Donald Trump clearly doesn’t do irony. How else can we describe inviting Vladimir Putin to join his so-called “Board of Peace”? At least “mad Vlad” will be in good company.
It’s not clear if Ukraine’s nemesis will take part, but plenty of other aspiring despots, authoritarians and flouters of the sort of norms that the United Nations tries to promote are falling over themselves to do so. Sucking up to the powerful never goes out of style, it seems.
Among the champions of peace and harmony who have rushed to take part are Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, currently locked in a sometimes-brutal contest for influence in Yemen. Still, it gives the Saudis a chance to try out all that expensive military hardware they’ve bought from the Americans.
It works, too: who can forget the Saudi air force’s success in blowing up a school bus full of children for example? They’d probably have grown up to be terrorists anyway. Even the peace president bombs Yemen occasionally. I mean, who doesn’t? Good to know the Saudi’s domestic repression and extrajudicial killings won’t be a barrier to participation either way.
Other noteworthy champions of democracy and human rights include Bahrain, Egypt and Pakistan. But it’s not just in the Middle East where Trump’s Kantian enlightenment is taking hold, though. On the contrary, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Turkey are keen to demonstrate their peace-loving credentials and commitment to human emancipation and progress.
And why wouldn’t they be? After all, the chairman for life is leading by example as he brings stability and order to the streets of his own country via killer ICE operations.
How Trump can claim to be “honored” to have been invited to chair the new organization is a bit of a mystery given it was his idea and prospective members have to stump up US$1 billion to join, but there’s no doubt he deserves it.
After all, he has stopped “eight plus” wars so far, and the way things are going, there are surely going to be lots of new ones to sort out.
At least he’ll have some experienced help. Tony Blair knows a thing or two about pointless wars, like Iraq, which result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, overwhelmingly civilians.
But it’s hard to go past Benjamin Netanyahu as the contemporary prince of peace. So far about 70,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed in Gaza and we haven’t even got to what President Trump, with his trade mark sensitivity for the welfare of the disadvantaged, describes as the “clearing out” stage.
Luckily, Trump has a family member in the form of the distinctively credentialled Jared Kushner to keep an eye on possible business opportunities that may emerge once the clearing out—or genocide as the wokearati, insist on calling it—is completed.
And let’s not forget that Steve Witkoff, in addition to being another real estate guy, is the US’s special envoy to the Middle East and a close friend of Putin’s. The future of the region and the world looks to be in safe hands.
Yes, these are all cheap shots, if that’s not an unfortunate metaphor. All this would be hilarious if it weren’t quite so serious and didn’t threaten to permanently cement America’s position as the principal threat to world peace, rather than its architect and presumed bedrock.
As Mark Carney pointed out in his widely noted speech to the Davos crowd, we are witnessing a “rupture in the world order, the end of a nice story and the beginning of a brutal reality where geopolitics among the great powers is not subject to any constraints.”
The real question for those states that like to think of themselves as principled middle powers dedicated to the preservation of mutually beneficial rules, norms and institutionalized forms of cooperation is: how do we act when the gamekeeper turns into a poacher?
The US has gone from the notional bedrock of a relatively stable world order to its principal threat.
Even Chinese leader Xi Jinping talks about the need for multilateralism and a non-hegemonic distribution of power and influence. True, he would say that, but it doesn’t make the point any less valid.
A coalition of middle powers could at least try to encourage Xi to live up to the rhetoric and discourage Trump from acting like a self-obsessed megalomaniac.
Will Australia’s political and strategic elites finally recognize that with friends like Trump’s America, we really don’t need to be making enemies or snubbing potential partners? How much evidence does it take for minds to be changed? As Carney accurately observed, “nostalgia is not a strategy.”
The very least the Albanese government can do is to not have anything to do with Trump’s Board of Peace. Given that Putin and Netanyahu have been invited, it has a good excuse not to.
Who knows, the Americans might even take some notice of us for a change. If they don’t, we’ve really only got ourselves to blame. One lesson from history that we might want to re-learn is that appeasement never works or ends well.
Mark Beeson is with the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney