Is Donald Trump’s 'Board of Peace' a corporate replacement for the United Nations?, asks Neil Oliver

It was reported on the 24th of January that Ukraine peace talks in Abu Dhabi were, in President Zelensky’s opinion, constructive.

Represented there, in that place, were Ukraine, Russia, and the United States of America for what they call trilateral peace talks. On his X account, Zelensky wrote: “All sides agreed to report back in their capitals on each aspect of the negotiations and to coordinate further steps with their leaders. A lot was discussed, and it is important that the conversations were constructive, provided there is readiness to move forward, and Ukraine is ready. Further meetings will take place potentially as early as next week.” End quote.

Okay. So far, so calm and reasonable. But let’s ask which individuals were there.

Well, we are told that the talks brought together senior military and intelligence officials. Ukraine’s delegation included Defence Minister Rustam Umerov and military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov. Russia was represented by members of its armed forces and military intelligence, and the US delegation included President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Wyckoff, Jared Kushner, and senior White House advisers.

So, Steve Wyckoff and Jared Kushner.

Who is Steve Wyckoff? What could be more calm and reasonable than to look up his Wikipedia page for a start? We are certainly invited to see Wikipedia—as Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand might have called it, “a source of truth.”

So here is Wikipedia on Steve Wyckoff:

“Stephen Charles Wyckoff, born March 15, 1957, is an American real estate developer, investor, and founder of the Wyckoff Group. Since 2025, Wyckoff has served as the United States Special Envoy to the Middle East and a special envoy for peace missions. He has also acted as a de facto envoy to Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

Ah. Okay. Real estate developer and special envoy to the Middle East. De facto envoy to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Okay, now Jared Kushner, from the same source.

“Jared Kushner, born January 10, 1981, is an American businessman and investor. He is the son-in-law of the President of the United States, Donald Trump, through his marriage to Ivanka Trump, and served as a senior adviser in his father-in-law’s first administration from 2017 to 2021. He was also director of the Office of American Innovation.”

The same page says Jared met Ivanka Trump around 2005, and the couple married in 2009. He also became involved in the newspaper industry after purchasing the New York Observer in 2006.

He was registered as a Democrat and donated to Democratic politicians for much of his life, but registered as an independent in 2009 and eventually as a Republican in 2018. He played a significant role in the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign, and was at one point seen as its de facto campaign manager.

For much of his career, Kushner worked as a real estate investor in New York City, especially through the family business, Kushner Companies. He took over the company after his father, Charles Kushner, was convicted of 18 criminal charges, including illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering, in 2005—although Charles was pardoned by Trump in 2020.

Interesting.

Let’s click on Charles Kushner’s blue link on Wikipedia.

We read: “On June 30, 2004, Kushner was fined $508,000 by the Federal Election Commission for contributing to Democratic political campaigns in the names of his partnerships when he lacked authorisation to do so. In 2005, following an investigation by United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey, Chris Christie negotiated a plea agreement with him, under which Kushner pleaded guilty to 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering.”

The witness-tampering charge arose from Kushner’s retaliation against William Schulder, his sister Esther’s husband, who was cooperating with federal investigators against Kushner. Kushner hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, arranging to record a sexual encounter between the two and send the tape to his sister.

He was sentenced to two years in prison and served 14 months at Federal Prison Camp Montgomery in Alabama before being sent to a halfway house in Newark, New Jersey, to complete his sentence. He was released from prison on August 25, 2006.

As a convicted felon, Charles Kushner was also disbarred and prohibited from practising law in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. Republican Chris Christie, who chaired Trump’s first transition team, said Kushner committed, quote, “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes I prosecuted.”

On December 20, 2020, President Trump issued a full and unconditional pardon to Kushner, his daughter’s father-in-law, citing his record of reform and charity. Charles Kushner has subsequently been made by Trump US Ambassador to France.

So all of this is out there on the familiar, freely sanctioned pages of the internet. Anyone asking the question “Who are these people?” would find those references in seconds.

A reasonable person might say that, having scrutinised—even superficially and from a single source—those two men, they should look into the lives of everyone else involved at the moment. I may do that. But in the first instance, I freely admit I’m interested in looking at what you might call the home team, being the Americans—America being, we are told, our most important ally and friend.

