A slow break with the UN: How Trump's 'Board of Peace' fits longer US retreat

Former diplomat and historian Thant Myint-U has warned that President Donald Trump's new 'Board of Peace' could deliver a decisive blow to an already weakened United Nations. This, he suggests, marks the first time the organisation's principal founder has attempted to build a rival international peace body.

Thant Myint-U, who has served at the United Nations and is the grandson of U Thant, the third Secretary-General of the UN, said Trump's move risks undermining the organisation at a moment when its relevance is already under question. 

"President Trump's 'Board of Peace' may well prove a decisive blow for an already beleaguered United Nations," he said. "The UN has been in pretty tough times before, with big states ignoring the Charter almost since inception. But never has the UN's principal founder and the world’s preeminent power since WW2 attempted to create a rival global peace organisation."

What is Trump's Board of Peace? 

The Board of Peace is an international oversight body to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza. The US has invited dozens of countries, including India, China, and Russia, to join the group. According to the White House, the board would be made up of world leaders, with President Trump serving as its chairman. 

Trump has been a strong critic of the United Nations. In September last year, Trump, while addressing the UN, asked: "What is the purpose of the United Nations? 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."

History behind America's hostility towards the UN

The historian said this moment demands a clearer understanding of why hostility toward the UN has taken root within sections of the United States. The UN during its first couple of decades was enormously popular with both US political leaders and the general public, even as America's inbuilt majority in the General Assembly waned over the 1950s, he said.

Washington, he noted, believed it could still count on the early Secretaries-General to remain faithfully aligned. "U Thant's (the third secretary-general of the United Nations) role in de-escalating the Cuban Missile Crisis only underlined a sense of UN usefulness," he said.

That relationship fractured in the mid-1960s. "But in February 1965, everything changed when U Thant began to publicly criticise the war in Vietnam and questioned whether the American people were being told the truth," Thant Myint-U said. "Even more annoyingly, he had begun seeking a brokered peace. For Washington, the UN went from being an occasionally helpful tool to a dangerous political headache."

He said US disillusionment deepened after the 1967 Six-Day War. "For others in the US, the Six Day War and the UN’s push for a Middle East peace settlement that included a full Israeli withdrawal from all the occupied territories, proved a decisive betrayal - appearing to reveal the organization as inherently anti-Israeli," he said.

"A myth around the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers on the eve of the war reinforced this narrative, as did the place of Israel within the organization’s broader decolonisation agenda," he added.

Thant Myint-U said the shift became more ideological in the 1970s. "Worse for some (in America) was the relentless focus of the new 'Third World' majority at the UN on the ending of colonial and white-minority rule in southern Africa, as well as an equal focus on the fashioning of a fairer global economy," he said.

"By the mid-1970s the UN was seen in a new ideological light, as an adversary to American interests," he said, arguing that US global supremacy came to be linked to weakening the institution itself. "US global supremacy required the defeat of Soviet communism; it also required the weakening of the UN (and a wilful forgetting of its past achievements - at preventing and ending wars and, more fundamentally, in the very creation of the post-war international system)."

According to the historian, the UN's role shifted again after the Cold War. "The UN was remade in the mid-1990s as an adjunct to a new US-dominated 'liberal international order', with new ‘donor’-driven schemes (mainly centred on intervening in civil wars far away from the West)," Thant Myint-U said. "There were some successes as well as shocking failures, some revived support for the organisation, but no real new political investment."

He said this left the UN both dependent and politically vulnerable on the US-dominated order, while, at the same time, "an idea of the UN as being fundamentally inimical to American interests (because of histories now faded from view) was never contested, and became 'common sense'."

Against that backdrop, Thant Myint-U warned that Trump's proposal could accelerate institutional decline. While he acknowledged that a 'Board of Peace' to replace as the new world body may not have broad support, it won't rescue the UN either.

The former UN official concluded with a historical warning. "Harry Truman said in 1945 that he hoped the new UN organisation - mankind's last hope - would survive 90 years. After which would come World War Three," Thant Myint-U said. "At this point, even 90 years may be seeming a little optimistic."