The Middle East has entered a phase where events no longer necessarily resolve into outcomes. They pause, harden, and then reappear elsewhere. Ceasefires freeze wars without settling them. New councils are announced before their purpose is fully explored or revealed. Violence recedes in one arena and resurfaces in another. What looks like diplomacy is often just deferral or distraction.

Europe remained vocally engaged on Gaza, conspicuously restrained on Iran, strategically vague on Syria, and angrily petulant on Greenland

Gaza is the clearest illustration. The ceasefire ended active fighting while leaving the logic of the war intact. Today, reconstruction has been elevated to first principle, with demilitarisation apparently postponed, treated as a future problem rather than a present condition. International frameworks are multiplying, yet the central issue of force remains untouched. Israel’s operational freedom has now been narrowed by president Donald Trump’s latest bulldozing of his plan into the region and the world, despite the reality on the ground. Hamas’s strategic position, though battered, has been left structurally unresolved. Thus the war ended administratively, but not politically.

Regardless of all this, we now have the emerging reality of Trump’s ‘Peace Council’, followed by the ‘Board of Peace’, both taking shape as declarations of intent rather than instruments of genuine resolution. The draft charter, issued this week, was revealing less for what it included than for what it omitted. Gaza was absent. Palestinians were absent. Israel was absent. What remained were institutional mechanics: membership rules, voting procedures, permanence on the council available for purchase at $1 billion (£740 million). It also enshrines authority concentrated in a chairman empowered to interpret the document, dissolve the organisation, and appoint a successor. Who is the chairman? Trump himself.

It is less a reconstruction policy than an institutional assertion. Trump has never hidden his contempt for the existing international architecture, which today he seems happy to ride roughshod over. His hostility to the United Nations predates his presidency and continued through withdrawals from UN-affiliated bodies once in office. The Board of Peace does not reverse that instinct, it redirects it. Of course, he may not be wrong about the UN. Yet instead........

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