ROGER KIMBALL: Why shouldn’t the Board of Peace replace the UN? It’s not hard to be more effective than the UN, but one has to start somewhere.
The latest media palpitation about Donald Trump concerns his just-announced “Board of Peace.” Unveiled as an initiative to manage the introduction of tranquillity and physical reconstruction of that pile of rubble formerly known as Gaza, the Board of Peace seems to be filling all the empty space in the parking lot reserved for international relations. Think Big! The BoP now seems to take as its mandate international conflict more generally. Reporting on the fledgling enterprise, a story on ABC News mournfully told the world that “Critics and government leaders are decrying the board, saying it undermines the United Nations.”
Is that a promise? And more to the point, how would anyone be able to tell whether that monstrous, superannuated magnet for spies and third-world grifters had been “undermined?” Inquiring minds want to know.
I will come back to Trump’s latest action idea in a moment. First, I have something to propose for the United Nations. Many countries have the sads about the United States. Their leaders think Trump is a bully. They hate it that he plucked the dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife from their bedroom in Caracas and flew them, free and for nothing, to New York. They are weepy about his talk of appropriating Greenland and making its 56,000 residents rich. All the Danes had to offer was forced sterilization for the ladies, but we’re not supposed to talk about that.
But back to the UN. Why should New York get all the glory? I know the assorted despots like to come to Manhattan in their cloud of all-expense-paid diplomatic immunity to rail against the evils of Israel and the United States. But shouldn’t we take a page from that great Kenyan Barack Hussein Obama and seek to spread the wealth around?
Here’s my proposal. Untether the UN from the US. Beginning next year, let’s locate that august (in its own eye) body in various spots around the world for a term of, say, three years. Since everyone is so keen on Somalia at the moment, let’s move the UN to Mogadishu for three years beginning in January 2027. Then it might go to Ukraine for three years. Then to Gaza, where its great moral authority might help restore the tissues of that unfortunate stretch of beach-front property.
Meanwhile, the hideous Corbusier structure in New York can either be demolished outright or taken apart piecemeal and shipped to Brussels, where it can be reassembled and open as a museum commemorating the unique combination of corruption and hectoring utopian blather that the UN has always specialized in. As for its site on the East River, that’s prime real estate. I suggest transforming it into some useful for once, a golf course, for example, or putting green.
If only we knew someone with Manhattan real estate development experience who could handle the repurposing.