Trump's model UN

0:00Well, this is a very exciting day, long in the making, and many countries have just received their notice and everybody wants to be a part of it.

0:10Noel King:In the announcement at Davos of who's joining the president's new initiative. The Board of Peace. It was clear that everybody did not want to be a part of it. No France, no U.K., but Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, El Salvador. Trump talked a lot about conflict. They have to give up their weapons. And if they don't do that, it's going to be the end of them. And in Nigeria, we're annihilating terrorists who are killing Christians. Though he had some nice moments. I think it's going to happen. To end decades of suffering, stop generations of hatred and bloodshed, and forge a beautiful, everlasting, and glorious peace.

0:45Noel King:So what is Trump's board of peace? Timu Uyghur? A money grab? Something that he's going to ditch when he gets embarrassed by the takers? I'm so sorry, Azerbaijan. John, or is it part of a bold plan to remake a troubled world? That's ahead on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Talkiatry. It's a 100 % online psychiatry practice that provides evaluations, diagnoses, and ongoing medication management for conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, depression, bipolar, OCD, PTSD, insomnia, so much more. Talkiatry says it takes just a few minutes to get started. You complete a short online assessment, get matched with clinicians who fit your needs and schedule your first visit in days, not in months.

1:27Noel King:Head to talkiatry.com slash explained and complete the short assessment to get matched with an in-network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. That's talkiatry.com slash explained to get matched. As AI reshapes professional services, law firms and in-house teams are rethinking how complex work gets done. Harvey AI is an AI platform built specifically for legal practice, helping teams analyze documents, draft with precision, and collaborate securely across matters. Today, more than half of the AMLA 100 use Harvey. Learn more at Harvey.ai.

2:10You're listening to Today Explained. Paul Beckett, senior editor at The Atlantic.

2:17Noel King:What is the Board of Peace? It's easiest to think of it as a United Nations mixed with a high-end golf club. This is Donald Trump's effort to have a body that will first, and this is its original rationale, oversee the reconstruction of Gaza. That's the context that brought about this. The 10 ,046th meeting of the Security Council is called to order. The Board of Peace, which will be led by President Trump, remains the cornerstone of our effort. The board will coordinate the delivery of humanitarian assistance, facilitate Gaza's development, and support a technocratic committee of Palestinians responsible for day-to-day operations.

3:04It is backed by the United Nations in that context. How it has been constituted and the way that he is pitching it... Everybody wants to be a part of it. ...is that this will effectively make an alternate to the UN that can go around the world intervening wherever it likes. Today, the world is richer, safer, and much more peaceful than it was just one year ago. We put out all those fires. A lot of people didn't know, including me, that some of those wars were going on. He is the chairman, he is the owner of the club, and it is by invitation only.

3:40Noel King:And what is it supposed to do in his telling? In Gaza, it is to oversee new institutions designed to try and get Gaza back on its feet. And you may have seen in Davos, Jared Kushner presented very elaborate architectural renderings of what Gaza might look like in the future. It could be a hope, it could be a destination, have a lot of industry, and really be a place that the people there can thrive, have great employment. That's what the UN actually gave permission for. The weird thing about it is its charter says nothing about Gaza and really says it will be there to bounce around as it sees fit.

4:19And the digs at the UN are pretty obvious. The preamble says that the reason for the board is because, quote, Durable peace requires pragmatic judgment, common sense solutions, and the courage to depart from approaches and institutions that have too often failed. That's the end of that quote, but you go down a couple more paragraphs and it says it is trying to be, quote, a more nimble and effective international peace building body. The UN is the only other institution of its type in the world.

4:51Noel King:Yeah, yeah. Okay, so how do countries join the Board of Peace? How do you get on? You get asked. You get asked by Donald J. Trump. So it's by his invitation, it's to heads of government. If he invites you and you say yes, there's no membership fee to join. However, if you go that route, you will just be on for a three-year term and he can decide whether you stay on or not. If you want a permanent seat... The three-year membership shall not apply to member states that contribute more than USD$1 billion in cash funds to the Board of Peace within the first year. You or your country pays a billion dollars.

