This initiative is not about reconstruction or justice, but about exploiting Gaza’s suffering to impose a new US-led world order, first in the Middle East and eventually beyond.
Gaza—a besieged territory of just 365 square kilometers—does not require a new political structure populated by dozens of world leaders, each reportedly paying a billion-dollar membership fee. Gaza needs reconstruction, its people must be granted their basic rights, and Israel’s crimes must be met with accountability. The mechanisms to achieve this already exist: the United Nations; international law; longstanding humanitarian institutions; and above all the Palestinians themselves, whose agency, resilience, and determination to survive Israel’s onslaught have become legendary.
The Board of Peace discards all of this in favor of a hollow, improvised structure tailored to satisfy Trump’s volatile ego and advance US-Israeli political and geopolitical interests. In effect, it drags Palestine back a century, to an era when Western powers unilaterally determined its fate—guided by racist assumptions about Palestinians and the Middle East, assumptions that laid the groundwork for the region’s enduring catastrophes.
Yet the central question remains: Is this truly a uniquely Trumpian initiative?
No, it is not. While it is ingeniously tailored to feed Trump’s inflated sense of grandeur, it remains a familiar American tactic, particularly during moments of profound crisis. This strategy is persuasively outlined in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, which argues that political and economic elites exploit collective trauma—wars, natural disasters, and social breakdown—to impose radical policies that would otherwise face public resistance.
Trump’s Board of Peace fits squarely within this framework, using the devastation of Gaza not as a call for justice or accountability, but as an opportunity to reshape political realities in ways that entrench US dominance and sideline international norms.
This is hardly unprecedented. The pattern can be traced back to the US-envisioned United Nations, established in 1945 as a replacement for the League of Nations. Its principal architect, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was determined that the new institution would secure the structural dominance of the United States, most notably through the Security Council and the veto system, ensuring Washington’s decisive influence over global affairs.
When the UN later failed to fully acquiesce to US interests—most notably when it refused to grant the George W. Bush administration legal authorization to invade Iraq—the organization was labeled “irrelevant”. Bush, then, led his own so-called “coalition of the willing,” a war of aggression that devastated Iraq and destabilized the entire region, consequences that persist to this day.
A similar maneuver unfolded in Palestine with the invention of the so-called Quartet on the Middle East in 2002, a US-dominated framework. From its inception, the Quartet systematically sidelined Palestinian agency, insulated Israel from accountability, and relegated international law to a secondary—and often expendable—consideration.
The method remains consistent: When existing international mechanisms fail to serve US political objectives, new structures are invented; old ones are bypassed; and power is reasserted under the guise of peace, reform, or stability.
Judging by this historical record, it is reasonable to conclude that the Board of Peace will eventually become yet another defunct body. Before reaching that predictable end, however, it risks further derailing the already fragile prospects for a just peace in Palestine and obstructing any meaningful effort to hold Israeli war criminals accountable.
What is truly extraordinary is that even in its phase of decline, the United States continues to be permitted to experiment with the futures of entire peoples and regions. Yet it is never too late for those committed to restoring the centrality of international law—not only in Palestine, but globally—to challenge such reckless and self-serving political engineering.
Palestine, the Middle East, and the world deserve better.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Save New START: Nuclear Arms Treaties Must Not Expire
Without New START, there will be no legal limits on US and Russian nuclear arsenals, triggering a costly and dangerous arms race.
Jan 30, 2026
On 5 February 2026, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START—the last remaining arms-control pact between the United States and Russia—is set to expire. Moscow offered to Washington to voluntarily extend it for a year, but US President Donald Trump recently shrugged it off and told the New York Times, "If it expires, it expires.” POTUS has also recently been in the headlines for saying that he doesn’t believe he is required to follow any laws except his own morality, accountable to no one.
I often think about the pre-election live-streamed conversation between Trump and Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX is now in charge of orbital dominance for the US Space Force over planet Earth. When Trump expressed fear of nuclear disasters like Fukushima, Musk responded by defending nuclear energy, despite the fact that a country that has the ability to create and maintain nuclear-power facilities is technically capable of creating nuclear weapons, and despite the fact that we still do not have the technology to remediate (detoxify) nuclear waste.
Musk went even further, minimizing the danger of nuclear weapons themselves. During the conversation which took place on August 11, 2025 (just three days after the 80th anniversary of the nuclear attack on Nagasaki), at an hour and 17 minutes Musk said: “It’s like, you know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, but now they’re like full cities again. So it’s really not something that, you know, it’s not as scary as people think, basically. But let’s see.”
No. We do not ever want to see nuclear weapons used again. The basis of any valid moral system means doing everything you can to minimize the harm you cause to others, and making amends for the harm you do cause. Nuclear weapons are designed to destroy entire cities.
A new arms race would not make anyone safer—but it would make weapons manufacturers wealthier.
