How the US system of world dominance is consuming itself
What has come to be known as the “Board of Peace” did not emerge as a response to war, nor as a sincere attempt at conflict resolution. It was engineered, deliberately and unapologetically, by US President Donald Trump to fit his own political ambitions.
Ostensibly conceived as a framework for managing Gaza in the so-called postwar phase of a war that never actually stopped, the board was grounded in Trump’s own 20-point plan for a ceasefire.
From the outset, it bore the unmistakable imprint of personal power rather than institutional legitimacy. Trump installed himself as its chair, and staffed it not with neutral mediators or representatives of international consensus, but with his own inner circle: his son-in-law Jared Kushner, his special envoy Steve Witkoff, and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair - a figure whose political capital was exhausted long ago, and whose reputation remains inseparable from the catastrophes of Iraq and liberal interventionism.
At the board’s opening ceremony on Thursday, Trump removed any remaining ambiguity about how he conceives “peace”. He spoke not in the language of law, rights or protection, but in the language of deal-making.
“I’m a real-estate person at heart, and it’s all about location,” he told the room.
Citing previous conversations about the board, he added: “I said, look at this location on the sea, look at this beautiful piece of property - what it could be for so many people.” He promised that those “living so poorly” would soon be “living so well”, insisting “that’s the vision”.
The language was revealing. The board was being presented not as a vehicle for justice or rights, but as a transactional instrument for deal-making, stripped of law, accountability and legitimacy.
What had initially been framed as a narrow mechanism tied to the question of Palestine was thus recast as something far more ambitious: an alternative framework for managing the global order itself, explicitly positioned as a substitute for the United Nations and the Security Council.
Legitimacy for sale
This shift unfolded alongside Trump’s withdrawal from more than 60 UN-affiliated organisations, a systematic hollowing-out of multilateral governance rather than a series of isolated acts.
Invitations were issued to 60 states, including even the permanent members of the Security Council, but on explicitly transactional terms: Trump made clear that permanence beyond an initial three-year term would require a cash payment of $1bn, a blunt codification of his governing philosophy that legitimacy, authority and recognition are for sale.
The response was telling. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced his decision to join on the very same day that Israeli forces carried out another massacre in Gaza, killing at least 11 Palestinians, including three journalists.
While nearly two dozen other states have accepted Trump’s invitation, none of the other permanent UN Security Council members has joined, although some nations are still “considering” it. This reflects a broad assessment that the board is politically unserious and institutionally hollow; an exercise in vanity rather than power.
Today's moral outrage reflects not principle rediscovered, but privilege lost, as the empire turns inward on those who long benefitted from its coercion
This episode is not an aberration. It is the logical extension of a broader project: the deliberate dismantling of the post-Second World War international system, whose rules and institutions were designed by the US itself when it emerged as the dominant global power.
Trump is not reforming that system; he is tearing it down piece by piece, completing and radicalising a trajectory initiated by neoconservatives at the turn of the century.
Where earlier administrations cloaked coercion in legal language and multilateral process, Trump dispenses with pretence altogether. His approach is cruder, more confrontational, and openly transactional. This explains his hostility to the UN, his contempt for international law, and his readiness to threaten allies and adversaries alike.
After attacking Venezuela and orchestrating the abduction of its president and his wife from their bed, transporting them handcuffed to the US, Trump renewed his threats to seize Greenland from Denmark, a Nato ally. When European governments objected, he responded not with diplomacy, but with threats of punitive tariffs, later posting a map depicting Canada, Greenland and Venezuela as part of “America”.
Such gestures are often dismissed as provocation or madness. But under Trump, they cannot be treated as mere theatre. The use of naked force - invading Greenland, forcibly annexing territory, even absorbing Canada, which he has described as the 51st state - has moved from the unthinkable to the conceivable.
This is not isolationism masquerading as restraint. It is imperial ambition stripped of euphemism.
'Might makes right'
This all flows from Trump’s “America First” doctrine, which in practice means imposing what he defines as American interests through intimidation, economic coercion, and the threat or use of military force. Those not persuaded by the display of power are subjected to it directly.
According to this worldview, strength confers moral entitlement. The strong may crush the weak; force is its own justification. Trump’s homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, has articulated this logic without disguise, openly embracing the principle that “might makes right”.
When critics warn that such thinking reduces the world to a jungle, Trump’s circle responds with chilling frankness: what is wrong with that, if the US can be the lion, or the master of the jungle?
Trump came to power under a slogan that suggested retrenchment and inward focus. “America First” sounded like a rejection of endless foreign wars. In reality, it has meant their reconfiguration.
