The 'Board of Peace' is the ultimate evolution of the modern grift, a C-suite approach to the impending apocalypse. Donald Trump, a man whose personal experience with 'peace' usually involves a non-disclosure agreement and a wire transfer to a silencing agent, has decided that the chaotic, millenia-old blood-letting of the 21st century can be solved with a board of directors. It is a beautiful, terrifying irony. The Left is predictably vibrating with indignation, weeping over the destruction of 'multilateral institutions' like the UN—an organization whose primary function is to provide a platform for dictators to complain about human rights while their own secret police are working double shifts. The Right, conversely, is treating this like the geopolitical equivalent of a Super Bowl win, convinced that the sheer 'dominance' of their orange deity will scare the rest of the world into behaving like a well-managed golf course.

Let’s examine the participants. Those who are eager to join this 'Board' aren't motivated by a sudden outbreak of altruism or a newfound love for their fellow man. They are the sycophants of the world stage, the middle-managers of global tyranny who see an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a new protection racket. If you are a minor despot with a major image problem and a few war crimes cooling on the windowsill, what better way to scrub the blood off your hands than by sitting next to a former U.S. President on a 'Board of Peace'? It is the ultimate reputation-laundry service. For these leaders, 'peace' is just a buzzword used to secure weapons deals and silence domestic critics. They aren't there to stop wars; they are there to ensure that the wars remain profitable and directed at the right people. It is diplomacy reimagined as a corporate merger where the shareholders are autocrats and the product is the absence of bad press.

And then there are those who declined. Oh, the performative integrity of the refuseniks! These are the leaders who have calculated that their brand of smug, Western liberal-democracy—or perhaps their own specific flavor of isolationist autocracy—doesn't play well with the Trumpian aesthetic. They aren't declining because they have a moral objection to the suffering in Gaza or elsewhere; they are declining because they prefer the traditional, boring ways of facilitating it. They want the wars to be managed by committees of grey-faced bureaucrats in Brussels or Geneva, where the paperwork is tidier and the hypocrisy is wrapped in better grammar. Their refusal is not a moral stand; it is a marketing decision. They have looked at the 'Board of Peace' and realized it is a tacky franchise, and they would rather keep their own boutique operations running without the gold-plated branding.

The scope of this Board is allegedly broader than just Gaza, because why settle for failing at one intractable catastrophe when you can fail at all of them simultaneously? Trump apparently thinks he can pivot from real estate to regional stability with the ease of a man changing a television channel. The Middle East, a gordian knot of religious fervor, historical grievance, and oil-fueled insanity, is being treated like a distressed asset in a bad neighborhood. The idea that a group of hand-picked 'leaders'—most of whom could not navigate a supermarket without a security detail and a teleprompter—can solve the Gaza situation by sheer force of personality is the height of hubris. But then again, hubris is the only thing the modern political class produces in abundance. We are expected to take this seriously, to analyze the 'strategic implications' of who said 'no' and who said 'maybe,' as if we aren't just watching a group of vultures argue over the intellectual property rights of a carcass.

Peace, in the hands of this group, is a commodity. It is something to be traded, hedged, and leveraged against the next election cycle or tariff negotiation. It is not the absence of war; it is just the monopolization of violence by the people Trump happens to like this week. The sheer vacuity of the enterprise is breathtaking. It is a masterpiece of modern performance art where the medium is human suffering and the gallery is the 24-hour news cycle. The Left will argue that this undermines the 'experts.' You remember the experts? Those are the people who gave us two decades of fruitless nation-building and a global financial system that functions like a giant, burning Ponzi scheme. The Right will argue this is 'unconventional genius.' Translation: we have no actual plan, but we are going to be very loud and aggressive about the lack of one.

In the end, the 'Board of Peace' will accomplish exactly what every other high-level diplomatic initiative of the last fifty years has accomplished: it will generate a lot of carbon emissions from private jets, provide fodder for several dozen ghost-written memoirs, and change absolutely nothing for the people actually being bombed. Humanity’s capacity for self-delusion remains our only truly infinite resource. We honestly believe that if we just get the right group of grifters in a room with a large enough mahogany table, we can override the fundamental human drive to ruin everything we touch. It would be funny if it weren’t so incredibly loud. Don't worry about the state of the world; the board of directors is meeting, and they have plenty of gold pens.