Those who survive the initial blast endure slow, excruciating deaths from radiation sickness, burns, cancers, and generational genetic damage—as did so many in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is nothing “not as scary as people think” about this.
Recently, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth at SpaceX announced that Elon Musk’s Artificial Intelligence software GROK, from Musk’s private corporation xAI, will be integrated into Pentagon networks. Hegseth said:
I demand and we demand that we arm our war fighters with overwhelming and lethal technology right now… This strategy will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus on investments, and demonstrate the execution approach needed, to ensure that we lead in military AI and that it grows more dominant into the future. In short, we will win this race.
The only race being fueled in the planet’s current polycrisis is the race to extinction, where there are only losers. The current push by the Department of War to accelerate AI-driven warfare alongside the development of new nuclear weapons eerily echoes the War Room scenes in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, where General “Buck” Turgidson treats mass murder and nuclear holocaust as a logistics problem and a branding opportunity. Reality is stranger than fiction when today’s enthusiasm for automation, speed, and “dominance” mimics satire like in Kubrick’s dark comedy. When machines shorten decision time and leaders prioritize advantage over restraint, the system begins to outrun moral judgment.
It was only a few presidencies ago in 1985 when the USA under former President Ronald Reagan reached a joint agreement with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the Geneva Summit that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” The dialogue implied that neither side would seek military superiority, with the intention to lower the risk of catastrophic conflict and to advance arms-control negotiations.
From survivors of nuclear tests on American soil—like New Mexico, Nevada, and San Francisco’s Hunter’s Point Shipyard—to communities across the Pacific, from the Marshall Islands to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there are innocent victims who experienced the horror of nuclear weapons. Their testimonies exist. Their pain is documented. Their warnings are clear.
As Mrs. Yoko Ota, a Japanese writer who put down this description shortly after the Bomb destroyed Hiroshima, recalled:
On the roads I saw thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children fleeing the hell of Hiroshima. All of them, without exception, were covered with terrible wounds. Their eyebrows were completely burned off. On their faces and hands the skin was burned too and hung in strips. If many of them held their two arms stretched toward the sky, it was purely to try and calm the pain. These unfortunate creatures had their whole bodies swollen up, like drowned men who have been a long time in the water. Their eyelids were swollen so that their eyes were completely shut, while the skin all around was bright red. They were all blind… Most of them were naked to the waist… girls completely naked, women without a hair on their heads, an old woman with both arms dislocated, walking along with them hanging by her sides, the flesh, burnt as if on a grill, came away from the bones; blood was flowing abundantly and a yellow liquid like fat mingled with it…There wasn’t a single person who wasn’t wounded. A woman was lying on the ground, her head split open horizontally. The whole inside of her head was red, like a watermelon. In spite of this horrible wound the woman was still alive and crawled along the ground, leaving behind her a long red streak…
Survivors of nuclear weapons deserve to be listened to—not dismissed, not minimized, and not disregarded.
Nuclear weapons should never have been created, yet we live with their existence. If the New START treaty lapses, there will be no legally binding limits on the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals. A new arms race would not make anyone safer—but it would make weapons manufacturers wealthier. According to The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), “The private sector earned at least $42.5 billion from their nuclear weapons contracts in 2024 alone.”
Companies positioned to profit include defense contractors and tech-military hybrids, many of which already benefit from massive government contracts. Elon Musk’s companies, particularly SpaceX, stand to gain further through expanded “orbital infrastructure” and defense systems. Trump’s proposal for an impossible “Golden Dome” missile defense system would funnel billions more into contractors like SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman—all while creating the illusion of safety rather than actual security—and leaving the working class impoverished and degraded. “Food, not bombs,” has been a persistent slogan among people who demonstrate for peace.
Letting New START expire would end more than a treaty—it would end the last remaining restraint on nuclear escalation. Secretary of War Hegseth announced that the US military will “learn from failure” as a strategy—so wouldn’t it be efficient strategy to learn from the failures of dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and take the opportunity now to renew New START?
Contact your senators in writing or call your representatives at the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121, and urge them to support extending the New START Treaty before it expires on February 5, 2026. Without it, there will be no legal limits on US and Russian nuclear arsenals, triggering a costly and dangerous arms race. We need immediate diplomacy to preserve New START, as nuclear arms control is a present and urgent challenge.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Memo to the Congressional Dems: Abolishing ICE in the Mainstream Democratic Position
If a Democrat on Capitol Hill endorses anything less than the elimination of ICE, the media and advocacy groups need to point out that they are in the fringe of the party.
Jan 30, 2026
Often times, the followers in a political party are far ahead of where their leadership is. This is indeed the case regarding the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. While Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill talk about reforming ICE and making changes in how ICE operates, rank and file Democrats have concluded that ICE must be abolished.
In polling conducted by YouGov on January, just under two-thirds of Democrats (62%) strongly support abolishing ICE while 14% somewhat support abolishing ICE. The bottom line here is that more than three-quarters of Democratic voters (76%) support doing away with ICE.
