Say No to Trump’s Offer of a Seat at the Board of Peace

"Will you walk into my parlour?" said a spider to a fly;
"'Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy.
The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,
And I have many pretty things to shew when you are there."

The difference between the conduct of the spider in the poem and that of US President Donald Trump, who has constituted a Board of Peace as a body for tackling international problems that bypasses the United Nations and is holding out invitations to join this body, is that Trump wants to charge invitees a $1 billion fee, in case they want to stay on beyond an initial term writhing in the tangles of its life-sucking web.  

India has been extended an invitation. India should decline, and not necessarily all that politely. The Board of Peace is nothing more than a Trumpian delusion of grandeur, in which he seeks to bring within the ambit of US unilateralism not just the Western Hemisphere, the terrain of the Monroe Doctrine, but the entire world.

The Board of Peace was originally proposed as part of the Gaza peace plan, but Trump’s current formulation of the body, as part of which he has set out a charter, sees it as a global troubleshooting agency, going far beyond Gaza. In the Charter attached to the invitation to individual leaders to join the Board — a copy of which has been published by the Times of Israel — there is no mention of Gaza.

Rather, there is a sweeping dismissal of extant global institutions for conflict resolution, and a call to constitute the Board, whose chairman would, of course, be Donald J Trump, whose agenda would be decided by the chairman, whose members would be chosen and invited by the chairman, whose membership renewal or termination would be piloted by the chairman, which worthy would also nominate his successor.

The invitation is, in essence, an offer to national leaders to leave their day jobs to play courtier, if not jester, in His Peaceful Eminence’s latest palace circus.

Trump has destroyed the World Trade Organization. He has more or less wrecked NATO, with his threat to wrest Greenland by force from Denmark. He has threatened tariffs on countries that oppose his plans to annex Greenland. He has withdrawn from 60 global organisations and agreements, including the World Health Organisation and the Paris Accord on climate change. He now wants to formally designate the United Nations as a useless relic, whose useful functions would henceforth be transferred to the US-created, US-led, US-run Board of Peace.

Ever since winning freedom from colonial rule, India has resolutely pursued a policy of strategic autonomy, building the economic and diplomatic muscle to stay clear of domination by any power. Multilateralism is a key tool for staying non-aligned in a world riven by multiple conflicts and power games.

New Delhi has forged multiple multilateral forums such as BRICS and Basics, besides the Non-aligned Movement, to steer clear of subordination by any great power.

New Delhi stands to gain little by ditching all the relations with other countries and their leaders built up through and grounded in these forums, for the fickle favours of the most unpredictable, most self-centred, most disdainful of national leaders in the world, even if the nation he leads is the world’s most powerful.

The existing forum of global coordination and conflict resolution, the United Nations, is far from perfect, true. And its reform has proved difficult. But if a bridge across a torrent is rickety, rather than stable and aesthetically charming, it makes little sense to abandon the bridge in favour of swimming through the raging waters below. And as for the Board of Peace, one would have to take on the fury of the mercurial nature of one individual, in addition to other turbulence.

The UN is an unwieldy, cumbersome body, slow and far less impactful than it ought to be. However, the many things the numerous UN bodies are engaged with are important for collective human welfare. Donald Trump might consider the World Health Organisation useless. For the rest of the world, particularly, the less well-off bits of it, it serves a very useful purpose. Trump thinks global warming is a hoax. For the rest of the world, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is a key mechanism of essential remedial action. To dump the UN is to dump all such diverse forms of coordinated action by the interdependent world.

America is inviting the rest of the world to make America greater than its incumbent leader realizes it is, in a manner that subserves the leader’s short-term agenda. There is no reason for India to walk into this particular spidery parlour.