Trump’s Board of Peace and the price of power politics
Trump is full of surprises; he is both leader and entertainer. Nearly nine hours into a long flight-a journey that had to U-turn due to technical issues before embarking on a new flight-Trump came straight to the Davos stage and spoke for nearly two hours without a sip of water. What he spoke about in Davos is another issue, but the way he stands and talks is unique in this 79-year-old man who is defining the world for the worse. Now Trump has come up with the Board of Peace, a ticket to membership that demands a one-billion-dollar entrance fee for permanent participation. It works-for how long nobody knows — but as long as Trump is there, it might. Look at how many Muslim-majority and wealthy countries have accepted: Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates are ready to be on board. Around 25-30 countries reportedly have already expressed their willingness to join.
The most interesting question, and one rarely asked by those who speak about Donald J Trump, is how much he has earned during the first year of his second term. Liberal Democrats, authoritarian socialists, and non-aligned misled-path walkers hail and hate him, but few look at the financial outcome of his politics. His wealth has increased by about three billion dollars, largely due to the crypto economy, which is why he pardoned the founder of Binance, the China-born Changpeng Zhao. ‘To be rich like hell’ is what Trump wanted. To fault-line liberal democracy, Trump is the perfect example. What Trump is doing-dismantling the old façade of liberal democracy at the very moment it can no longer survive — is, in a way, a greater contribution to the West. But I still respect the West, because the West still has a handful of genuine scholars who dare to look in the mirror and accept the havoc their leaders have created in the name of humanity.
Democracy in the Arab world was dismantled by the West. You may be surprised, but that is a fact. Elizabeth Thompson of American University, in her book How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs, meticulously details how democracy was stolen from the Arabs. ‘No ruler, no matter how exalted, stood above the will of the nation,’ she quotes Arab constitutional writing, adding that ‘the people are the source of all authority.’
These are not the words of European revolutionaries, nor of post-war liberal philosophers; they were spoken, written, and enacted in Syria in 1919-1920 by Arab parliamentarians, Islamic reformers, and constitutionalists who believed democracy to be a universal right, not a Western possession. Members of the Syrian Arab Congress in Damascus-the elected assembly that drafted a democratic constitution declaring popular sovereignty-were dissolved by French colonial forces. That was the past; now, with the Board of Peace, the old remnants return in a new form.
Trump got one thing very clear, among many others: Western liberal ideology is nothing but sophisticated doublespeak dressed in various forms. They go to West Asia, which they named the Middle East, and bomb Arabs; then they go to Myanmar and other places to protect Muslims from Buddhists. They go to Africa to ‘contribute’ to livelihoods, while generations of people were ripped from their homeland, taken as slaves, and sold.
How can Gramsci, whose 135th birth anniversary falls this week on January, 22, help us escape the present socio-political quagmire? Gramsci was writing in prison under Mussolini’s fascist regime. He produced a body of work that is neither a manifesto nor a programme, but a theory of power that understands domination not only as coercion but as culture, civil society, and the way people perceive their world. In the Prison Notebooks, he wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old world is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid phenomena appear.” This is not a metaphor. Gramsci was identifying the structural limbo that occurs when foundational certainties collapse but no viable alternative has yet emerged.
The relevance of this insight today cannot be overstated. We are living through overlapping crises: environmental collapse, fragmentation of political consensus, erosion of trust in institutions, the acceleration of automation and algorithmic governance that replaces judgement with calculation, and the rise of leaders who treat geopolitics as purely transactional. Slavoj Žižek, in his column last year, reminded us that the crisis is not temporary. The assumption that history’s forward momentum will automatically yield a better future is a dangerous delusion. Instead, the present is a battlefield where what we thought would be the new may itself contain the seeds of degeneration. Trump’s Board of Peace, with its one-billion-dollar gatekeeping model, embodies this condition: it claims to address global violence yet operates on transactional logic, prioritising wealth over justice and promising reconstruction without clear mechanisms of accountability or inclusion beyond those with money.
Gramsci’s critique helps us see this for what it is: not a corrective to global disorder, but a re-enactment of elite domination under a new mechanism. Gramsci did not believe domination could be maintained by force alone; he argued that in advanced societies power rests on gaining ‘the consent and the active participation of the great masses’, and that domination is sustained by ‘the intellectual and moral leadership’ that turns the ruling class’s values into common sense. It is not coercion alone that sustains capitalism, but ideological consensus embedded in everyday institutions-family, education, and media-that make the existing order appear normal and inevitable. Trump’s Board of Peace plays directly into this mode: styled as a peace-building institution, it gains legitimacy through performance and symbolic endorsement by diverse member states, while the deeper structures of inequality and global power imbalance remain untouched.
Worse, the Board’s structure, with contributions determining permanence, mimics the logic of a marketplace for geopolitical influence. It turns peace into a commodity-something to be purchased rather than fought for through sustained collective action addressing the root causes of conflict. But this is exactly what today’s democracies are doing behind the scenes while preaching a rules-based order on the stage. In Gramsci’s terms, this is trasformismo-the absorption of dissent into frameworks that neutralise radical content and preserve the status quo under new branding.
If we are to extract a path out of this impasse, we must recognise that the current quagmire is more than political theatre or the result of a flawed leader. It arises from a deeper collapse of hegemonic frameworks that once allowed societies to function with coherence. The old liberal order, with its faith in institutions and incremental reform, has lost its capacity to command loyalty. The new order struggling to be born has not yet articulated a compelling vision that unifies disparate struggles-ecological, economic, racial, and cultural-into a coherent project of emancipation rather than fragmentation.
To confront Trump’s phenomenon as a portal — as Žižek suggests, a threshold through which history may either proceed to annihilation or re-emerge in a radically different form-is to grasp Gramsci’s insistence that politics is a struggle for meaning and direction, not merely for offices or policies. A Gramscian approach would not waste energy on denunciation alone; it would engage in building counter-hegemony-alternative institutions, discourses, and practices that lay the groundwork for new popular consent. It would link ecological justice to economic democracy, affirm the agency of ordinary people rather than treating them as passive subjects, and reject the commodification of peace. Gramsci’s maxim, ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’, captures this attitude precisely: clear-eyed recognition of how deep and persistent the crisis is, coupled with an unflinching commitment to action.
In an age where AI and algorithmic governance threaten to redefine humanity’s relationship to decision-making, where legitimacy is increasingly measured by currency flows rather than human welfare, Gramsci offers not a simple answer but a framework to understand why the old certainties have crumbled and how the new might still be forged through collective effort. The problem is not the lack of theory or insight; it is the absence of a political subject capable of turning analysis into a sustained force for transformation. Without a new form of organised will, the interregnum will continue, and the world will remain trapped between the decay of the old and the absence of the new.
The writer is a columnist based in Colombo; views are personal
