When unveiling the Board of Peace’s structure at the 2026 Davos summit with his typical bravado, US President Donald Trump proclaimed that the body, in its capacity to promote peacekeeping globally, would “forge a beautiful, everlasting and glorious peace” for the world. Unlike the United Nations, especially the Security Council, which consistently struggles to do more than wring its hands, the Board will be able to ensure global peace and security, regardless of how the Security Council itself authorized the Board’s founding to end the war in Gaza.
Even in the context of the aggressive posturing of the second Trump administration though, these criticisms of the Security Council are hardly fringe views, particularly considering the numerous major wars and mass atrocities that have occurred since the UN’s establishment. Trump has even hinted that the Board “might” one day replace the UN because of its numerous efficacy issues, but that he wanted the UN to continue functioning for the time being.
Nevertheless, if the Board is supposed to be a solution, its structure appears more like a mere remake of the Security Council’s core weaknesses than a genuine attempt at supplanting it as the leading multilateral platform for ensuring global peace and security. Namely, the Board copies and amplifies the UN Security Council’s own issues with over-centralization and legitimacy.
A majoritarian façade by any other name…
Both the Security Council and the Board put up a majoritarian façade in their tasks of maintaining global peace and security, which is arguably the principal flaw of both institutions. By having a select few members with veto powers, these supposedly consensus-based platforms only move when the veto holders permit them to.
In the case of the Security Council, the five permanent members with veto powers (namely the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China) have this special status from being the victorious Allied great powers of World War II, rather than based upon their contemporary security and peacekeeping capabilities. Defenders of the Security Council have argued that the veto is an unfortunate necessity, as without special privileges for great powers, those states would ignore the United Nations entirely. In this sense, these vetoes guarantee their buy-in.
In practice, these vetoes guarantee gridlock. Irrespective of how the UN General Assembly elects other UN members to fill the other 11 Security Council seats, even the mere threat of a single permanent member’s veto (referred to as a “pocket veto”) is enough to force the Security Council into gridlock. Vetoes cannot be overridden either, even when the other 14 members of the Security Council, including the other four permanent members, vote in favour of passing a resolution. The results are the diluted outcomes and paralysis that the Security Council is infamous for.
The Board tries to overcome this problem by simplifying the veto process. Instead of five veto players, it effectively has one: the chairman, who has the final say on whatever decisions the Board makes and the ability to select members of the body’s Executive Board, which sets the overall organization’s agenda. Theoretically, fewer veto players will mean fewer chances for paralysis in decision-making.
On the other hand, the Board’s solution is placing its entire institution on the chairman’s rails. Membership is invitation-only, with three-year terms only available to countries that the chairman invites to join. Permanent membership is also effectively for sale at $1 billion, effectively creating a “pay to play” environment. The chairman can additionally designate a successor without meaningful member oversight, with succession triggered only by resignation or incapacity, practically ensuring the chairman holds the position for life. By specifying that Trump will act as both inaugural chairman and US representative on the Board, the Board’s charter underlines how personal the role is.
… will trigger legitimacy crises just as often
By centralizing de facto veto powers into the chairman position and institutionalizing invitation-only and pay to play membership dynamics, the Board recreates and compounds many of the same representational deficit problems that the Security Council struggles with. Functionally, both systems effectively admit that assembling the world and counting the hands in the room will only go as far as the privileged actors permit them to.
However, whereas the Security Council is widely criticized, most states still treat it as the unavoidable hub for global security. Rather than arguing for its replacement, the common response is to promote reforms to expand membership and restrain veto use. This dynamic emerges partly out of inertia, as the Security Council is still “the” global security venue, despite all its flaws.
The Board will not have the same benefit of the doubt. With power so deliberately centralized, the Board will only serve to provide the veneer of legitimacy for any actions the chairman approves of. Every Board member already knows where de facto authority lies, which will cause diplomacy to tilt away from coalition-building and toward appeasing the chairman.
Because of their majoritarian façades, both the Security Council and Board are effectively forcing the non-veto power members to trust that the veto power members will exercise their vetoes in a fair and neutral manner. Unsurprisingly though, the Security Council’s permanent members wield their vetoes in pursuit of their own national interests, which has already generated extreme friction between the permanent and temporary members of the Security Council. In fact, UN members’ demands for Security Council reform have grown so widespread that even the permanent members themselves have expressed interest in some of them, particularly regarding the addition of new permanent members and restrictions on veto powers. The Board takes this existing frustration and merely intensifies it with its comparatively more centralized structure.
Why the Board will still struggle to replace an ailing Security Council
Far from addressing the Security Council’s fundamental flaw of legitimacy, the Board has amplified it to the extent that it resembles a patronage network more than a multilateral institution. A body whose temporary membership depends on invitation, whose permanent membership can be purchased, and whose decisions are contingent on a single chairman’s approval will struggle to claim it represents “the international community” in any meaningful sense, predominantly whenever the chairman’s preferences diverge from those of the majority.
That matters because peacekeeping is a question of mandate and compliance. The more the international community views an institution as an instrument of just one leader’s discretion, the more conflict parties will treat any of its resolutions as optional, politicized, and transactional. In this manner, the Board would risk reproducing the Security Council’s other perennial difficulties with selective action and enforcement, all while forfeiting the significant amount of legitimacy that the United Nations still carries. The Board would therefore not forge a lasting peace so much as it will repackage the old status quo.