In the rarified, oxygen-deprived heights of Davos, where the world’s self-appointed custodians gather to discuss the plight of the poor over twelve-dollar bottles of artisanal water, a new monument to human vanity has been unveiled. Donald Trump, a man whose personal aesthetic can best be described as ‘dictator-chic by way of a suburban Atlantic City casino,’ has introduced his ‘Board of Peace.’ It is, as one might expect, less an instrument of diplomacy and more a branding exercise for the collapse of Western civilization. The centerpiece of this endeavor is a logo that has sent the international community into a tizzy of performative pearl-clutching. It is the United Nations emblem, stripped of its boring, egalitarian blue and reimagined in shimmering, ostentatious gold, with the United States of America placed firmly at the center of the world.

One must admire the sheer, unadulterated laziness of the theft. In an age where intellectual property is guarded more fiercely than human rights, the Trump administration has simply taken the existing iconography of global cooperation and spray-painted it like a stolen bicycle. The European onlookers, those guardians of protocol and exponents of the deeply furrowed brow, are reportedly ‘aghast.’ Their outrage is, as always, a delightful study in hypocrisy. These are the same bureaucratic entities that have watched the actual United Nations become a glorified debating society for regimes that treat the Geneva Convention as a suggestion box. To be offended by the logo is to admit that you still believe the original symbol stood for something other than a high-rent office building in Manhattan.

The ‘Board of Peace’ was originally conceived, with the UN Security Council’s blessing back in November, as a focused mechanism to broker a ceasefire in Gaza. It was a modest goal, or at least as modest as stopping a centuries-old cycle of blood-letting can be. But modest goals are for people who don’t have their names in giant letters on the sides of buildings. Trump has since metastasized this mandate into a global body tasked with resolving ‘international conflicts of all stripes.’ It is the ultimate expansion of the ‘deal-maker’ mythos—a one-stop shop for peace, chaired by a man who treats geopolitical alliances like a reality television elimination round. The irony is so thick it could be served as a side dish at a Davos gala.

Let us deconstruct the rebranding of the world. By centering the logo on the United States and rendering it in gold, the administration is not-so-subtly suggesting that peace is a commodity that can be bought, sold, and brokered under a single, glitzy umbrella. It is the ‘Great Man’ theory of history, updated for the era of the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the short attention span. The Left will decry this as the end of multilateralism, as if the current state of multilateralism wasn’t already a rotting corpse being kept upright by the sheer inertia of its own committees. The Right will champion it as a return to American strength, willfully ignoring that ‘strength’ in this context looks remarkably like a logo you’d find on a counterfeit tracksuit.

What we are witnessing is the final stage of the commodification of hope. We live in a world where the substance of diplomacy—the grueling, thankless, and often failed work of preventing people from killing each other—is being replaced by the optics of diplomacy. It doesn't matter if the board actually achieves peace; it only matters that the board exists and that its logo looks expensive on a televised backdrop. The Davos crowd is upset because the mask has slipped. Trump isn't playing the game by the established rules of polite, bureaucratic incompetence. He is saying the quiet part out loud: that international institutions are playthings for the powerful, and if you’re going to run the world, you might as well put your own spin on the stationary.

History will not remember the Board of Peace for its triumphs, primarily because there will likely be none. Instead, it will be remembered as a footnote in the long, exhausting chronicle of human stupidity—a golden sticker slapped onto a fractured globe. We are presided over by a class of people who believe that if you change the font and the color scheme of a problem, the problem ceases to exist. Whether it’s the performative moralizing of the European Union or the gilded ego-tripping of the American executive branch, the result is the same: a total vacuum of leadership filled by the loud, clanking machinery of self-promotion. As the world burns, the elite are arguing over the shade of gold on the fire extinguisher. It’s not just depressing; it’s boring. And that, in the end, is the greatest sin of all.