Major European allies decline to join first meeting of Trump’s Board of Peace | Trump administration

Dozens of world leaders and national delegations will gather in Washington DC tomorrow for the inaugural meeting of Donald Trump’s Peace Board, as major European allies refuse to join the group and criticize the organisation’s uncertain funding and political mandate.

While the White House stated that tomorrow’s summit will function mainly as a fundraising tour for its new special council, which has been renamed the Donald J Trump Peace Institute, Trump announced on social media that countries have pledged more than $5 billion for the reconstruction of Gaza, which was devastated in the war with Israel and remains in a humanitarian crisis.

The US president claimed that member states also “deployed thousands of personnel to the International Stabilization Force and Local Police to ensure the Security and Peace of Gazans.”

The board was initially created with the reconstruction of Gaza as its primary goal, but its mandate was later expanded by Trump to include intervening in other global conflicts.

But despite Trump’s characteristic bombardment, the Peace Board summit will be open to heavy skepticism, with limited expectations both for tomorrow’s meeting in Washington and for the Middle East, where Jared Kushner’s 100-day peace and recovery plan unveiled in Davos has stalled and aid to Gaza has fallen short.

Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former U.S. diplomat, said the Peace Board will struggle to resolve fundamental questions in the Israel-Gaza conflict: who will govern the region, who will provide security on the ground and how to meet the urgent needs of the Palestinian people. He also added that there was little indication of how the Peace Board could resolve the key impasse in negotiations between Israel and Hamas.

“The board is a convenient way for a president who is more interested in quick wins and transactions and too much action rather than serious action as a way to reflect that things are not somehow… dead,” he said, referring to diplomacy. “So you can get impressive promises. But making promises is one thing, keeping them is another.”

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen rejected his invitation, and leaders of key US allies such as Britain, Germany and France also said they would not attend the Peace Board. Trump canceled his invitation to Canadian Mark Carney after the Canadian prime minister made a critical speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month.

The White House initiative suffered another blow this week when Pope Leo XIV announced that the Vatican would not join the board; Critics said it was an attempt to usurp the authority of other major international organizations, including the United Nations, and could allow Trump to remain president even after his presidency ends.

“One of the concerns is that at the international level this has to happen first and foremost,” said cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s top diplomat. [United Nations] who manages these crisis situations. “This is one of the points we insistently emphasize.”

Instead, the meeting will be attended by Middle Eastern delegations including Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan and Qatar, as well as a host of international states with little direct involvement in the conflict in Gaza, from Argentina and Paraguay to Hungary and Kazakhstan. Many appear to be doing the Trump administration a favor by joining the Peace Board, which has proposed a permanent seat for a $1 billion donation to support Trump’s latest signature initiative.

Max Rodenbeck, Israel/Palestine project director at the International Crisis Group, said the initiative would be under intense scrutiny and that there were “global doubts about the shape and intentions of the Peace Board.”

“If this meeting does not result in rapid and tangible improvements on the ground and especially on the humanitarian front, its credibility will rapidly collapse,” he said.

Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu, who signed on to the idea during his visit to Washington last week, chose to skip the meeting. Netanyahu’s right-wing ally, foreign minister Gideon Saar, will attend instead.

It is expected to be extremely difficult for Netanyahu to gain cooperation with Israel’s peace plan in an election year when he is trying to hold on to the far-right wing of his party and avoid the perception of working with regional powers with close ties to Hamas, such as Qatar or Turkey.

Developments on the ground have shown that few of the political or security institutions under the Trump-backed peace plan have actually made progress toward resolving the conflict or easing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Nearly a month after Kushner, who is also Trump’s son-in-law, unveiled his 100-day peace and recovery plan, those charged with implementing it are still unclear about how it should work.

The 15 members of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), a group of technocrats established under Trump’s plan, are waiting in Cairo, anxious to demonstrate rapid improvements in the living standards of Gaza’s people, but they lack the tools to get anything done.

Nickolay Mladenov, who is expected to serve as the Peace Council’s high representative in Gaza, has so far been little visible and has said even less about his role. NCAG’s first major post on social media on Saturday conveyed a degree of disappointment and a message that it wasn’t willing to be a puppet.

“NCAG’s full administrative, civil and police control is not merely procedural; [the] NCAG cannot be expected to be accountable without all the administrative, civil and police powers necessary to effectively implement its authority,” NCAG said in its post on X.

“Everything is going slower than expected and everyone is very angry,” said Gershon Baskin, an Israeli commentator and peace activist who played a role in negotiating the peace plan.

“NCAG will stay in Cairo until they have a clear understanding that they can accomplish something. Going to Gaza now would not be very constructive. They would not accomplish anything,” Baskin said. They don’t even know what their budget is, how much money they have to work with, or what their duties will be. It is not even clear to them under whose authority they work.

There are some moves in the Trump plan to establish an international stabilization force (ISF) that will provide support to the Palestinian police. Indonesia has already offered 8,000 troops; A barracks area is being prepared for them in Gaza, and it is reported that there is an office in the civil-military coordination center with “ISF” written on the door. But there is no one inside.

Diplomats in Jerusalem worry that the ISF plan will be doomed to failure unless the right conditions are created for its deployment, including a proper plan for the disarmament of Hamas and the withdrawal of the IDF.

Aid to Gaza remains severely limited, and in a major obstacle to any reconstruction effort, there have been no changes to the highly restrictive list of banned “dual-use” items, which includes almost anything made of metal, including metal tent poles.

“Israel continues to encroach on Gaza territory with the yellow line extending further west. People are still being killed, buildings are still being destroyed,” said Sam Rose, acting Gaza director of the UN aid agency Unrwa. “We seem to have fallen into a pattern of managing conflict or managing post-conflict in a way that we never considered.”