Top photo credit: Britain's former Prime Minister Tony Blair attends a world leaders' summit on ending the Gaza war, amid a U.S.-brokered prisoner-hostage swap and ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, October 13, 2025. REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett/Pool/File Photo
Phase farce: No way 'Board of Peace' replaces reality in Gaza
January 19, 2026
The Trump administration’s announcements about the Gaza Strip would lead one to believe that implementation of President Trump’s 20-point peace plan, later largely incorporated into a United Nations Security Council resolution, is progressing quite smoothly.
As such, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff announced this month on social media the “launch of Phase Two” of the plan, “moving from ceasefire to demilitarization, technocratic governance, and reconstruction.” But examination of even just a couple of Witkoff’s assertions in his announcement shows that "smooth" or even "implementation" are bitter overstatements.
Witkoff said that Phase One has “maintained the ceasefire.” No, it has not. Israel has continued daily attacks against the Gaza Strip ever since the ceasefire was supposed to go into effect last October. As usual with unobserved ceasefires, both sides accuse the other of violations. The casualty count, however, reveals which side lethal violations are coming from. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, Israeli attacks since the start of the supposed ceasefire have killed at least 451 Palestinians and injured 1,251. As was true of Israeli attacks during the previous three years, many of the victims have been civilians. On the other side, the Israeli military states that three of its soldiers were killed in combat during the first few days of the ceasefire in October 2025.
Witkoff also said that “Phase One delivered historic humanitarian aid” to Gaza. What he did not say is that continued Israeli rejections of requests to deliver aid to the Strip have made the flow of aid much less than what was agreed to and far less than what is needed. As of mid-January, 24,611 aid trucks have entered Gaza since the ceasefire agreement—fewer than half of the 57,000 that Israel should have allowed in under the agreed allocation.
Phase Two thus is being announced without anything close to full implementation of Phase One.
The administration has announced some, though not all, members of the “Board of Peace,” headed by Trump, that is supposed to function as an international board of directors overseeing implementation of the rest of the plan. Recruitment of a full slate of members evidently has been difficult. Hesitation by many governments to participate is perhaps understandable, given the uncertainties about implementation so far and the nature of the overall project as one that Trump has directed in coordination with Israel.
Recruitment will not be made any easier by the administration requiring a $1 billion cash contribution from any government wanting extended membership on the board.
The personnel announcements made so far are sufficient to displease each side in this conflict. The Board of Peace includes, among others, Witkoff, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and former British prime minister Tony Blair. Arab governments and many others in the Muslim world distrust Blair because of his role in the Iraq War and his perceived pro-Israel bias when he was an international envoy addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Israel has been quick to object to the membership of a “Gaza Executive Board,” which the White House also announced and will have a vaguely defined relationship with the other bodies involved in Gaza. This board will include — besides Blair, Kushner, Witkoff, and others — the Turkish foreign minister and a senior Qatari official. The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the Gaza Executive Board as constituted is “at odds with Israeli policy.” The statement evidently reflects Israel’s sour relations with Türkiye and Qatar, largely because of the relations of those two governments with Hamas.
The Israeli objections will provide Netanyahu’s government with an additional rationale for overturning the whole diplomatic process whenever it chooses to do so. It is not just the government, but also the Israeli opposition that is making an issue of the Executive Board membership. Opposition leader Yair Lapid called the inclusion of Türkiye a “grave diplomatic failure.” Itamar Ben Gvir, the extreme right-winger who is minister of national security, called for the Israeli military “to return to war with tremendous force in the Strip.”
Meanwhile, some apparent organizational progress has taken place in Cairo, with the first meeting of the National Committee for the Administration of the Gaza Strip (NCAG), a group of 15 Palestinian technocrats who are supposed to function as an interim administration under the supervision of the Board of Peace. The committee met with Bulgarian diplomat Nickolay Mladenov, who has been named “director-general” of the Board of Peace. Members of the NCAG have not been announced apart from the committee’s head, a civil engineer and former deputy minister of transportation in the Palestinian Authority named Ali Shaath.
