Allegations of Donald Trump’s kompromat by Russian spies at sex parties in Moscow and St Petersburg may – or may not – be salacious apocrypha, but there is no doubt the international kidnapper and blackmailer is partial to a golden shower.
He euphemistically calls his latest one the Board of Peace (BOP) and is offering sovereign states permanent membership for a joining fee of “more than $1 billion United States dollars in cash”.
He intends stacking it with renowned peaceniks Vladimir Putin and Binyamin Netanyahu – both wanted for war crimes – and is filling the executive board with his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Washington’s nodding dogs Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, and Tony Blair, America’s co-invader of Iraq in 2003. What these likely lads all have in common is money. The editorial board of The New York Times has calculated, conservatively, that Trump, the self-appointed chairman, has made $1.408 billion (€1.2 billion) in the past year by exploiting his presidency of the US.
This is the shower he is convening to pee all over the law-bound world order. On Tuesday, he was asked if BOP would replace the UN. “It might,” he replied. What he had originally presented as an oversight body for the reconstruction of Gaza has morphed into a vanity project for Trump to exert global sway, even after his presidency expires.
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As he was talking, Israel began demolishing the headquarters of the UN Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa) in Jerusalem while Russia attacked Ukraine with a squadron of drone bombers. Another baby died of hypothermia in pulverised Gaza.
Trump has as much interest in making peace as he has in making apple pie. Greed and ego are what get him out of bed in the late morning. He admitted as much when he texted Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, on Monday that he feels no obligation “to think purely of peace” after failing to snaffle the Nobel Prize.
Denial of that award appears to have dampened his enthusiasm for peace in Ukraine, which he had promised to deliver within 24 hours of his inauguration last year. He seldom mentions the country now unless asked about it. He seems unbothered, too, in his zeal to build hotels and condos in Gaza, that at least 100 children have been killed since the so-called ceasefire began in October; roughly one child each day.
Trump has been preoccupied with running an extortion racket against Europe. Ordinary criminals have the shame, at least, to don a mask when they threaten: give me what you’ve got or I’ll burn you out. This mugger prefers to issue his menaces through worldwide media forums.
Yet he is right about two things. One, there is a gap in the world’s peacekeeping market. Two, the rule book needs to be torn up because it has rendered the UN as useful as a bikini in a blizzard. The organisation’s impotence reached a new low on November 17th when it endorsed the BOP, his imperialist reverse-takeover vehicle.
While current commentary concentrates on the existential threats Trump’s belligerence poses for Nato and the European Union, his biggest threat to humanity is aimed squarely at the UN. It is a soft target, neutered by the stranglehold on the Security Council by the five permanent members’ veto. Common wisdom has it that Russia is the one paralysing the UN, but the United States is a frequent user of the veto. It has repeatedly blocked decisions it deemed detrimental to Israel, thus allowing mass killings of Palestinian civilians enabled by US weapons.
The UN’s ideals of peace, justice and humanitarianism ought to be protected, but its rules militate against them. The Irish Government’s plan to bin the requirement for a UN mandate before deploying peacekeeping troops is a tacit acknowledgment that the organisation is dysfunctional to the point of irrelevance. Everyone accepts it is impossible to abolish the Security Council vetoes without the unanimous consent of the big five. And turkeys who are cock-o’-the-walk don’t vote for Christmas.
Nor can they be expelled from the UN, even when they are flagrantly disengaging from it. Not even when a country like the US withdraws its participation and funding, as it has done on Trump’s orders, from more than 30 of its bodies, including the Human Rights Council, Unrwa, UN Women and the Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Other state leaders have been cowering so long on their obsequious knees that they failed to anticipate his master plan to carve the world into his and his fellow colonists’ dominions, under the governance of his BOP. Its draft charter states that, unless he voluntarily resigns as its chairman, he may only be replaced in the event of “incapacity”. Who will be the judge of that? His doctors, who consistently give the visibly declining 79-year-old fast food junkie a clean bill of health?
Trump’s golden shower has propelled the rest of the world to a defining moment. The time has come to throw out the old rule book. The Gordian knot must be cut. If the UN cannot be fixed, it should be dissolved, as happened to the League of Nations, and replaced by a more nimble, egalitarian and effective global organisation immune to nobbling by superpowers.
Canada’s admirable prime minister Mark Carney has urged “middle powers” to act together because, he warned, the old order is not coming back, but any UN replacement must be predicated on an equal say for all member countries. History will record the root of the UN’s demise in its failure to uphold article two of its charter promising “sovereign equality” for all its members.
Replacing the UN cannot be done overnight. It is a gargantuan organisation with numerous functioning divisions devoted to human rights and aid. Those agencies should be preserved and transferred to the new organisation, as League of Nations’ agencies were inherited by the UN after the second World War.
That work needs to start now. Ireland could be its instigator by bringing the world’s neutral states together to lay the foundation stones of a fairer world order. The alternative is world rule by a golden shower of land-grabbers.
