Donald Trump’s dream of a grand signing ceremony in Davos for his “Board of Peace” — with the president at the helm and a $1 billion membership fee — is melting away as quickly as what little snow there is at the Swiss ski resort.
With widespread concern that the Trump administration is assembling a rival outfit to the United Nations, the list of fellow Group of Seven leaders who are politely declining the invitation is growing. Trump wasted no time in venting his anger at them one by one.
Emmanuel Macron was threatened with a 200% tariff on French champagne and teased for being a lame duck. Then Keir Starmer was mocked for the UK’s decision to hand the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean to Mauritius.
Trump, of course, has his heart set on controlling the biggest island of them all — Greenland — and his obsession with achieving this goal is, as Finland’s Alexander Stubb put it, sucking up all the oxygen at this week’s World Economic Forum.
Indeed, the geopolitical agenda appears to have been sacrificed at the shrine of Trump’s territorial ambitions — along with his desire to supplant the 80-year-old UN he’s long reviled with his own vehicle to resolve conflicts and shape international events.
If Ukraine and its allies had hoped to corner Trump on the Alpine slopes and pin him down on security guarantees to deter further Russian aggression, they can probably forget it.
While strongmen like Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are surely delighted to have been invited to the Board of Peace, many leaders are in a bind on how to respond.
After all, Trump doesn’t respond well to rejection. Early today, he posted a screenshot of a text from Macron for all to see.
Minutes later, he posted an AI image of himself raising the stars and stripes over Greenland. — Flavia Krause-Jackson