The Board of Trump

President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace is off to a rough start. When he launched this international peacekeeping effort on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 22, he said it had “the chance to be one of the most consequential bodies ever created.” Yet such proclamations of peace are already being undermined by divisions among world powers pushing us toward the next world war.

Key Western allies like Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway and the United Kingdom have declined to participate on the board, citing concerns that it could undermine the United Nations’ role in global diplomacy. Meanwhile, these same nations are discussing how to maintain European power over Greenland and stonewall the United States.

Canada was invited to join the Board of Peace, yet President Trump retracted his invitation after Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a speech at the same conference about how “intermediate powers” like Australia, Canada and the UK, which have lived under American magnanimity, must find alternative alliances. Carney, along with European leaders, has also hinted that America can be attacked economically (article, page 1).

It is concerning that Canada isn’t welcome on the Board of Peace because Carney insulted Trump, yet Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping are invited because President Trump wants to negotiate with these tyrants.

But the fact that President Trump can’t negotiate peace with Canada is a bad sign of his ability to negotiate peace with Russia and China.

When British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain proclaimed “peace for our time” after signing a pact with Adolf Hitler in 1938 allowing Germany to annex Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, people applauded. World War ii started only 11 months later. His optimistic pronouncement of peace turned out to be a sick joke.

Will future historians look back on President Trump’s Board of Peace the same way?

Board of Autocrats

The president keeps referring to his Board of Peace as the “greatest and most prestigious board ever assembled,” yet two thirds of the countries who have joined it so far are authoritarian regimes. Its founding members include President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, frequently called Europe’s last dictator; President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, a post-Soviet strongman; Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarch; and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, an Islamist-leaning autocrat.

Does this sound like the greatest and most prestigious board ever assembled?

Democracy Index data from the Economist Intelligence Unit ranks the average democracy score of the governments on the Board of Peace roughly 4.5 out of 10.

Authoritarian regimes frequently exploit UN bodies, particularly the Human Rights Council, to shield themselves from scrutiny, legitimize their rule, and undermine international human rights. President Trump’s Board of Peace is supposed to fix such injustices. But so far, the countries that have joined the Board of Peace are more authoritarian on average than those that comprise the UN.

Compared to the UN, the Board of Peace will be able to make quick decisions because its charter names Donald J. Trump (not whoever the current U.S. president may be) as chairman. Trump is given exclusive authority to modify the board’s entities.

However, trusting Donald Trump to hold dictators to account may still be a losing strategy. He has already threatened 200 percent tariffs on French champagne and wine simply because French President Emmanuel Macron said he did not want to join the Board of Peace, while turning a blind eye to human rights abuses by Hamas.

After the president pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into releasing 1,904 Hamas terrorists last year in return for a ceasefire, my father, Gerald Flurry, wrote, “President Trump not only betrayed Israel, he disgraced Netanyahu specifically. This is a catastrophe difficult to even describe” (Trumpet, March 2025).

Prime Minister Netanyahu submitted and released the hostages—then Hamas broke the ceasefire only six weeks later. But did President Trump learn from his failure? He did not! His new Board of Peace originated as an attempt to oversee future ceasefires with Hamas with a panel of world leaders drawn primarily from autocratic countries that hate Israel and oppress their own people.

Trump is undoubtedly sincere in his belief that his Board of Peace will create both prosperity and tranquility in the Middle East. But future generations will look back on his promises as a “peace for our time” moment!

Dangerous World

When the late Herbert W. Armstrong attended the inaugural meeting of the United Nations in 1945, he contrasted the eloquent public speeches about peace with the bitter arguments occurring off the stage.

“Never in the history of mankind has anything like this taken place,” Mr. Armstrong explained. “It is the greatest, most elaborate conference of world leaders ever held. … In the plenary sessions of the conference we hear beautiful oratory enunciating lofty aims of altruism and world peace—to be printed in newspapers throughout the world for public consumption. But the real sessions are behind locked doors of committee council chambers, and there the savage battle for national interests rages fiercely” (Plain Truth, December 1948).

Fast-forward eight decades, and two things have changed. The first is that you no longer have to peer behind locked doors to see “the savage battle for national interests” raging. At the 2026 World Economic Forum, leaders openly discussed their desire to resist the U.S. and create a powerful European bloc. The second is that there is no longer only one nation with nuclear weapons (the United States), but nearly a dozen, plus nuclear-ambitious nations and even terrorist organizations.

None of the 19 leaders who gathered around President Trump to establish the Board of Peace witnessed the deaths of 85 million people in a world war like the generation that founded the UN just had. So what makes President Trump think that his attempts at world peace will work?

The League of Nations, established in 1920; the Pact of Paris, signed in 1928; the United Nations, founded in 1945; and the International Court of Justice, also created in 1945, were all impressive, prestigious efforts led by men who arguably had more talent and ability than President Trump. Yet all of them failed abysmally.

What makes the Board of Peace different? The same selfish human nature that scuttled past peace efforts is still present in the Board of Peace. In fact, this selfish human nature has probably gotten worse as leaders like President Trump have forgotten the horrors unleashed by World War ii.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the time of their symbolic “Doomsday Clock” forward by 4 seconds on January 27, pushing it to 85 seconds until midnight—the symbolic hour of global nuclear destruction (article, page 15). The need for global peace is greater than ever, but our chances of achieving it are narrowing.

Human Nature

After signing the Japanese surrender in World War ii, Gen. Douglas MacArthur sounded a strong warning about war and peace to America and the world. He said, “Men since the beginning of time have sought peace. … Military alliances, balances of powers, leagues of nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. The utter destructiveness of war now blots out this alternative. We have had our last chance. If we will not devise some greater and equitable system, our Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence, an improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature and all material and cultural developments of the past 2,000 years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.”

This message is very different from the one President Trump delivered at Davos!

MacArthur did not deliver an optimistic message about “a brighter day” and a “safer future.” Having experienced the worst war in human history, this man of strong character warned us that we need “a spiritual recrudescence” and “an improvement of human character.”

The Apostle Paul also recognized that human nature was the main obstacle to peace. He warned that “the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape” (1 Thessalonians 5:2-3).

In an ironic turn, the fact that men like MacArthur were warning about human extinction was a sign that the world was about to experience a respite from the horrors unleashed during World War ii. And the fact that men like Donald Trump are talking so much about a new golden age of peace is a sign that “sudden destruction” is about to come upon much of the world.

As I wrote in the May-June 2025 Trumpet (“The Fatal Flaw in Trump’s Foreign Policy”), the Trump administration’s belief that anything can be solved with dialogue is naive. The president has learned nothing from the failures of dialogue to bring peace to Gaza, Ukraine and other conflicts. He feels he just needs to assemble world leaders in a Board of Peace or other forum and talk things out.

This delusional notion reflects a shortsighted view of world history and human nature. The world is more dangerous now than ever. It bristles with more than 12,000 nuclear warheads!

Hosea prophesied that the leaders of end-time Israel (which include America, Britain and Israel) would be “like a silly, senseless dove, crying to Egypt, flying to Assyria; but as they fly, I fling my net on them, and bring them down like a bird …” (Hosea 7:11-12; Moffatt translation). This analogy well describes America’s senseless foreign policy.

God is preparing a net to bring down the American people if they do not heed His warning!