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Peace as Brand Name, War as Business

The name alone feels like something out of Orwell: the “Board of Peace” is a Trump‑branded project, engineered by his advisers and allies and legally centered on him. It is a quasi‑international body he pushed into existence and now chairs for life, presented by his administration as the centerpiece of his Gaza “peace and reconstruction” plan. Coming from anyone else, it might read as a risky experiment in unconventional diplomacy; coming from Trump, it looks like the latest entry in a long record of corrupt, law‑skirting schemes dressed up as public service. On the surface, it taps into something people understandably crave when traditional diplomacy fails: a faster, more “businesslike” way to rebuild a shattered territory and end a brutal war. In an era of obvious institutional breakdown, when the UN looks paralyzed and global publics are desperate for relief in Gaza, that promise has real emotional pull, which is precisely what makes it such a dangerous vehicle for his familiar pattern of self‑dealing and abuse of power.

Once you look at how the Board is actually built and funded, the uplifting language starts to ring hollow. Its charter concentrates power in Trump personally, and its main financial rail runs through a private stablecoin venture tied to his family and to foreign capital, echoing the same self‑dealing patterns that have followed him through bankruptcies, a bogus university, and politicized charities. Its first theater, Gaza, is a place where genocide and ecological devastation have created a kind of blank slate from the perspective of outside planners: a landscape of ruins that can be “regenerated” according to their priorities rather than the needs and rights of the people who survived the onslaught. What emerges is not a neutral peace institution, but a highly engineered system that turns catastrophe into an investment platform, fuses public money with private gain, and relies on a tightly controlled international force to keep that order in place.

In other words, the Board of Peace is not simply an odd footnote in Trump’s second term, but a natural continuation of his long habit of blurring public power and private enrichment. It is a vivid example of disaster capitalism at work: a project that exploits the mass suffering and destruction in Gaza in order to build a new layer of global governance in which peace is less a moral goal than a brand name for profitable control. The rest of this essay traces how that happens, what it does to both the United States and the broader international order, and why it matters to anyone trying to understand a collapsing civilization that answers crisis not with justice and repair, but with new boards, new fortresses, and the same old cast of operators in charge.

A Boardroom Built on Ruins

Trump first unveiled the idea of a “Board of Peace” in 2025 as part of his Gaza peace blueprint. In January 2026, in a ceremony that mixed White House staging with Davos theatrics, he ratified the Board’s charter and accepted the role of chairman for life. That origin matters because it makes clear this is not a neutral instrument that the United States happened to join. It is a body conceived around his personal leadership and political project from the very beginning.

The charter and early reporting establish several core features. The Board is a U.S. backed entity, but it is not a UN body and does not sit within existing multilateral structures. Trump is named chairman for life, with sole authority to approve changes to the charter, invite or block member states, and create or dissolve subsidiary entities. The founding executive board is stacked with political allies and business figures close to him: Marco Rubio, Jared Kushner, Tony Blair, Steve Witkoff, Mark Rowan, and others who are already part of his political and financial orbit.

If the United Nations is, at least nominally, a community of states with one‑state‑one‑vote rules, the Board of Peace is a gated club. Membership is effectively pay to play. Countries that pledge at least one billion dollars receive lasting influence, while others circulate through rotating seats with less weight. Early joiners include Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kazakhstan, Bahrain, and Morocco, states with deep capital reserves and strong interests in reshaping Gaza and the regional balance of power. What the Board offers them is not disinterested peacekeeping. It offers a share in a new structure of control that is built quite literally on the ruins of Gaza.

Disaster Capitalism in Gaza: From Genocide to “Regeneration”

Naomi Klein coined “disaster capitalism” to describe a grim pattern. Elites use shocks such as wars, coups, or hurricanes to push through privatization and restructuring that would be politically impossible in normal times. Gaza now fits that pattern with painful clarity. Years of siege, followed by an assault that many observers, UN experts, and human rights organizations describe in genocidal terms, have left the territory shattered. Thousands are dead, neighborhoods are obliterated, water systems and power grids are wrecked, and aquifers and soils are heavily damaged. That level of destruction is the precondition for the Board’s arrival.

At its inaugural meeting, Trump announced that member states had pledged billions of dollars for Gaza, with the United States alone committing ten billion dollars. The public language is uplifting: he speaks of “hope and dignity” for Gazans, of rebuilding their homes and lives, of turning a page on conflict. However, when you look closely at the plans described by officials, leaks, and sympathetic media, the pattern looks far more like classic disaster capitalism than like restorative justice.

The Board and its partners tout ambitious plans for hundreds of thousands of new housing units and major hotel and resort developments along the coast. This is not simply a matter of restoring what was destroyed. It is an attempt to redesign the territory’s economic and spatial order. Leaked documents about a planned community in Rafah show dense surveillance, checkpoints, and highly controlled movement built into the urban design. The result is a high‑tech cage rather than a truly liberated city. Governance is to be overseen not by a fully sovereign Palestinian polity chosen freely by residents, but by layered structures in which the Board and its backers hold decisive leverage through funding conditions, security arrangements, and formal or informal vetoes.