In his announcement about Phase Two, Witkoff said nothing about the prospective International Stabilization Force (ISF), which is supposed to play a major security role during the interim administration and reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. Recruiting participants in the ISF has been even more difficult than recruiting members of the Board of Peace. Governments do not want their troops to get involved in an active combat situation, as the Israeli attacks continue. They especially do not want to be involved in a mission of disarming Hamas, an objective that Israel was unable to achieve through three years of unrestricted warfare.
Amid frequent mention by Witkoff and others about Hamas needing to live up to its obligations, it is important to remember that Hamas never signed up to Trump’s 20-point plan. What Hamas has agreed to, going back to a framework agreement in 2024, has been a complete ceasefire, release of all hostages in exchange for release of an agreed number of Palestinian prisoners, and return of remains of the deceased, amid an ending of the siege of the Gaza Strip and the beginning of internationally supervised reconstruction of the territory.
Hamas also has made clear it is willing to cede governance of the Gaza Strip to independent Palestinian technocrats. In this regard, Hamas publicly welcomed as an “important positive development” the establishment and initial meeting of NCAG. Hamas also accepts in principle the presence in Gaza of a neutral international peacekeeping force.
As for disarmament, the conditions matter. Hamas has offered to bury its weapons as part of the long-term truce or hudna that it has long offered Israel. But it would completely surrender its weapons only to a genuine Palestinian government.
What Hamas will not do is unilateral disarmament as Israel continues to occupy Palestinian territory and to kill Palestinian citizens. It is unrealistic and unreasonable to expect that, especially in view of the slaughter in Gaza of the past three years.
The technocrats on NCAG have an enormous task, and they face it with major handicaps. Perhaps symbolic of the handicaps is how Shaath, to get to the Cairo meeting from where he has been living in the West Bank, had to travel through Jordan and was detained by Israeli authorities for six hours at the Allenby crossing. A Palestinian official commented that this incident demonstrates an Israel intention to sabotage the committee’s work.
An Arab diplomat observed that a committee of 15 members cannot administer the Gaza Strip without large numbers of civil servants. But Israel is blocking the participation of not only anyone on Hamas’s payroll but also anyone on the Palestinian Authority’s payroll.
In his initial public comments after being named chairman of NCAG, Shaath talked about the huge task of clearing the rubble, which could take three years while overall reconstruction would take about seven years. The situation could become even worse. Israel is continuing to create still more rubble by methodically demolishing buildings in the half of the Gaza Strip that it still occupies.
Neither Trump’s plan nor any other peace plan will be able to bring anything close to peace, security, and prosperity to Gaza as long as Israel is the controlling power on the ground and is determined to oppose anything that looks like Palestinian self-governance.
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Top image credit: Samuele Wikipediano 1348 via wikimedia commons/lev radin via shutterstock.com
On Greenland, Trump wants to be like Polk
January 17, 2026
Any hopes that Wednesday’s meeting of Greenland and Denmark’s foreign ministers with Vice President Vance and Secretary Rubio might point toward an end of the Trump administration’s attempts to annex the semiautonomous arctic territory were swiftly disappointed. “Fundamental disagreement” remains, according to Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen.
That these talks would yield no hint of a resolution should not be surprising. Much of Trump’s stated rationale for seeking ownership of Greenland — the need for an increased U.S. military presence, the ability to access the island’s critical mineral deposits, or the alleged imperative to keep the Chinese and Russians at bay — is eminently negotiable and even achievable under the status quo. If these were the president’s real goals he likely could have reached an agreement with Denmark months ago. That this standoff persists is a testament to Trump’s true motive: ownership for its own sake.
