We should be partners to the United States and responsible international actors but we can be neither on the Board of Peace.
The Charter of the Board of Peace is a modern-day fawning indulgence to a vain madman who wants to be a monarch. The Charter makes Trump “the Chairman” to an organisation whose purpose is in reality whatever he says it is. The words “Gaza” or “Palestine” are not even in the Charter. The agenda is set by an Executive Board that the Chairman appoints and dismisses at will. States are to contribute US$1billion if they want to stay as members for more than 3 years and they vote on whatever the Executive Board puts in front of them. The Chairman is there for as long as he likes and appoints his successor. The Chairman can set up subcommittees and issue directives and orders for the purposes of the Board of Peace, whatever he decides they should be. If any state has any complaints about the Board of Peace, the final arbiter is, of course, the Chairman. To quote Humpty Dumpty ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean’
The title “Eternal Chairman” had already been taken as it is the formal title of Kim Jong-Il. The title of “Eternal President” was reserved for his father, making North Korea the world’s only necrocracy. That would not be an option for Trump as there are term limits under the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution and also Article 2 provides that the president’s term ceases upon death.
It is said that we should not dismiss Trump as a phenomenon that will go away. I agree. The future is written in history. There are no eternal presidents, but the dead hand of past generations will weigh on the minds of the living (with apologies to Karl Marx). The Republican Party is possessed by MAGA and there are many lining up to be his successor, as president and perhaps Chairman. In the words of Senator Lindsay Graham, Trump is the most consequential president this century. We will be living the consequences for the remainder of the century. That does not mean that those of us who think that there is a better tomorrow are naively looking back nostalgically to the good old days.
The United States will be 250 years old this year. It started as a confederation, then became a federation divided between slave owning states and others. It acquired territory from France, expanded westward on the racist notion of “manifest destiny”, annexed Texas, was torn in half by civil war, remained divided by segregation in the South, became isolationist, engaged in imperialism, fought two World Wars started in Europe, replaced the British Empire, made the dollar the world’s bench mark currency and though instrumental in establishing the rules based order, engaged in countless operations that resulted in countless wars and insurections. It has been prolifically inventive and advanced in every field of human endeavour. There is no aspect of our lives that is not enriched daily somewhere by American progress.
If the arc of history bends towards justice, as Martin Luther King Jr claimed, it appears to have taken a rather circuitous route. Nevertheless, and despite nearly 250 years darkness and light, this is the first time that an American president asserts a divine right of kings.
The first president of the United States, General George Washington could have. According to Gore Vidal, he was addressed as, “Your Majesty”. Yet, having won the Revolutionary War, he returned to his farm, saying he did not defeat George III so that he should become George I. When George III heard about it, he said of Washington that he must be the “greatest character of the age”.
More recently, in 2023, General Mark Milley, who served as Trump’s own Chairman to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said to the ire of Trump, “We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or a tyrant or a dictator. And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator…We take an oath to the Constitution.”
It is, of course, delusional and indulgent nostalgia to think that American presidents have adhered to the constitution or that any were “the greatest character of their age”. The ignorance, corruption and mendacity of Trump is not on a scale that has been seen before but those characteristics are not unique to him.
Americans define themselves by fidelity to the constitution and a refusal to bow to a pretender to a crown. It is a realisation that the United States is a nation of laws or it is nothing and that there is nothing more unamerican than wanting to be a king.
Trump is subject to the constitution. In front of the Supreme Court at the moment, is a case arguing that Trump’s tariffs are illegal. The indications are that the case is not going well for Trump given that the justices he appointed are saying that a future administration might use the same powers to do something MAGA will not like. If Trump indulges himself after his presidency with the Board of Peace, he may be subject to the United States Logan Act, which broadly prohibits private citizens from conducting diplomacy without permission. This summer Trump is heading for the midterm elections with a net approval rating today of -39%. He probably does not know that the Congress is Article 1 of the Constitution and the President is Article 2 and the checks and balances there are ones some of us only dream of for Cyprus.