When it comes to Charles Kushner, a reasonable person might say he has done his time and that people can change. As nominally Christian nations, we are obliged to forgive. I’m all for forgiveness, but I certainly don’t think forgiveness must necessarily lead to promotion to high office.

We are often told to forgive and forget. But for me, the forgetting part is lunacy. Forgive by all means—but always remember. It is by remembering that we are less likely to be taken by surprise or let down by an individual in the future. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me—and all that.

At Davos last week, Jared Kushner gave a presentation about his plans for a “new Gaza,” the new Gaza to replace the old Gaza that’s been pounded into rubble and is peppered liberally with the blood and bones of the dead. This is Project Sunrise.

I couldn’t help noticing that the slide Kushner showed of the proposed new Gaza suggested to me the shape of a handgun aimed towards the right. But that’s just me—a flippant comment.

Here are a few moments of Jared’s presentation, available on YouTube:

[Transcript excerpt continues unchanged.]

“Catastrophic success,” he says. It’s an interesting choice of words. Catastrophic is from the Greek katastrophē and means to overturn, turn down, trample on, to come to an end.

I’m appalled by the speed at which luxury and high tech are being proposed to smother the scene of mass slaughter. It seems to me that while the smell of the burning flesh of their loved ones is still in their nostrils, the survivors are being invited to contemplate living in what I would call ghettos, set aside for them in the shadow of luxury hotels and places of billionaire business.

Is it just me, or does this remind anyone else who has seen the films of the ethos of The Hunger Games?

New Rafah. New Gaza.

The blunt statement that corporations are already clearing the rubble to make way for the new—let’s remember that the rubble contains the shallow graves of unknown numbers of the oh-so-recently dead. The people of Gaza, as Jared Kushner describes them, are being invited to live on top of that. That horrifies me. But that’s just me.

It’s all being done under the guise and auspices of what President Donald Trump is calling the Board of Peace. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair—who was behind the lies about weapons of mass destruction and the so-called war on terror that left over a million dead in Iraq and thereabouts—is among the board’s members.

Here are the countries that have accepted places on the Board of Peace so far: Argentina, Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Bulgaria, Egypt, Hungary, Israel, Indonesia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Morocco, Mongolia, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.

What is this Board of Peace? Is it, I ask, the new Trump-inspired replacement for what we learned to call the United Nations?

Let’s remember: the United Nations succeeded something else, which was the League of Nations, formed after World War One—a body the United States shunned on account of popular US desire at that time to keep out of what were called foreign entanglements.

The League of Nations was preceded by something called the League to Enforce Peace. Everyone’s forgotten that one—to enforce peace. Even US President Woodrow Wilson, a puppet president I would say, whose strings were pulled at all times by Edward Mandell House—called Colonel House, though he never held such a rank—even Wilson balked at such a name, and so it was renamed the League of Nations.

The Board of Peace is openly about giving investors the power to govern places if they pay up front to build them. It’s about putting the boards of transnational companies, corporations, hedge funds, and the like in charge of territories without the hindrance of anything like democracy.

In 16th-century South America, the Spanish conquerors set in place a system called encomienda, whereby the King of Spain entitled himself to make aristocrats little kings of Spanish territories there. The little king was given the right to demand the labour of the people living there, putting them in circumstances little better than slavery.

The thinking of the Board of Peace sounds similar to encomienda to me. You pay for it. You own it. You can do what you like with it.

So who are these people?

We are looking at rich people buying the power to govern. We are looking at people we have no say over, and far less any power to be rid of.

At Davos, Trump and co. insisted globalism had failed, that globalism was over. Maybe. But globalism has already transferred all the money to the billionaires now preaching about how outsourcing jobs made Americans and Europeans poor. That has happened. That has been achieved.

Europe has been deindustrialised. The power has been taken away from Europe in every meaningful sense. And all the while, the rich simply got richer.

So where are we?

We have been shown—and are being shown—that the rules-based order, international law, was a fiction, and that the powerful will simply take what they want from whomever they want, just as they always have.

It’s happening right in front of us. It’s happening right under our noses, as far as I’m concerned.

This is the reality of the one-world government. They still keep telling us it is only a conspiracy theory.