President Donald Trump likes a good party, and his Gaza “Board of Peace” is turning into one. While he has staffed the executive board with trusted officials, family members, and business associates, he has also sent out invitations to officials from regional states and international bodies to serve as representatives.
Confirmed members include Sigrid Kaan, a longtime United Nations bureaucrat who served as Dutch deputy prime minister and married a former Palestinian Authority minister. Hakan Fidan, Turkey’s foreign minister, who, in his previous role as intelligence chief, helped build Turkey’s ties to Hamas. Qatari representative Hassan Al Thawadi is best known for his role in the alleged bribery scandal surrounding Qatar’s successful 2022 FIFA World Cup bid. Inclusion of Maj.-Gen. Hassan Mahmoud Rashad, head of Egypt’s General Intelligence Service, makes more sense, since any Hamas resurgence would spark immediate security consequences. Saudi Arabia has also now joined alongside representatives from several other countries, ranging from Armenia to Mongolia. Trump has, in addition, sent invitations out to both Russia and China, although both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping remain uncommitted.
While Trump likes the optics of more than two dozen world leaders and representatives joining his initiative, his desire for such a photo-op likely leads his plan to be dead on arrival.
Trump should instead have taken a lesson from President Ronald Reagan. The gold standard Middle Eastern peace agreement was the 1978 Camp David Accords that President Jimmy Carter helped shepherd. It actually won Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin the Nobel Peace Prize that Trump so craves. It established the principle of land-for-peace and called for Israel to evacuate the Sinai Peninsula and for Egypt to demilitarize the Sinai.
To oversee the agreement in the Sinai, Reagan chose not to establish a U.N. peacekeeping force for a simple reason: to include the Soviet Union and Communist China would be to open the door to spoilers whose goal would be less to consolidate peace and more to undermine it in order to embarrass the United States and undermine regional integration under a Western umbrella. Reagan cultivated the resulting Multinational Force of Observers to exclude the U.N. and U.S. adversaries. To date, and not by coincidence, the Multinational Force of Observers remains perhaps the world’s most successful peace monitoring and keeping organization, with a record that puts most U.N. peacekeeping operations and every U.N. mission to the Middle East to shame.
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Reagan understood that imagery of handshakes cannot trump the substance of peace.
By inviting the U.N. to have a seat at the table, Trump appears determined to repeat their mistakes rather than learn from their lessons. By including Turkey, Pakistan, and Qatar — after Turkey traded cooperation for cash inside NATO, Pakistan harbored Bin Laden, and Qatar funds almost anyone Islamist who seeks Israel’s eradication and America’s subversion — is negligent. To speak about countering China in the 2025 National Security Strategy and 2026 National Defense Strategy, and then offer it a potential spoiler role in the heart of the Middle East and an entry point into the Eastern Mediterranean, is self-defeating. To believe that Russia wants him to succeed is naïve.
The Gaza Board of Peace will not oversee a new Gaza; it will keep Hamas on life support, biding its time to reemerge like the Taliban, the Islamic State, and Hezbollah.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.