Ms Prokopiou mentioned the viral speech of Mark Carney which he is said to have written unassisted. There are some very thoughtful statements there and some memorable phrases but there is another part. What underlies the speech is that we can no longer rely on the United States. So far so good. I would add that in Europe we have seen a reversal of what has been US foreign policy towards Europe for 80 years and that as Ms Lagarde has said, the EU is strengthened by the kick up the backside. Where the Carney thesis appears to fray is where he says the “rules based international order” has been ruptured and is not coming back. He also dismisses international law as a “pleasant fiction”. The incoherence of that statement is proven first by the part of the speech where Carney calls for medium size powers to band together (how else but by international law?) and then his own actions which was immediately to go off and negotiate international agreements.
International law is neither pleasant nor a fiction. The lack of order can only be judged from a sense of order. The law does not disappear because people act as outlaws rather the law shows us that they are in fact outlaws. In much darker days in the case of Liversedge v Anderson, Lord Atkins said, “Amid the clash of arms the laws are not silent. They may be changed but they speak the same language in war as in peace.” We have seen darker days and the only recourse that has taken us out of them has been the reassertion of a legal order arching towards justice. The judgments of Nuremberg are not a “pleasant fiction”, the United Nations is not a museum. The European Union is a creature of international law and the most successful peace project in history. It has a Nobel Peace prize. The Chairman of the Board of Peace is not in line to get one.
Prime Minister Carney reminded us of a phrase used about the UK during the Brexit referendum, “If you are not at the table, you might find itself on the menu”. Unfortunately, our president has put our country on the menu and so found it on the table. We will be mere observers but we will also be observed.
We got there by presenting ourselves as a conduit for humanitarian assistance, as a mediator of regional disputes and “a strategic partner”. All of these are laudable ambitions but some are laughable. Our geographic position- a blessing and a curse- makes us ideally suited to act as the edge of the European Union, but we cannot credibly present ourselves as problem solvers to others while being ourselves one of the most protracted problems in world history.
It has been quipped that “the secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you can do anything”. That does not apply to statecraft. Once you are caught pretending that Iran asked you to speak to Israel on its behalf and then Iran denies it; once you hold a meeting with AIPAC, a lobby group that caused the Trump administration to sanction the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, and say you will cooperate with them; you cannot present yourself as an honest broker in the Middle East. Once you make a public statement to the effect that a final judgment of the International Court of Justice concerning the occupation of Palestine consists of “unfounded allegations” you have chosen your table.
It is not the table that any of your predecessors has sat at until now. We have reason to be proud of how the Republic of Cyprus has contributed to international law in the past. Our own Foreign Ministry website records the contributions of Pikis J to the Internatinal Criminal Court, the same court that AIPAC convinced Trump to punish. The Republic was represented in the Chagos Islands case where we asserted our right of self-determination as a peremptory norm of international law. That does not sit will with claiming that a finding of that court consists of “unfounded allegations” when they decide that the Palestinians have a right of self-determination.
The Charter of the Board of Peace has a thinly veiled attack in its preamble toward the United Nations suggesting it institutionalises conflicts. Are we going to ask them to institutionalise ours when we meet them?
As for the suggestion that we, the small boat, should tie ourselves to an ocean-liner; that does not work even as a matter of navigation and you will be dragged into seas that you are not seaworthy for. But the proposition is not even to tie ourselves to a tugboat. It is to take orders from a captain whose license is about to expire and who is prepared to draw up the admiralty chart as he goes.
The next president of the United States could be Gavin Newsom or some other American who does not defer to kings or tyrants. In Davos he called leaders who bend to Trump, “pathetic”.
We are in a vessel, the European Union, and currently we hold the wheel. We have that privilege because at some point statesmen with vision presented our country as capable of living united as one people as part of the European family of nations. If we want to be credible leaders in Europe or global citizens, we need to live up to the image we once projected. The current presidency of the EU is held by a country who speaks for some of the people of that country. To be a European leader our president must first be a president for all Cypriots and not merely act as the head of a “Christian country” bending the knee to an ephemeral chairman.
Michael J Harakis
A citizen
19/2/2026