In this vision, Gaza’s destruction is not just a horror to be mourned and remedied on the victims’ terms. It is also an “opportunity” to remake the strip into a securitized investment zone that is profitable, controllable, and symbolically useful as proof that Trump’s plan “works.” The genocide and its aftermath become raw material for a new regime of ownership and control. That is why critics speak of “completing the genocide”: the physical erasure of communities is followed by spatial and economic reconfiguration that locks in dispossession so thoroughly that return and self‑determination become almost impossible in practice.

The Money Machine: Stablecoins, Slush Funds, and Self‑Enrichment

Disaster capitalism always relies on some financial machine behind the rhetoric. For the Board of Peace, that machine is Trump’s own crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, and its stablecoin, USD1. World Liberty Financial presents USD1 as a digital upgrade to the U.S. dollar, fully backed by treasuries and cash, tradable globally, and integrated into decentralized finance. That pitch makes it sound like a politically neutral technical innovation. In reality, several details change the picture.

First, the company is closely linked to the Trump family. His sons have fronted the rollout, Trump himself is publicly associated with the brand, and the political cachet of the family name is a selling point. Second, a UAE‑linked firm bought a 49 percent stake in World Liberty shortly before Trump’s second inauguration, in a deal worth roughly 500 million dollars, with independent estimates suggesting that well over 100 million dollars of that flowed directly to Trump personally, on top of substantial sums to his sons. Analysts have noted that this made little conventional financial sense unless one factors in the political access and influence it might buy. Third, USD1 rapidly reached a multibillion‑dollar market capitalization, making it one of the major dollar‑pegged tokens in circulation.

The Board’s charter and supporting statements explicitly position USD1, or equivalent U.S. backed stablecoins, as the infrastructure for moving Gaza funds: from state pledges into Board accounts, from Board accounts into specific projects, and from projects into returns, fees, and future tokenized instruments. In practice, this means that when member states wire money for Gaza, those funds can be converted into USD1 and moved on chain. World Liberty collects spreads, fees, and reputational gains from being the Board’s preferred payment rail. If property, future revenues, or other assets are later tokenized and sold to investors, World Liberty is ideally placed to profit again.

This is where corruption and self‑dealing stop being abstract concerns and become built into the architecture. Trump is, at the same time, the president of the United States, the chairman for life of an international body that allocates billions in reconstruction funds, and a leading political figure tied to the private company whose token is used to handle those funds. No one has to uncover a secret memo for people to see the problem. The structure itself makes it both possible and tempting to steer public resources and disaster reconstruction flows in ways that directly enrich a platform that his inner circle partly owns and that a foreign ally partly controls.

Critical analysts have described this arrangement as a kind of giant slush fund that Congress cannot easily reach. Tariffs, foreign pledges, and tokenized instruments can be blended into a pool that sits under a governance structure Trump controls, rather than under normal legislative oversight. That is disaster capitalism in its purest form: a system for monetizing crisis zones with minimal democratic scrutiny and maximum personal upside for those at the center.

The Security Arm: Stabilizing Whose Peace?

No such project can function without a security apparatus to protect investments and suppress resistance. For the Board, that apparatus is the International Stabilization Force. In late 2025 and early 2026, the United States hosted talks in Qatar and elsewhere to assemble this force for Gaza. Those talks produced pledges of about twenty thousand soldiers and twelve thousand police from countries such as Indonesia, Egypt, Morocco, and others. Trump officials and sympathetic commentators describe this as the key to ending the war, keeping extremists at bay, and giving reconstruction a chance.

The crucial question is not whether security is needed. It is whose peace this force is being built to stabilize. The ISF is not structured as a traditional UN blue‑helmet mission that answers to the Security Council. Instead, it is set up as a force linked to the Board’s mandate and architecture. Its main base and command structure are physically and politically tied to the Board’s reconstruction and governance plans. Its funding and operational priorities are bound up with the same member states and financial flows that drive the Board itself.

In practice, this means the ISF exists primarily to secure the new order: to protect infrastructure, enforce movement controls, and prevent organized challenges to the framework that the Board and its partners have designed. Its mission is to stabilize a specific configuration of power, not to guarantee a neutral peace. That is why many Palestinians and outside observers see it less as a peacekeeping body and more as an occupation force with different uniforms.

Seen plainly, this is a militarized enclosure. Palestinians are expected to live inside a space that is rebuilt and policed by outsiders. Their horizon is narrowed by walls, checkpoints, and the logic of “stability,” the same term used globally to justify suppressing protests that might unsettle investors. The army is international, but its loyalties, by design, are to the Board and its funders. That is exactly the configuration disaster capitalism prefers: armored protection for assets in a landscape of trauma.