The only accurate way to describe Democratic support for abolishing ICE is that it is the overwhelmingly mainstream Democratic position. If a Democrat on Capitol Hill endorses anything less than the elimination of ICE, the media and advocacy groups need to point out that they are in the fringe of the party.
A Democratic member of Congress may argue that in order to win they need not only Democratic votes, but Independents as well. There is good news here for ICE opponents. Independent voters, though certainly not as supportive of abolishing ICE as Democrats, do support abolishing ICE. According to the YouGov polling, just over 1 in 3 (35%) of Independent voters strongly support abolishing ICE, while 12% of Independents somewhat support abolishing ICE. The bottom line here is that a 47% plurality of Independent voters support abolishing ICE.
I would hope that Democrats on Capitol Hill would take substantial political comfort in deciding to vote to eliminate ICE.
Successful politics is always about adding people to your coalition. The polling data from YouGov clearly shows that it is easy to build a strong coalition with Democratic and Independent voters to support abolishing ICE. I would suggest that anyone who tells you otherwise is either disingenuous or can not do the simple arithmetic.
Democratic support for abolishing ICE is so great that almost any Democratic member of Congress who fails to support the abolition of ICE could easily face a primary challenge. The dividing lines are that clear.
I would hope that Democrats on Capitol Hill would take substantial political comfort in deciding to vote to eliminate ICE. Abolishing ICE is strongly supported by the majority of Democrats. To any Democrat thinking of compromising on the abolition of ICE, I would ask if you are not going to support something that has the support of 76% of your party, are you really a Democrat?
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Disgusting Act of Corruption': Trump Sues IRS, Treasury for $10 Billion Over Tax Return Leak
"While Trump is weaponizing taxpayer privacy laws for his own benefit, his Treasury Department is flouting those exact same laws to send tens of thousands of individual tax records to his anti-immigrant henchmen at ICE."
Jan 30, 2026
President Donald Trump has sued the US Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns during his first term in the White House, when the president broke with decades of tradition by refusing to voluntarily divulge the records.
The lawsuit—joined by Trump's two eldest sons and his family business, the Trump Organization—was revealed Thursday in a filing with the Miami division of the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida. The suit alleges that the IRS and Treasury Department "caused Plaintiffs reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Donald Trump and the other Plaintiffs' public standing."
Charles Littlejohn, a former IRS contractor who was employed by Booz Allen Hamilton, pleaded guilty in late 2023 to one count of unauthorized disclosure of tax return information and was later sentenced to up to five years in prison.
The US Treasury Department, led by Scott Bessent, announced earlier this week that it was canceling all of its contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton, accusing the company of failing to "implement adequate safeguards to protect sensitive data, including the confidential taxpayer information it had access to through its contracts with the Internal Revenue Service."
The leak included the tax records of Trump and other mega-rich Americans, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The New York Times, which obtained the records along with ProPublica, reported in 2018 that the returns showed Trump engaged in "outright fraud" and other "dubious" schemes to avoid taxation.
Trump, according to the Times investigation, "paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, the year he was elected president, and... he had not paid any income taxes in 10 of the previous 15 years."
US Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said in response to the president's lawsuit that “Donald Trump is a cheat and a grifter to his core, and for him to abuse his office in an attempt to steal $10 billion from the American taxpayer is a shameless, disgusting act of corruption."
"While Trump is weaponizing taxpayer privacy laws for his own benefit, his Treasury Department is flouting those exact same laws to send tens of thousands of individual tax records to his anti-immigrant henchmen at ICE," Wyden continued. "It is the height of hypocrisy for Trump to pretend he cares one bit about taxpayer privacy."
Journalist Tim O'Brien, who has covered Trump for decades, called the lawsuit "a flagrant and obvious conflict of interest."
"Trump oversees the IRS. He wants the IRS to pay him a big chunk of change," O'Brien wrote on social media. "He is, and always has been, in it for the money."
The lawsuit isn't the first time Trump has sought a large sum of taxpayer money from a federal agency during his second term in office. Last year, Trump demanded via an administrative claims process that the US Justice Department pay him roughly $230 million in compensation for federal investigations he has faced.
Trump launched his attempt to wring $10 billion in taxpayer money out of the Treasury Department and IRS as he and his allies worked to gut the tax agency, leaving it with inadequate staff and resources to audit wealthy individuals and large corporations. The IRS is currently headed by Frank Bisignano, who was named "chief executive officer" of the agency late last year.
In a letter to Bessent and Bisignano earlier this week, Wyden and a group of fellow Senate Democrats warned that "the administration’s plans for the IRS"—including painful budget cuts—"will shift the burden of audits more heavily onto working Americans while giving rich scofflaws and big businesses a green light to cheat on their taxes."
"The administration has failed to detail any serious plan to avoid that unfair outcome," the senators warned.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular