Should the Board of Peace Replace the United Nations?

Executive Summary The launch of the “Board of Peace” by President Donald Trump has sparked strong resistance in Europe, where the initiative is widely perceived as a challenge to the United Nations and to the post-1945 system of collective security. Yet this reaction risks misreading both the nature of the Board of Peace and the deeper forces that made such an initiative conceivable. The emergence of alternative frameworks for managing international security is not the cause of the erosion of the existing order; it is the consequence of its long-standing failure. This paper argues that the United Nations is no longer capable of fulfilling its core mission. Structural paralysis in the Security Council, the politicization and capture of key UN bodies by authoritarian regimes, and the growing marginalization of democracies within universal institutions have severely undermined the UN’s legitimacy and effectiveness. Reform has proven structurally impossible, as those who benefit most from the system have no incentive to change it. As a result, universality has ceased to guarantee legitimacy, while moral language has become increasingly detached from responsibility and enforcement. In this context, initiatives such as the Board of Peace should not be assessed solely on their institutional design or political sponsorship. They should be understood as symptoms of a broader shift from universal legitimacy to functional legitimacy, in which authority increasingly derives from the capacity and willingness to act. This shift poses a strategic dilemma for Europe, which risks clinging to procedural legitimacy while forfeiting influence over the emerging architecture of global security. The paper further argues that solidarity among democracies has become a strategic necessity in a world where liberal states are a numerical minority in universal institutions. Israel’s experience at the United Nations—despite its historical contribution to the concept of universal justice and its emergence from the Holocaust—offers the clearest illustration of the UN’s moral inversion and institutional decay. Reopening the debate on collective security is therefore not an act of defiance, but a prerequisite for restoring responsibility, credibility, and justice in international affairs. The Controversy Around “The Board of Peace”  The announcement by President Donald Trump of a “Board of Peace” provoked a predictable reaction across much of Europe. Several governments, France most explicitly among them, declined to participate, arguing that such an initiative would undermine the United Nations and further fragment an already weakened international order. The Board was quickly framed as a unilateral and transactional experiment, driven more by political instinct than by institutional prudence, and emblematic of a broader American scepticism toward multilateralism. In this reading, the danger lay less in the proposal itself than in the precedent it appeared to establish: the normalization of alternatives to the United Nations as the central framework for collective security. Yet this reaction rests on a fundamental misdiagnosis. The Board of Peace does not threaten stability because it challenges a functioning system. It challenges assumptions only insofar as one assumes that the system it questions still performs its core functions. The more unsettling reality is that such an initiative could emerge at all without being dismissed as implausible or marginal. Its plausibility is itself the most revealing indictment of the post-1945 order. The international system is not witnessing the reckless invention of substitutes for collective security. It is witnessing the consequences of the long-term exhaustion of the only collective security architecture it has known. The United Nations was not designed to operate in a world where democracies are a minority, where revisionist powers openly weaponize international institutions, and where moral language is routinely detached from enforcement. When institutions fail episodically, they invite reform. When they fail structurally and persistently, they generate alternatives. In this sense, the Board of Peace is not the cause of institutional fragmentation; it is one of its clearest symptoms. The purpose of this paper is therefore neither to endorse the Board of Peace nor to advocate abandoning the United Nations. It is to legitimize a discussion long postponed by habit, nostalgia, and political caution: whether universal institutions conceived for the geopolitical and moral landscape of 1945 can still serve as the backbone of international security in the twenty-first century. Avoiding this discussion does not preserve order. It accelerates its erosion by forcing states to act outside institutions that no longer function, while continuing to pretend that they do. The Foundational Logic of Collective Security and Its Breakdown The United Nations was created in response to a catastrophic failure of international governance. The collapse of the League of Nations, the inability of the international community to deter aggression in the 1930s, and the moral abdication that culminated in the Holocaust and the Second World War convinced the founders of the UN that peace could not be sustained by idealism alone. The post-1945 order was therefore not built on naïve universalism, but on a sober recognition of power and responsibility. The UN Charter institutionalized a deliberate compromise between legitimacy and enforcement. Universal membership would provide moral and political authority, while real power would be concentrated in the Security Council, where the victors of World War II would enjoy