In the past two weeks and throughout his first year in office, Trump has made no secret of his desire for territorial expansion or his fixation on incorporating Greenland into the United States. “The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation — one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons,” he declared in his inaugural address. “Anything less” than U.S. possession of Greenland, Trump wrote on Wednesday, “is unacceptable.”
These have not been mere one-off statements or sleep-deprived Truth Social posts, but reflect a deep component of Trump’s governing philosophy and understanding of his historical role as U.S. president. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump went out of his way to acquire a portrait of President James K. Polk, which he hung in the Oval Office. The president made it clear that this was an homage to the territorial expansion that occurred under Polk, who doubled the size of the United States by waging a war of conquest on Mexico. “He got a lot of land,” Trump said at the time.
Trump apparently believes presiding over a similar acquisition would cement his legacy. In 2021, he told journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser that securing Greenland was “not different from a real estate deal” and suggested that it would earn him a place in U.S. history. He further explained his rationale: “Look at the size of this, it’s massive, and that should be part of the United States.”
These are the kind of accomplishments that the president believes could get his face on Mount Rushmore. One can imagine Trump’s delight at seeing history books credit his name with the first expansion of the U.S. map in nearly 100 years. All the better that the acquisition of Greenland would allow the United States to leapfrog Canada to become the world’s second largest nation, an achievement that the superlative-loving president would certainly relish. Never mind that expanding U.S. territory through coercion would seem to conflict with his fixation on winning the Nobel Peace Prize — after all, Teddy Roosevelt was able to do both.
Despite the abundant evidence for the expansionist motives driving Trump’s Greenland ambitions, much of the resulting commentary has focused on debunking his claim that acquiring the territory is essential for U.S. national security (and to a lesser extent, that it offers a bonanza of oil and critical minerals).
These arguments are important, as the administration has publicly staked its effort to annex Greenland on these claims. It’s therefore vital to note that the U.S. already has the ability to expand its base and troop presence in Greenland under the 1951 Greenland Defense Act, and that it has drawn down that presence since the Cold War entirely of its own volition. Indeed, Denmark and Greenland have stated their openness to an expanded U.S. presence under the current framework. Likewise, it matters that Russian and Chinese naval vessels are not constantly stalking the waters around Greenland as Trump alleges, and that Greenland and Denmark have already been cooperating with U.S. efforts to keep Chinese investment out of critical infrastructure on the island.
Yet there is some risk that a domestic and international response which focuses unduly on rebutting Trump’s security claims inadvertently grants some legitimacy to his annexation drive. For even if the president’s arguments had more merit, the attempt to seize an ally’s territory through coercive diplomacy or military action, against the will of its inhabitants, would still be wildly illegitimate. The notion that the United States ought to be able to invoke its “national security” to run roughshod over self determination, sovereignty, and decades-long treaty commitments ought to be opposed on its own terms.
That successive U.S. governments have previously invoked national security to justify such abuses is unquestionable. Trump himself has cited national security as license to do everything from raising tariffs on kitchen cabinets to fast-tracking deportations. An annexation of Greenland would only be an unusually flagrant and self-defeating expression of this tendency. As the danger of a president who views his power as essentially unlimited becomes more clear, however, it is incumbent upon the American people, elected officials, and international actors to draw a firm line on principles like territorial integrity and self determination.
Some have argued that the Trump administration’s national security arguments point to its real, more limited goals for Greenland — namely, securing greater military access to the island while ensuring Russia and China are kept at arms length.
While it’s hard to reconcile this view with Trump’s statements or the fact that the U.S. could already do these things under its present arrangements with Greenland, it's entirely possible that Trump will find a need to back down from, or at least postpone his designs on the territory. He may be thwarted by defiant congressional Republicans, or persuaded that the consequences for transatlantic relations are too great and that the idea is too unpopular domestically. He may be distracted by another foreign or domestic crisis. Regardless, he could easily pocket an agreement with Greenland and Denmark to increase U.S. troops and bases on the island, as well as deals for U.S. companies to extract oil, gas, and critical minerals there. This would be enough for him to claim victory, and for his allies to claim that actually, this was what he was after all along.
Certainly this outcome would be acceptable to most parties involved. It may suit Denmark, ultimately, to treat Trump’s national security concerns as very serious and try to address them, playing for time while also planning for the possibility that he might simply declare U.S. annexation of Greenland via Truth Social post.
In any case, no one can count on him giving up and moving on. Trump has made it abundantly clear: he views the U.S. acquisition of Greenland as an end unto itself — another way to impose his will on history. That he might be willing to use force or coercion to achieve this goal will remain a live possibility for the duration of his presidency.
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Top photo credit: HAGSHULT, SWEDEN- 7 MAY 2024: Military guards during the US Army exercise Swift Response 24 at the Hagshult base, Småland county, Sweden, during Tuesday. (Shutterstock/Sunshine Seeds)
Trump digs in as Europe sends troops to Greenland
January 16, 2026
Wednesday’s talks between American, Danish, and Greenlandic officials exposed the unbridgeable gulf between President Trump’s territorial ambitions and respect for sovereignty.
Trump now claims the U.S. needs Greenland to support the Golden Dome missile defense initiative. Meanwhile, European leaders are sending a small number of troops to Greenland.
On Wednesday, Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat down with Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and Greenlandic Foreign Minister Vivian Motzfeldt, attempting to find common ground on what has become a surreal crisis.
“There was a fundamental disagreement,” Rasmussen told reporters afterward. Rasmussen said he was unable to change Trump’s position: “It’s clear that the president has this wish of conquering over Greenland.” His Greenlandic counterpart, Vivian Motzfeldt, reiterated her compatriots’ firm stance: “Greenland does not want to be owned by, governed by or part of the United States.”
The meeting, arranged after a week of escalating threats from Trump, was supposed to defuse tensions. Instead, the president is unmoved in his determination to seize Greenland. While the parties agreed to establish a “high-level working group” to continue discussions, this seems to be nothing more than a stalling tactic. The president continues to insist that Greenland must be “in the hands of the U.S…. anything less than that is unacceptable.”
The Golden Dome pretext
With the narrative of “Russian and Chinese ships off the coast” falling apart, the White House has pivoted to a new rationale: the Golden Dome. Trump is now emphasizing that full control of Greenland is “vital” for his proposed multi-layer missile defense system designed to intercept hypersonic and ballistic threats. “NATO should be leading the way for us to get it,” Trump insisted. “IF WE DON’T, RUSSIA OR CHINA WILL, AND THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!”
Vice President Vance reinforced this position, arguing that “the entire missile defense infrastructure is partially dependent on Greenland.” While there is no denying the strategic value of the island, the U.S. Space Force already operates the Pituffik Space Base with full radar coverage.
Experts dismiss Trump’s claim that annexation is required for Golden Dome to work, arguing that the existing agreements, specifically the 1951 Greenland Defense Agreement, already permit the project’s expansion and any necessary modernization on the island.
The Golden Dome argument appears to be bureaucratic cover for an ideological desire to expand the map. As Rasmussen pointed out, there is zero evidence of Russian or Chinese interest in colonizing the island, rendering the administration’s preemption argument moot.
The $700 billion question
Rubio has been tasked with coming up with a proposal to purchase Greenland, estimated to cost $700 billion. While Rubio tells Congress that the military threats are merely rhetoric to pressure Denmark, the financial offer is being presented as serious.
Danish Foreign Minister Rasmussen shot down the idea with a stinging rebuke of the American social model: “There’s no way that the U.S. will pay for a Scandinavian welfare system and Greenland,” said Rasmussen. “You haven’t introduced a Scandinavian welfare system in your own country.”
Greenland’s answer is just as firm. Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen stated Tuesday, “We choose Denmark. We choose NATO, the Kingdom of Denmark and the EU.” The 34-year old Greenlandic leader is walking a tightrope. As a pro-business leader, Nielsen wants American investment, but he refuses to let Greenland be treated like a prize to be acquired.
When asked for a response to Nielsen’s loyalty to the current order, Trump turned to personal intimidation: “I disagree with him. I don’t know who he is... but that’s going to be a big problem for him.”
All of this just shows the administration’s fundamental misunderstanding, or willful ignorance, of Greenland’s constitutional status. Even if Copenhagen wanted to sell Greenland, it lacks the legal authority. The 2009 Self-Government Act gives Greenlanders the final say on their future.
Congress fractures
The crisis has bled into Congress. On the expansionist right, Senator Randy Fine (R-Fla.) has introduced a legal framework for Greenland to be recognized as the 51st state. “Greenland is not a distant outpost we can afford to ignore — it is a vital national security asset,” Fine declared, arguing that control of the island equals control of Arctic shipping lanes.
In response, Representative Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) introduced the “Greenland Sovereignty Protection Act.” This bill would block federal funds from being used to “invade, annex, purchase, or otherwise acquire” the island. The bill would also prohibit funding for troop surges or influence campaigns aimed at affecting Greenlandic opinion. Gomez warned that threatening allies “weakens international law and puts NATO at risk.”
Republicans aren’t united on this. Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) joked, “Psst, Denmark… Tell this administration the Epstein files are in Greenland… they’ll lose all interest.” Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Representatives Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Don Bacon (R-Neb.) introduced a Sense of Congress bill affirming the U.S.’ partnership with Denmark and Greenland and recognizing America’s responsibility to comply with treaty obligations and solve any disputes peacefully.
Sen. Murkowski and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H). introduced the “NATO Unity Protection Act” to prohibit the use of DoD or State Department funds to blockade, occupy, annex or otherwise assert control over the sovereign territory of a NATO member state. Even House Speaker Mike Johnson tried to cool things off, stating, “All this stuff about military action... I don’t think anybody’s seriously considering that. And in the Congress, we’re certainly not.”
Europe's symbolic stand
The Danish government has confirmed that Danish soldiers would shoot back if invaded. Denmark allocated $6.5 billion last year to boost its military presence in the Arctic. After Trump brushed off Denmark’s defenses as “two dogsleds,” the Danish Armed Forces and European allies announced increases in their military presence in Greenland.
To send a message, a group of European countries is sending a small, symbolic force to Greenland. Germany has sent a 13-person reconnaissance team; France has redeployed 15 soldiers; Sweden is sending officers; Norway, the Netherlands and the UK have contributed single-digit personnel. The White House has stated that European troops in Greenland won’t change Trump’s mind.
These forces, barely 30 personnel in total, obviously cannot defeat the 200 U.S. troops already stationed at Pituffik, let alone any reinforcements. Rather, their purpose is political. As one French diplomat noted, “We’ll show the U.S. that NATO is present.” With European troops on the ground, any U.S. incursion becomes an attack on Germany, France, and the UK simultaneously.
The rhetoric from European capitals is apocalyptic. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and EU Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius have warned that American military action against a NATO member state would mean the end of the alliance. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk went even further, stating that such an attack would be “the end of the world as we know it.”
What happens next
The “high-level working group” will convene in Copenhagen next month, but expectations are minimal. The administration seems committed to acquisition despite the diplomatic dead end. There is a clear off-ramp, but it requires the White House to accept that sovereignty is not a transaction.
Legitimate security concerns regarding the Golden Dome can be addressed through the 1951 Defense Agreement, which has served U.S. interests for 75 years. As for critical minerals, the U.S. should pursue access through commercial diplomacy and joint ventures that respect Greenland’s high environmental standards.
The handful of European soldiers now stationed in Greenland won’t stop American military action if Trump decides to attack. But their presence raises a question every American should ponder: How did we become the threat our own allies need protection from?
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