said<\/a> they did not receive visas from the U.S. to attend the meeting on Thursday.) In January, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, and his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva, issued a joint call for the defense and strengthening of the U.N. in the face of Trump\u2019s enterprise. Pope Leo XIV made a similar pitch for the U.N. in declining Trump\u2019s invitation.<\/p>\nSitting in the room during the meeting on Thursday, a European official in attendance was bemused by the succession of leaders voicing their admiration for Trump, especially after a number of top European politicians have been mocked for their own attempts to ingratiate themselves with the U.S. President over the past year. \u201cOne cannot only blame Europeans flattering you-know-who,\u201d the official told me. \u201cWe\u2019re not even the worst ones.\u201d<\/p>\n
Board-membership terms last three years (conveniently running out just as Trump\u2019s term does). A government can pay a billion dollars for a permanent seat, but it\u2019s unclear to most diplomats whether this experiment will exist or matter beyond Trump\u2019s time in office. Two Presidents I spoke to in the aftermath of the Davos ceremony downplayed any expectation of financial contributions or commitments. The President of Kosovo, Vjosa Osmani, instead cast her small nation\u2019s participation as an act of historical redemption, thanking Washington for its leading role in Kosovo\u2019s struggle for independence from Serbia. \u201cIt was the helping hand of the United States of America that came to our rescue,\u201d she told me. \u201cNow, twenty-six years later, we are giving back and we are helping carry that peace forward.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Armenian President, Vahagn Khachaturyan, told me that he hoped that the board could help \u201cenhance confidence\u201d in the U.N. system by boosting peacemaking efforts. He lamented that \u201cprinciples of coexistence are very often violated, and the United Nations is not often able to prevent those violations,\u201d gesturing to the perennial problem of the Security Council, where one of the five veto-wielding powers\u2014in recent history, chiefly Russia and the U.S.\u2014can block significant resolutions to address conflicts such as Russia\u2019s war in Ukraine or Israel\u2019s war in Gaza.<\/p>\n
But Trump and his lieutenants rarely speak of principles and seem far more interested in establishing an arena where only the U.S.\u2019s veto counts. You could hear their ideological animus this past weekend, at a major security conference in Munich. Elbridge Colby, the U.S. under-secretary of defense for policy, scoffed at the \u201chosannas and shibboleths\u201d that constitute talk of shared values and paeans to the rules-based order. Rubio poured scorn on the U.N., saying that \u201con the most pressing matters before us, it has no answers and has played virtually no role.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thant Myint-U, a Burmese-British historian whose grandfather U Thant was the U.N.\u2019s third Secretary-General, said that, \u201cdespite all of its failings,\u201d the U.N. \u201chas been a big part of eighty years of unparalleled peace and prosperity in human history.\u201d He warned that if the Board of Peace picks up momentum, it may \u201cset the stage for a much broader collapse of the whole U.N. architecture that we\u2019ve had since 1945.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s plenty of reason to believe that the board may not be much more than a Trump vanity project of dissonant parts and vague goals that will fade from view amid the rolling dramas of his Presidency. But, as the U.S. plays spoiler within an international system in which it was once the linchpin, no other world power seems especially eager to pick up the slack. Thant Myint-U said, \u201cAt a time when Washington is challenging the very fundamentals of the U.N., both through the Board of Peace but also through aid cuts and funding cuts and everything else, no other country is saying, We\u2019re either going to make up financially for the missing U.S. contributions, or we\u2019re going to really invest politically in renewing and strengthening the U.N.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The current membership of the board is a motley mix. It includes prominent countries already invested in bringing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":482582,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,1930,12,222379,3,60417,222378,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-482581","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-diplomacy","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-middle-east-politics","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-peace","14":"tag-united-nations-u-n","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=482581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482581\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/482582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}