5:34That way you get what would, I suppose, be akin to a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

5:41Noel King:And so Trump himself is inviting people. Who's he invited so far? Lots of heads of state, which, as he said at Davos, are all people that he likes. I mean, I lined them all up on stage and he said, This group, I like every single one of them. Can you believe it? Usually I have about two or three that I can't stand. Usually I have two or three that I don't like. I don't find them up here. I like every one of these people. That would include Argentina. He's obviously very close to Javier Millet. Belarus, Moscow's closest ally. Egypt, which is run by the man that Trump once called his favorite dictator.

6:22Hungary, which is run by Viktor Orban, a fellow traveler in Trump's type of right-wing politics. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. So they have accepted. A bunch more have been invited and are, let's just say, mulling it over. Canada was invited but has already been uninvited because of what Prime Minister Carney said at Davos last week. Every day we're reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry. That the rules-based order is fading. that the strong can do what they can and the weak must suffer what they must. So that seems to have gone down quite badly and he's now had his invitation rescinded.

7:17Truth Social. Dear Prime Minister Carney, please let this letter serve to represent that the Board of Peace is withdrawing its invitation to you regarding Canada's joining what will be the most prestigious board of leaders ever assembled at any time. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Vladimir Putin has been invited. So probably prospects of the Board of Peace ever working on Ukraine may be slim or not, but he hasn't said whether he'll join yet.

7:49Noel King:You got to pay a billion dollars. You or your government has to pay a billion dollars. No small fee. What do the people joining the Board of Peace get out of this? Proximity to Donald J. Trump, I think, is probably the simplest thing. They will have a say in world affairs if this takes off. So if you're a very small country and if you can afford it, you know, you will have a hand in voting and steering post-conflict efforts around the world if it all comes to pass. It's hard to envisage how it will work from just reading the charter. So a huge amount of this has yet to be decided or at least elaborated on.

8:31Noel King:Let me ask you about the UN here. So respectfully, you can't spell dysfunction without the UN. The Security Council is supposed to manage global conflict and keep the peace. The last couple decades have not been great. Russia and China have permanent seats, makes it hard to get anything done. So I wonder about the argument that somebody should come up with another way to handle global piece. And here's Donald J. Trump making an effort in his way. What do you think? I think it is a very fair point. It's very hard to find people who think that the UN is all that it could be, including Trump. He went there in September and stood up in front of the United Nations and said, what is the purpose of the United Nations?

9:15You know, he said it's too weak to step in and end wars. All they seem to do is write a really strongly worded letter and then never follow that letter up. It's empty words and empty words don't solve war. All those kinds of things. So, yes, I don't think anybody would want to be in the position of saying, why do we need an alternative because the UN is working so well? The flip side is it's very hard to see what the accountability mechanisms here, what the transparency is, where does the money go? They just said, well, put the money in reputable banks. It's like, okay. And the other thing here that I think could get complicated is this isn't a United States exercise.

10:00This is a Trump exercise. Nowhere does it say that he has to step down when he starts being president. In fact, in the charter, he's the only named person. Donald J. Trump shall serve as inaugural chairman of the Board of Peace, and he shall separately serve as inaugural representative of the United States of America. So in theory, after he leaves office, he will stay as chairman and then invite his successor, or not, because he gets to make the invitations. He will be in a position to invite the president of the United States to serve on this board. So it just gets very complicated when you stop dealing with an institution and start dealing with a private members club so closely associated with a private citizen.

10:52Noel King:Yeah. I want to bring this back to Gaza because those renderings that you mentioned, they are remarkable, right? They show a developed Gaza skyline, tall buildings, all the things you associate with Donald Trump. If the stated purpose right now is we're going to help rebuild Gaza and you've got a bunch of real estate guys involved, where do you think that may be headed? I think the billion dollars that countries pay for that permanent seat is designed to provide funds for the reconstruction of Gaza. And so, good thing. I think the question then is, okay, but who gets a contract? How is it decided?

11:36How do you stop it becoming the kind of insider's network for the lucrative contracts that will inevitably follow efforts to do post-conflict reconstruction wherever it is in the world?

11:50Noel King:How do you see – you read the charter. You've been looking into this. It's called the Board of Peace. Yeah. How are they defining peace? As a goal. Okay. Okay. They're in good company. as a good thing. If this had been in Europe, it probably would have been called the Board for Reconstruction and Vitalization of the Territory called Gaza or something incredibly tedious. I mean, Board of Peace, President Trump is a superb marketer. I think it is a very catchy title and one that fits with the way that he has portrayed himself. As president, I ended those eight wars in nine months. He was openly soliciting for a Nobel Peace Prize.