permanent seats and veto power. This was not an egalitarian system, nor was it intended to be. It was hierarchical by design. Its premise was that peace could be maintained only if those capable of enforcing it consented to the rules. For several decades, this architecture functioned imperfectly but intelligibly. During the Cold War, the United Nations rarely acted as an autonomous guarantor of peace, yet its paralysis reflected an underlying balance between the superpowers. The organization did not prevent conflict so much as mirror a strategic equilibrium imposed from outside it. Crucially, however, it still operated in a world in which the moral authority of liberal democracies was broadly acknowledged, even by their adversaries. That world no longer exists. The end of the Cold War did not usher in an era governed by universal norms and collective enforcement. Instead, it exposed the fragility of an institutional system dependent on a balance of power that had disappeared. The Security Council’s veto power, once justified as a means of securing great-power engagement, hardened into a mechanism of permanent obstruction. Conflicts involving the interests of permanent members or their clients became effectively immune to collective action. This paralysis is not a temporary malfunction; it is a structural condition. Universal Membership and the Capture of Institutions The crisis of collective security cannot be understood solely through the lens of the Security Council. Universal membership, long celebrated as the United Nations’ moral foundation, has itself become a central source of dysfunction. As membership expanded from 51 states in 1945 to nearly 200 today, the organization ceased to be a forum of states sharing even minimal assumptions about political legitimacy, individual rights, or the rule of law. Democracies are now a numerical minority within the UN system. Authoritarian and hybrid regimes dominate voting blocs, agenda-setting bodies, and elections to key institutions. This demographic transformation has reshaped the internal logic of the organization. Influence flows less from adherence to norms than from coalition-building among states that often share little beyond hostility to Western power and liberal standards. The consequences are structural. Institutions originally designed to uphold universal principles have been systematically captured. Human rights bodies, legal forums, and specialized agencies increasingly function as arenas of political warfare rather than guardians of impartial standards. Normative language is deployed selectively to isolate adversaries and protect allies. Universality, once invoked as a source of legitimacy, has become the mechanism through which legitimacy is hollowed out. Normative Inflation, Legal Cynicism, and Moral Inversion One of the most corrosive consequences of this evolution has been the inflation of norms accompanied by their selective application. The United Nations produces an ever-expanding corpus of resolutions, declarations, and reports, even as their practical impact steadily diminishes. Moral language proliferates precisely as its credibility erodes. Human rights institutions illustrate this pathology with clarity. Bodies established to protect individuals from state abuse have become platforms for selective outrage and political theatre. States with appalling human rights records sit in judgment of others, while systematic repression by powerful or strategically useful regimes is ignored or relativized. This is not merely hypocrisy; it is moral inversion—the transformation of human-rights discourse into a tool that shields perpetrators and delegitimizes those who resist them. International legal institutions have followed a similar trajectory. The expansion of international criminal jurisdiction was initially justified as a response to the horrors revealed by the Holocaust and later genocides. Yet when legal mechanisms are controlled by political coalitions hostile to liberal democracy, law itself becomes a weapon. Universal jurisdiction, detached from accountability and reciprocity, undermines the legitimacy of justice rather than strengthening it. This erosion does not remain confined to institutional corridors. It corrodes the very idea of universal justice. When international law is perceived as cynical, selective, and politically instrumentalized, it loses authority not only among those it targets, but among those who once believed in it. The Structural Impossibility of Reform Faced with mounting evidence of dysfunction, reform has become the United Nations’ permanent rhetorical horizon. Proposals to expand the Security Council, restrain the veto, or recalibrate representation are endlessly recycled. Yet decades of debate have produced little more than cosmetic change. The reasons are structural rather than accidental. Meaningful reform would require the consent of actors who benefit most from the existing system. Permanent members have no incentive to dilute their privileges. Authoritarian coalitions have no interest in empowering institutions that would constrain them. Even modest proposals, such as voluntary veto restraint in cases of mass atrocities, collapse under the weight of political reality. Reform discourse thus functions less as a strategy than as a ritual. It allows states to reaffirm their attachment to multilateralism while avoiding the conclusion that the system is unreformable in any meaningful sense. The persistence of this ritual sustains the illusion that the post-1945 order can be preserved through inertia. From Universal Legitimacy to Democratic Solidarity The emergence of alternatives to the United Nations reflects a deeper transformation in the