Trump’s board includes people accused of war crimes and unelected rulers accused of widespread human rights abuses.
What is President Trump’s “Peace Commission”?
Members of President Trump’s Peace Commission include Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Türkiye, and Belarus.
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump has long admired political heavyweights such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman. Now he has a new international “peace commission” that is open by invitation only.
In a speech on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 21, President Trump said of himself: “People usually say, “He’s a horrible dictator type of person; I’m a dictator.” “But sometimes you need a dictator.”
The next day, President Trump held a signing ceremony for new members of the Peace Commission in Davos. The peace committee was initially established to cement a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and later to help rebuild Gaza after two years of war.
President Putin, Mr. Orban and Mr. Bin Salman are all on the board or have announced their intention to join. The same goes for Türkiye’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan., Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Both have drawn condemnation from international human rights groups and some international law organizations.
“Once this board is fully formed, we will be able to do just about anything we want to do, and we will do it in coordination with the United Nations,” President Trump told the new signatories on January 22.
There is criticism, but it is not directed at board members.
The new signatories were referred to only by their titles, not their names, as they arrived in pairs to sit with Trump and sign the document.
Each of them received a handshake and a pat on the back from President Trump, and they posed for photos with smiles.
“Everyone in this room is a star, or you wouldn’t be here,” Trump told the assembled dignitaries. “You are the greatest people in the world, the most important people in the world, the most powerful people in the world.”
As part of his initial invitation to up to 50 countries, President Trump asked a number of democratically elected leaders to join him. Countries wishing to become permanent members must pay $1 billion to become charter members.
The White House did not respond to requests for comment on who officially joins the group or how much they are paid. State Department Spokesman Edgar Vázquez told USA TODAY that the administration “isICent. That includes democratic countries. ”
The bylaws say Trump will remain chairman of the board, potentially permanently, even after he leaves the White House in January 2029, when his constitutionally mandated second and final term ends.
The board has come under attack from Trump’s critics who say it serves his personal interests.
California Governor Gavin Newsom told the Davos audience, “I’m not naive about graft and corruption on a scale we’ve never seen in the history of the United States,” and “I’m not naive about the people who wrote billion-dollar checks to (Stephen) Witkoff and Jared Kushner for this new peace deal that we’re announcing today.”
Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Witkoff, Trump’s confidant and special envoy for the Middle East, are among Trump’s representatives to the organization.
But the group also drew headlines for who else President Trump invited to join.
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Invitations were also extended to U.S. adversaries such as Russia and China. President Trump has also sent them to repressed nations such as Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Egypt, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.
President Trump told CNN that President Putin had agreed to participate, adding: “There are some controversial figures on this.” The Russian president emerged using Russian assets frozen in the United States to pay the $1 billion cost of securing a permanent seat.
Who are the “controversial figures” on the board??
President Putin is one of the most controversial figures, given that he has waged a brutal war against much smaller neighboring Ukraine for almost four years.
Putin’s decades-long rule over Russia includes orchestrating dozens of murders of dissidents like Alexei Navalny, using the country as a personal piggy bank and kidnapping thousands of Ukrainian children.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said it was difficult to “cooperate with Russia in any council” and said: “The problem is that Russia is our enemy and Belarus is our ally.”
Lukashenko, a staunch ally of President Vladimir Putin, has kept Belarus under strict authoritarian control since 1994. To crush the opposition, Lukashenko has overseen human rights abuses against the country’s civilian population, some of which amount to crimes against humanity, the United Nations Independent Group of Experts on Human Rights in Belarus warned in a report last February.
The report found that detained men and women were “routinely subjected to torture and ill-treatment, including beatings, electric shocks, and threats of rape against the detainees as well as their partners.”
Mr. Orbán, praised by President Trump for his hard-line anti-immigrant policies, has been accused of systematically dismantling democratic institutions and committing widespread human rights abuses since taking power in 2010.
Bin Salman, known informally as MBS, is Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler and has been criticized for a similar authoritarian leadership style. He is accused by U.S. intelligence agencies of ordering the brutal murder and dismemberment of Saudi-American journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi embassy in Turkey.
When bin Salman visited the Oval Office last November, Trump described Khashoggi’s murder as “things happen.” President Trump told MBS during the meeting, “It’s an honor to be your friend,” and “I’m honored to have you here.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also reportedly taking part, but like Putin, he faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges. That may explain why they did not attend the annual economic summit in the Swiss resort.
Under President Erdoğan’s leadership since 2014, Turkey has “a large number of unscrupulous political prisoners, particularly Kurds and Turks who support the Gülen movement,” New Jersey Republican Rep. Chris Smith said at a human rights hearing last June.
What is a peace committee?
President Trump originally proposed establishing a peace commission as part of the U.S.-brokered Gaza ceasefire plan in September.
In November, the UN Security Council endorsed the plan, giving it international legitimacy and tasking it with overseeing the demilitarization and reconstruction of Gaza.
However, the organization’s charter states that it works to “ensure lasting peace in areas affected by or threatened by conflict,” raising questions about whether it could come into conflict with the United Nations.
Asked this week if he would like to see a peace commission replace the U.N., Trump said, “Maybe. The U.N. just hasn’t been very helpful,” before adding, “I think we should keep the U.N. because the possibilities are so great.”
Few people criticize it publicly. Annalena Barbok, president of the United Nations General Assembly, told Sky News that the United Nations is the only institution with the moral and legal capacity to unite all nations, large and small.
“If we question that… we’re going to go backwards and we’re going to have very, very, dark times,” Burbock said, adding that it’s up to individual states to decide what to do.
China, another repressive regime, acknowledged receiving the invitation. However, no decision has been made yet, and a spokesperson said, “We will continue to work resolutely to protect the international system centered on the United Nations.”
Who are the other members of the Peace Committee?
So far, few prominent U.S. allies have participated. One reason for this is President Trump’s overt “America First” approach.
French President Emmanuel Macron flatly rejected the proposal, Politico reported, with Macron’s office saying the council’s charter “goes beyond the Gaza framework” and “raises serious questions” about weakening the United Nations.
Norway and Sweden also saw declines. The Vatican announced on January 21 that Pope Leo, the first pope from the United States and a critic of some of President Trump’s policies, appreciated his invitation.
On January 22, just days after Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke at Davos and indirectly but forcefully criticized Trump for creating a “rift” with the United States over tariffs and Greenland issues, President Trump withdrew his invitation to Canada.
“The Peace Committee will withdraw at any time Canada’s invitation to participate in the most prestigious summit ever assembled,” Trump said in a social media post directed at Carney.
Other dictators on the board
Other prominent dictators also attended the deployment of President Trump’s peace commission, including Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev. He has been president since December 2016, consolidating his power in a country with no legal opposition and extending his presidential term.
Other countries also sent representatives to sign the agreement, including Mohammed bin Zayed, president of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of Abu Dhabi. His Gulf kingdom is known for its authoritarian state governance centered on security.
Egypt’s military-backed President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi was not present, but his representatives confirmed in a statement on January 21 that he agreed to participate and that his country would complete all legal and constitutional procedures necessary to formally join the Council. After leading a military coup in 2013, Sisi has been accused by Amnesty International of aggressively suppressing political opponents and detaining tens of thousands of political prisoners, a charge he denies, according to Human Rights Watch. President Trump said during his first term that Sisi was “doing a great job.”
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto also attended and posed for a smiling photo alongside President Trump. Subianto, who took office in October 2024, was previously banned from entering the United States for 20 years because of his human rights record from his time in the military. He was a special forces commander in a unit linked to torture and disappearances, but vehemently denied the allegations during the election campaign.