12:44Everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize. There's a lot of peace in his legacy building, and I would think that's probably the most helpful context to look at it.

12:56Noel King:Paul Beckett is a senior editor at The Atlantic. Coming up, it's not just the U.N. Security Council that President Trump wants to redo. Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney obliquely accuses Trump of wanting to remake the world order. What's that mean?

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15:59Today, this world is on fire.

16:05Noel King:Today Explained, I'm Noelle King with Monica Duffy Toft. She's a professor of international politics at Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and director of the Center for Strategic Studies. All right, so it is unbelievably, Monica, still January of 2026. And we have had really significant events in Venezuela, in Greenland or over Greenland, with the EU and NATO. And all of this is leading people to say, President Donald Trump is trying to remake the world order. What is the world order? So the world order was established after World War II. Far into the night, the happy crowd screamed their relief at the end of the greatest war in history.

16:46I'm Kenneth Cowell from Arizona. Okay, boys. I just run down, boy, it's over. What are you going to say about it? This is the happiest day of my life. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing. We want peace and prosperity for the world as a whole. And so the United States and its Western allies decided to establish rules that would govern the international system. and along with that a series of institutions, including, by the way, the United Nations. These representatives of 50 nations, they have made a beginning, a brave beginning, that can build a mighty structure for peace. The time for action is here now.

17:25And what they were trying to do is set up a system of law, international law, norms and rules, in order to prevent a third world war. So the idea was that force, the use of force, the use of the military was no longer going to be an acceptable form of politicking, international politicking on the global arena.

17:50All right.

17:50Noel King:So this is the thing that President Trump seeks to change or to undo or to disrupt. You've written about a philosophy that you think is relevant right now. What's the philosophy? He's trying to reestablish the U.S. sphere of influence, its control over the Western Hemisphere, right? In a sphere of influence, it's best understood as control without rule. So with states within a sphere, right, they're sovereign on paper. They have their own government, right? They own borders, their own money, and they have international recognition. But their strategic choices are restrained by the great power.

18:28And in this case, it's the United States. And so the United States, what it's doing is it's saying under President Trump and his administration is that they can't freely choose alliances, trade partners, right, without crossing lines or without getting agreement from the United States.

18:44Noel King:What's the sphere of influence that the U.S. is seeking? So we clearly want to have a lot of influence in Venezuela. We need that for ourselves. We need that for the world. Greenland, the president, has been very clear there as well. Probably won't get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force. Although he climbed down. He climbed down. Now everyone's saying, oh, good. What other nations, what other regions do we see Trump wanting to have influence over? And what does he want them to do or not do? We know that he wants the Western sphere under U.S. control. This was part of the national security strategy that was released.

19:18And it's very clear that the United States is going to dominate the region. National Security Strategy of the United States of America, page 17. The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity, a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region. You can look at what is done in Venezuela, where it just said Venezuela can no longer have relations with China, trade relations formally with China and with Russia, shutting off the oil. You have to understand, why does China need their oil? Why does Russia need their oil?

19:54Why does Iran need their oil? They're not even in this continent. This is the Western Hemisphere. This is where we live. But paradoxically, it also wants to have global reach. And so now we're seeing the tensions. There's a flotilla, as Trump uses it, moving to the Middle East in order to get Iran to behave. We have a big flotilla. And then also, the United States wants to maintain its leverage in Asia. It has allies there, of course, Japan and Taiwan and South Korea. So on the one hand, it's really pressing its case in the Western Hemisphere. But then it's also insisting that it should have some leverage in these other regions.

20:33And the one that's probably the most problematic is Asia. Because, of course, if the United States can have pointy elbows in its own sphere, why China could make the argument, then why can't we?

20:48Noel King:Okay, so this makes me wonder then, who are the other great powers? Who are the other nations trying to influence the smaller nations here? So, you know, there's the top two are probably the Russian Federation, of course, which invaded Ukraine in 2014 and then again in 2022. and Putin's made it very clear that he wants to determine sort of Ukrainians' foreign policy so much so that it doesn't want it joining the EU or NATO and it doesn't want NATO expanded. So the Russian Federation is one. And of course, the other one is China, whose economy is booming as a huge population and, of course, a large landmass.