This post is part of a symposium on international law under the second Trump administration. Read the rest of the posts here.
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“I think that peace is not that different than business,” Jared Kushner—the founder of the Miami based investment firm Affinity Partners and President Trump’s son-in-law—explained onstage at the FII Institute summit in Miami on March 26th. “Right now we’re working on Iran, but as we do that the facts continue to change, and you just constantly have to be marking your thinking to market every day and then look for the opportunities to … mitigate the bad scenarios and … try to find the good scenarios.”
Kushner, who neither holds any formal position in government nor possesses any particularly relevant geopolitical knowledge or experience, has been directly involved in high stakes diplomacy on behalf of the US government on matters ranging from Gaza to the Russia-Ukraine war to Iran. He has formed a working partnership with real estate developer and senior Trump advisor Steve Witkoff, and the two self-identified “deal guys” have played the role traditionally reserved for the Secretary of State by shuttling around the world, meeting with foreign counterparts and adversaries, and shaping US foreign policy. So far, their efforts at “finding the good scenarios” have been less than fruitful: Gaza remains locked in bloody destitution, the Russia-Ukraine war rages on, and we’re now in the third month of a war of choice against Iran that has engulfed the entire Middle East and brought the global economy to the brink of crisis.
This privatization of statecraft has been formalized through a new international organization, almost sardonically named the “Board of Peace.” Though initially billed as an ad-hoc arrangement to negotiate and finance the post-war reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, it is, per its own charter, a much broader effort to transform the very nature of international diplomacy into something that resembles a protection racket. The board—announced at Davos with a gilded version of the UN logo that essentially only depicts North America—is chaired for life by Donald Trump, who is empowered to make unilateral decisions on membership. The buy-in for a permanent seat is $1 billion.
Most world leaders seem to recognize that the Board serves primarily as a venue through which to purchase influence over Trump, most directly within his preferred sector of real estate and through his preferred intermediaries of Kushner and Witkoff. At the Board’s inaugural meeting, Witkoff announced a deal brokered between the governments of Pakistan and the United States to redevelop a hotel in lower Manhattan. Likewise, Putin’s envoy Kirill Dmitriev has sought to influence the President’s policy on Russia by making private commercial deals in Russia with Trump’s associates, and Gulf states have curried favor with the administration in part by investing heavily in Kushner’s private equity firm. If these tithes are the new price of access, the Trump administration has laid bare the cost of refusal: it has levied (and withdrawn) steep tariffs against much of the world, and either threatened or deployed military force against Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and Greenland.
This overt gangster-fication marks the culmination of a dangerous transformation in the nature of US hegemony on the global stage. The international compact inaugurated in 1945 was premised on a mutuality of interests between the United States as a national power and the interstate system as a whole: the United States would, from its post-war position of strength, use its military supremacy to police threats to international security and its financial centrality to maintain economic stability. This arrangement was consummated through international institutions including the United Nations, the IMF, and NATO, through which the Americans have been able to direct global affairs with at least the veneer of consent from the community of nations, justified broadly within the framework of liberal internationalism. But since the end of the Cold War and through the so-called Global War on Terror, US power has increasingly taken the form of a solution in search of a problem, ultimately coming to generate the very instability it purports to defend against. To the “deal guys” now in charge of American foreign policy, multilateral institutions like the UN and NATO, which for decades have served as venues for US imperial stewardship, are more of a hindrance on private accumulation than a source of authority for the state. Under the Trump administration, the US is now refusing to pay the vast majority of its dues on the former and threatening to withdraw from the latter.
These developments are not the death knell of international law nor its replacement by force. International law has never transcended the exercise of power between states; it has always operated immanently to stabilize and universalize the interests of dominant states into the general conditions through which their power is reproduced. Law was thus central to the post-’45 settlement not because it restrained US empire, but because it provided a durable form capable of extracting consent, managing subordinate allies, containing potential rivals, and wedding the reproduction of global capitalism to the maintenance of international peace. What its erosion signals is less the abandonment of or retreat from law than a growing inability of the post-war compact to mediate between the immediate extractive impulses of US elites and the systemic conditions necessary for that reproduction.
This is not to say that the US and its ruling class have suddenly discovered the benefits of unilateralism or outright corruption. The turn away from hegemony has proceeded, in fits and starts, since at least as far back as the post-9/11 period. As Giovanni Arrighi presciently argued in his two-part essay “Hegemony Unravelling” in 2005, the war in Iraq exposed the real crisis of American power—an overreliance on military primacy to counterbalance declining economic-organizational capacity becomes a self-defeating strategy over time as adventurism abroad produces fewer and fewer strategic gains while gradually eroding the structures of international consent and stability demanded by international markets. This represents not the abandonment of law so much as the fracturing of a legal order based on universal principles of nonaggression, free trade, and human rights into particularist legal regimes of economic sanctions, private defense contracting, and trade blocs. Trump’s Board of Peace and over transactionalism is continuous with this broader retreat from multilateralism into coercive extraction. The legal form remains, though it has been reduced to an instrument of shakedown.