The United States at the Edge of a Shadow Regime

Inside the United States, the Board arrangement pulls against the constitutional fabric. On paper, Congress retains the power of the purse and foreign policy is meant to run through accountable institutions. In practice, Trump has pledged to divert ten billion dollars in U.S. public money to the Board of Peace, despite having no clear congressional authorization to do so and mounting warnings that such a move would be totally illegal under basic appropriations law. The Board itself is wrapped in immunities and structured to operate beyond the normal reach of domestic courts and transparency laws.

The result is a kind of shadow regime for foreign policy and financial decision making. Decisions about Gaza, and potentially about future crisis zones, are no longer made only in the State Department, Congress, or at the UN. They are also made in Board sessions that Trump chairs as a quasi‑international leader. The money that follows those decisions travels along a private platform that is partly owned by foreign capital and insulated from standard government auditing. A separate security apparatus, the ISF, implements Board decisions on the ground with its own mandate and chain of command.

For ordinary Americans, this is confusing and corrosive. Many already struggle to see how foreign policy relates to their daily lives. When they hear that billions of dollars are going to a body that Congress barely debated, that the chair for life has a private financial stake in its payment system, and that the Board enjoys special immunity from scrutiny, it deepens a familiar suspicion. Governance looks less like a public process and more like a private club, one that turns even war and peace into investment products. That perception, in turn, erodes trust not only in Trump or in any single party, but in the basic idea that public institutions serve a broader common good.

Fragmenting the Rules‑Based Order into Boards

Beyond the United States, the Board of Peace accelerates the fragmentation of what people call the rules‑based international order. That post‑1945 system, an uneasy mix of UN norms, U.S. hegemony, and international law, has always been compromised and often hypocritical. Yet it did at least contain an aspiration that even great powers would justify their actions in general terms and that some lines, such as genocide and mass ethnic cleansing, were supposed to be unacceptable.

The Board’s design effectively steps outside that framework. It does not aim to fix the UN or work through universal membership. Instead, it creates a parallel lane for a coalition of willing and wealthy states. In that lane, a small board replaces a general assembly, a private stablecoin rail substitutes for the IMF and World Bank, and an ad hoc stabilization force stands in for UN peacekeeping. Decisions are faster and less encumbered, but they are also less transparent and less bound by inclusive norms.

Gaza is the first testing ground in this lane. If the model appears to work, meaning it produces visible reconstruction and dampens violence without immediate scandal, it is easy to imagine it being applied elsewhere. Yemen, parts of the Sahel, or climate‑ravaged regions in South Asia or coastal Africa could all be candidates. Wherever the old system fails or stalls, a Board can be proposed as a “solution,” offering peace on terms that primarily protect investors and allied states.

This is exactly how disaster capitalism scales. Every shock becomes both a human tragedy and a market opportunity. The Board of Peace stands out as one of the clearest institutional expressions of that logic. It is a standing body ready to step into the void whenever conventional mechanisms are too slow, too democratic, or too constrained by law to satisfy the interests of those at the top.

Civilizational Unraveling and the Choice of Boards

Modern industrial civilization is under extraordinary pressure from climate breakdown, resource exhaustion, demographic shifts, and technological disruption. Institutions that were built for a more stable world are cracking under the strain. In that context, societies face a basic fork in the road. One path deepens democracy, strengthens global solidarity, and centers those most harmed in the design of solutions. The other path doubles down on fortresses and boards.

Fortresses mean hardened borders, offshore bases, and walled enclaves designed to keep the worst chaos outside. Boards mean structures like Trump’s Board of Peace, where wealth and decision making are concentrated in small circles that are insulated from accountability and woven together through capital flows. The Board clearly belongs on the fortress‑and‑board path. It is not just Trump’s involvement that makes the Board of Peace slanted toward corruption and self‑enrichment. It expresses a broader pattern in which collapse is treated as a set of business opportunities, from reconstruction contracts to tokenized debt, and in which immunities and private security are used to lock in those gains.

Gaza makes that pattern unusually visible. A people subjected to siege and mass killing, living on a strip of land already strained by environmental deterioration, are now being incorporated into a scheme where their future is collateral for a new financial and security architecture. Their suffering is not only an aberration that future policy should prevent. It is also the ground on which the Board stands and from which it seeks to profit. That is the core of disaster capitalism: the conversion of collective trauma into private advantage under the cover of rescue.

Why This Story Matters

Once you strip away the acronyms and financial jargon, the underlying story is devastatingly simple. A genocide and ecological catastrophe in Gaza created ruins. Those ruins attracted a “peace” project built by a man and a network with powerful incentives to profit and to consolidate power. That project is structured to route public and foreign money through private rails, shielded from normal oversight, and guarded by a private security force. It offers a vision of the future in which boards like this manage patches of a collapsing world for the benefit of a few, while the people who live there are told to be grateful for the reconstruction of their cages.

If you wanted a single case that ties together environmental breakdown, institutional failure, oligarchic power, and the human cost of all three, it would be hard to find anything more revealing than Trump’s Board of Peace and its Gaza experiment. It is disaster capitalism laid bare, exploiting the genocide of Gaza to build a new layer of global governance in which “peace” functions as a brand name for permanent, profitable control.

References

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