China has not given an official response to the invitation to join President Trump’s “Board of Peace.” Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun only acknowledged on Tuesday that an invitation has been received. He was firm today, however, that any idea of such a board replacing the United Nations is rejected out of hand, when asked about Trump’s mooting of this possibility. “No matter how the international landscape may evolve, China will stay firmly committed to safeguarding the international system with the United Nations at its core, the international order based on international law, and the basic norms governing international relations based on the purposes and principles of the UN Charter,” he replied.
China’s Global Times published a scathing commentary today on the proposed board authored by Li Zixin, a scholar from the China Institute of International Studies, under the headline “‘Board of Peace’ Resembles a Club that Turns the World into the ‘Law of the Jungle’.” Scholar Li’s excoriation of the proposed board is no mere isolated opinion. His article was also published by the English-language news website of the People’s Liberation Army.
“This act of ‘privatizing’ international affairs and ‘commodifying’ regional peace not only disregards the will of the Palestinian people but also poses a huge challenge to the existing international governance system and norms of conduct,” Li wrote. It is “a typical product of ‘transactional diplomacy’,” creating an institution “filled with US politicians and their cronies, but conspicuously absent is the most critical stakeholder: the Palestinians.”
Even more shocking is the offer to sell “permanent seats” on the board for a billion dollars, a move which “reduces the solemn cause of international peace to a game of money,” he added. No true peace can come from treating Gaza’s future as “a commodity to be bought.”
He cites three ways in which the proposed charter may “poison the political landscape of the Middle East” as a whole. First, that it does not prioritize resolving Gaza’s immediate humanitarian crisis. Second, by excluding the Palestinians, it “replaces sovereign governance with external intervention,” undermining the needed two-state solution and further dividing the Gaza Strip from the West Bank.
Third, the ongoing Gaza crisis itself is already “a brutal illustration of … `might makes right’.” The board would deliver another blow to the international governance system by allowing that “major powers can arbitrarily establish their own systems outside the international order… This `club governance’ model reduces international law to a private contract among major powers, forcing the world back into the law of the jungle.”
A true resolution requires returning to an “international order of fairness and justice…. `Palestinians governing Palestine,’” Li insists. “The international community should be wary of the dangerous tendency to place geopolitical games above international law and ensure that the reconstruction of Gaza is the reconstruction of justice, not an expansion of hegemony.”