To be sure, US hegemony has long contained a significant transactional component: the liberal international order ensured the world would be made safe first and foremost for the prosperity of global capitalism, which under US stewardship promised development to non-Western states, so long as they complied with the interests of multinational corporations and kept a lid on counter-hegemonic political movements. That aspect of US hegemony has always been most pronounced in the Middle East, where the oil-producing states of the Gulf have functioned as a core engine of American power. The sale of oil—the world’s most important commodity—is denominated in dollars, generating surpluses for the Gulf monarchies that are then reinvested in the United States in exchange for military hardware within broader security arrangements. The United States gets its military bases and power projection; the Gulf states, oil majors, and arms producers get rich; the Gulf rulers keep control of their fiefdoms; and the circuits of oil, capital, and arms flow according to the needs of the private sector.
Yet this arrangement, like that underlying the US-led international order more broadly, has been fraying for decades. The oil shocks of the 1970s briefly empowered producers, but it also set in motion a restructuring of global capitalism in which financialization, debt, and capital mobility loosened the tight coupling between Gulf surpluses and American industrial and military expansion. Over time, the United States became less dependent on imported oil, while the Gulf monarchies diversified their investments beyond US Treasuries and arms purchases, seeking autonomy through sovereign wealth funds and new trade partnerships. More recently, the rise of China as a primary trading partner for the region has further strained the old bargain. What once functioned as a relatively stable petrodollar system has become more diffuse, more contested, and less capable of anchoring a coherent regional order.
On a geopolitical level, recent developments in Palestine have also unsettled this arrangement. For decades, the issue of Palestine made the full integration of Arab states with Israel—the other arm of US power in the region—a major political challenge. But October 7 and the wars that have materialized in its wake have finally knocked the mix of coercion and consent sustaining American hegemony out of equilibrium. In a process that began under the Biden administration, the United States has, over the past several years, backed Israeli aggression and regional escalation that began with a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and has now brought chaos to the Gulf in the form of a large-scale US-Israeli war against Iran. Iran has predictably retaliated in part by targeting the core nodes of US power in the region: military bases and oil infrastructure. This has left the Gulf monarchies stuck between a rock and a hard place, and has exposed the degree to which they are held hostage to the belligerence of their patron and its arsonist junior partner.
As the previous arrangement has faltered, it is becoming increasingly clear that, for nations other than Israel, US patronage is a form of direct extortion by its ruling class. For his part, Trump has seemed to revel in the elision of reliance on US power and personal fealty to him. Speaking at the same FII summit as Kushner, he openly mocked Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, boasting: “he didn’t think he’d be kissing my ass. He really didn’t. He thought [I’d] be just another American president that was a loser … But now he has to be nice to me. He better be nice to me.” And even as the economy suffers on the whole, those in Trump’s personal orbit are making a killing on insider trades and direct market manipulation.
This was not how it was supposed to go down. Entering power in 2021, the Biden administration actively sought to reverse the decline of US hegemony by restoring a sense of global order and aggressively bolstering its competitive posture vis-a-vis China, both militarily and in the all-important green technology race. But a sequence of geopolitical surprises—first a land invasion in Europe and then an insurgency of the dispossessed in the Middle East—derailed that plan, and the United States committed itself to a forceful defense of its allies in Ukraine and Israel. Neither intervention proved decisive; both conflicts persist through the present. And rather than recuperate American hegemony, steadfast defense of Israel has catalyzed a US turn against the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, undermining the very legal structures that have secured its world-systemic centrality and providing Israel with the impunity it needs to set the region ablaze. Such was the world order Trump and his cronies stepped into.
This current arrangement is far from stable, and the turn toward nakedly corrupt transactionalism is less a new paradigm of power than a form of crisis looting at the level of the state. The Board of Peace is not the new United Nations. The legal and institutional form through which the US was once able to universalize its interests as the general interests of the world is collapsing. And no matter the size of the US arsenal or its bloated military budget, force absent consent cannot hold together a unipolar order. While Trump seems content with the cheap thrills of tactical success, these will soon fade into the enduring reality of cascading strategic regressions. Whatever replaces the liberal international order will need to emerge from beneath the wreckage caused by a United States in terminal decline.