Trump does not oppose war; he opposes prolonged war. He favours short, brutal, highly visible uses of force: raids rather than campaigns, punishment rather than governance.
To date, his administration has bombed Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and Venezuela; attacked alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific; and openly floated Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Iran, and Greenland as potential next targets. This is not restraint; it is neo-imperialism, unconcealed.
In Trump’s telling, the failure of American power lies not in its destructiveness, but in its restraint. Previous presidents, he argues, squandered supremacy by binding it to international law, UN frameworks, alliances and multilateral norms - what he derides as liberal illusions.
These constraints, in his view, allowed allies to exploit the US, a grievance he repeats obsessively, particularly when referring to Europe.
What Trump seeks to inject into the international system is not stability, but fear. The US need not be admired or emulated; it must be feared by enemies and allies alike. The tools are blunt and familiar: trade wars, economic punishment, military threats, and strategic destabilisation. Where previous administrations balanced coercion with persuasion, Trump discards persuasion entirely. There is only the stick.
Strategic erosion
The effects have been immediate and predictable. States hedge. Partners diversify. Dependence becomes liability. What appears as dominance reveals itself as strategic erosion.
Washington’s behaviour might look like strength, a superpower acting without constraint - but it signals something more fragile and dangerous: an empire turning on the very system that sustained its power.
That system was never benign. It was constructed to serve the interests of the Global North, above all the US, while medium-sized western powers shared in the spoils. For decades, it functioned as a machinery of subjugation in the Global South: enforcing unequal trade, extracting resources, underwriting dictators, staging coups, and arming militias under the language of order and stability.
France, in particular, perfected this model across Africa through monetary control, military intervention, and political engineering. And yet today, it is precisely France and other European powers that cry loudest about bullying and violations of sovereignty.
There is something faintly absurd in watching European leaders rediscover the sanctity of international law when the tools once deployed against others are turned inward. This is not hypocrisy alone. It is the system consuming itself.
The system Trump is now tearing apart was never a moral one. It was designed to serve power: to legitimise brute force through institutions that dressed domination in the language of order.
It allowed the strong to prevail while claiming legality, enabling the US-led Global North to extract and coerce, while retaining the veneer of legitimacy. It was unjust and violent in its effects. But it functioned.
What distinguishes this moment is not that the system is collapsing, but why it is. Trump’s grievance is not with exploitation or empire. It is with sharing.
Order fragmented
For decades, the US was the principal beneficiary of a system that also allowed its allies to take their share of the spoils. That arrangement imposed limits. It balanced force with consent, coercion with legitimacy. Trump now seeks to abolish even that restraint. His ambition is not to lead the system, but to monopolise it.
This is where the danger lies. You cannot impose your will on the world by force alone. Military power can terrorise, but it cannot govern. The old order worked for its beneficiaries precisely because it cloaked violence in law, and domination in legitimacy. Trump is discarding that architecture entirely, stripping American power of the very legitimacy that once amplified it.
What follows is not a world reordered under American command, but one that fragments in response to American excess. Allies hedge. Partners defect. Rivals harden. The system does not collapse into obedience; it splinters into alternatives.
This realignment is already visible. Even close US allies no longer treat Washington as an unquestioned anchor. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was recently in Beijing, exploring deeper economic and strategic engagement, before departing for Europe - a quiet but telling signal that diversification is no longer theoretical, but necessary.
This is a perilous game, and the losers may not be the old European allies alone. The greatest loser may be the US itself
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Carney captured the moment with rare bluntness: “Nostalgia is not a strategy.” The postwar order, he warned, is not undergoing a gentle transition, but a rupture - and states that cling to old assumptions of American stewardship risk finding themselves exposed rather than protected.
Carney went further, conceding that the “rules-based international order” was always selective and hypocritical: the strongest exempted themselves, trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and international law was applied unevenly depending on who stood accused. This fiction, he admitted, was “useful” to western powers, meaning that today’s moral outrage reflects not principle rediscovered, but privilege lost, as the empire turns inward on those who long benefitted from its coercion.
The greed that drives Trump’s project - the refusal to share power, influence, or even the illusion of fairness - ensures that the backlash will be systemic. This is a perilous game, and the losers may not be the old European allies alone. The greatest loser may be the US itself.
By tearing apart the mechanisms that once legitimised its dominance, Washington risks discovering a hard truth: brute force without legitimacy is not supremacy. It is isolation, exhaustion, and eventual decline.
Because empire does not fall only when it is resisted by the weak. It also falls when it devours the system that made it strong.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
posted by Satish Sharma at
10:06
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