foundations of legitimacy. For much of the postwar era, legitimacy was equated with universality. Today, universality no longer guarantees effectiveness, and effectiveness increasingly shapes legitimacy. This shift has profound implications for democracies. In a system where they are numerically outnumbered, democracies cannot rely on universal institutions to protect their interests or uphold their values. Solidarity among democracies is therefore no longer a moral aspiration or rhetorical flourish; it has become a strategic necessity. Yet such solidarity has proven fragile. Divisions among democratic states—particularly between Europe and the United States—have repeatedly undermined coordinated action. Authoritarian coalitions have exploited these divisions to entrench their influence and redefine norms in ways that shield repression and aggression. Multilateralism without solidarity has thus become an instrument of democratic self-restraint. Alternative frameworks, however imperfect, reflect an attempt to restore a minimum of coherence among states willing to defend the principles they invoke. They are not rejections of multilateralism, but acknowledgments that multilateralism without shared responsibility is empty. Israel and the Moral Bankruptcy of Universal Institutions No country illustrates the failures of the contemporary UN system more starkly than Israel. Israel is not merely another state embroiled in geopolitical controversy. It is a nation that emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust, from the most devastating moral collapse of the international system in modern history. The inability—or unwillingness—of the international community to protect Europe’s Jews in the 1930s and 1940s was among the very reasons the post-1945 order was created. Israel’s founding is therefore inseparable from the idea of universal justice. The memory of the Holocaust shaped the development of international criminal law, the prohibition of genocide, and the language of crimes against humanity. Jewish jurists, thinkers, and survivors were among the principal architects of these norms. Israel is not an outsider to universalism; it is one of its moral progenitors. Yet Israel has become the most systematic victim of the UN’s moral failures. No other country is subjected to comparable levels of scrutiny, condemnation, and institutional targeting. Legal and human-rights mechanisms are used not merely to criticize policies, but to question the legitimacy of Israel’s right to defend itself. This is not the result of impartial concern for justice; it is the product of majoritarian capture and cynical hijacking. In this inverted moral universe, a democratic state confronting terrorism is cast as a serial violator of international law, while regimes that massacre their own populations or export violence abroad are normalized. The UN’s fixation on Israel is not a marginal defect; it is the clearest diagnostic case of its moral bankruptcy. In any framework grounded in democratic solidarity and functional legitimacy, Israel’s role would be understood very differently. As a democracy forged in the aftermath of genocide, as a contributor to the concept of universal justice, and as a frontline state confronting asymmetric warfare, Israel embodies precisely the challenges that any credible system of collective security must confront. Its marginalization weakens not only Israel, but the moral coherence of the international system itself. Conclusion: Reclaiming Responsibility After Universal Illusions The debate triggered by the Board of Peace ultimately concerns responsibility. The United Nations was created to prevent the recurrence of the catastrophes that defined the first half of the twentieth century. Its failure to adapt to the political realities of the twenty-first century has produced a world in which aggression is normalized, moral language is weaponized, and justice is selectively applied. Acknowledging this failure does not require endorsing any particular alternative. It requires abandoning the comforting illusion that universality automatically confers legitimacy, regardless of institutional behaviour. Legitimacy divorced from responsibility is not legitimacy at all; it is ritual. Institutional competition is already underway. It is not an act of sabotage, but the consequence of prolonged dysfunction. Institutions that cannot act in the face of aggression or mass violence do not preserve peace; they discredit the principles they claim to defend. Reopening the debate on collective security is therefore not an act of recklessness, but of strategic honesty. For democracies, the stakes are existential. In a world where they are outnumbered but not outpowered, solidarity is indispensable. Without it, universal institutions will continue to be captured by coalitions hostile to liberal norms. With it, new forms of cooperation may yet emerge that can realign power with justice. Israel’s experience offers both a warning and a lesson. A state born from the collapse of the international system, and from humanity’s gravest moral failure, now stands as the clearest victim of that system’s corruption. Ignoring this reality does not strengthen universalism; it exposes its emptiness. The question is no longer whether the post-1945 order can be preserved intact. It cannot. The question is whether those who still believe in responsibility, restraint, and justice will shape what comes next—or whether they will continue to defer to institutions that no longer deserve unquestioned loyalty. Reclaiming collective security requires not nostalgia, but courage: the courage to admit failure, to demand accountability, and to align moral language with the willingness to act.