We do need new institutions that are global without being globalist.

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President Donald Trump’s proposed Board of Peace had decidedly rocky beginnings. In Europe, only Hungary and Bulgaria have joined so far. Others, in the West and around the world, have expressed reservations. It isn’t difficult to see why. The presentation of the new international organisation was a typically Trumpian cocktail that was heavy on braggadocio and light on detail: its mission undefined, with an unclear scope (is it about Gaza, Ukraine, or the whole world?), a garish logo, weirdly reminiscent of Command and Conquer: Red Alert or of Sid Meyer’s Civilisation series, and the eyebrow-raising suggestion that joining the group might require a one billion dollar entry fee all contributed to make the project seem a tad unserious. Should we give it a chance, though?

When one strips away the aesthetics, the branding, and the inevitable Trumpian bombast, what he ends up with is a diagnosis that is actually profoundly reasonable. The truth of the matter is that the system of performatively multilateral global governance we inherited from the mid-20th century isn’t just cracking; it’s sinking. Though meant as a sort of “assembly of nations” that might fairly represent humanity’s diverging interests and concerns, the UN is now one of the clearest symbols of that failure.

The UN is a decent idea gone awry. Everyone—and that includes its most committed defenders—knows it. While the Security Council was designed as the neuralgic centre of the global order and as a tacit recognition of the unique role of the world’s great powers in shaping international security, its membership has long failed to accurately represent the existing balance of power. Its structure mirrors the geopolitical realities of 1945, not those of 2026. It is incomprehensible, for instance, that the world’s third-largest economy by purchasing power parity-measured GDP, India, is denied a seat at the Council. As diminished as Germany’s own global stature may be, it is hard to understand why London, but not Berlin, enjoys membership. The same goes for Japan and Brazil, a state of 220 million people that is hegemonic in South America as well as the South Atlantic. This fossilisation of the Council has made it increasingly illegitimate in the eyes of the world. Worse, by failing to genuinely include the world’s main powerbrokers, it is becoming increasingly useless.

The eeriest trend, however, is the transformation of the UN from a forum of states into an ideological actor. The United Nations has become a bloated, self-reverential lair of left-wing, progressive activists. More often than not, UN agencies sound more like a permanent campus seminar than like the meeting place of the world’s nations and civilisations. The NGO-isation of the UN is a doubly unfortunate phenomenon: not only because it distracts resources and attention from what actually matters, but because it destroys the credibility such an organisation ought to enjoy.

Indeed, UN bodies routinely promote radical gender ideology entirely detached from the cultural, religious, and legal traditions of most of the world’s population. These are ideas that do not convince more than a minority even in the West, the only region in the world where they hold any clout—outside the Euro-American space, they are, and always have been, almost non-existent. Nevertheless, concepts such as ‘gender identity’ and ‘reproductive justice’ are aggressively exported by unaccountable UN bureaucrats as universal norms. They repeatedly get smuggled into development aid, humanitarian assistance, and peacekeeping mandates—an abuse of trust that nothing in the UN Charter appears to justify. Countries that dissent, whether they are non-Western or Western conservative governments, are often not treated as equal partners and as sovereign states with the right to independently determine their policies but as moral delinquents in need of bullying and re-education.

This is also the case with the UN’s approach to issues of climate and migration. Both are almost always infused with an unmistakably left-wing worldview: a visible, ardent hostility to national borders, a suspicion of national sovereignty, and a reflexive preference for technocratic regulation over democratic choice. The Global Compact for Migration, for instance, effectively reframed mass migration as an unquestionable moral good while demonising states that insist on border control. The world has no need for a UN that no longer acts as a forum of equal, sovereign nations and instead attempts to bully them into accepting Berkeley-style liberalism.

Today’s UN is increasingly made up of Western-educated bureaucrats, activist lawyers, and NGO professionals who share the same assumptions, use the same jargon, and police the same moral boundaries. Far from mediating between competing national interests, the UN now routinely takes sides—and, hélas, always the same. In this context, the idea of starting anew is not as mad as it sounds. Building a new institution from scratch may, in fact, be the only realistic way to recover the original promise of the United Nations: a great gathering where the peoples of the world can discuss, in equality and dignity, the issues that humanity faces.

Such an organisation would not pretend to transcend power politics; it would manage them. It would not seek to morally homogenise humanity but to provide a space where genuinely divergent civilisations, interests, and values can coexist without being forced into a single liberal mould. Trump’s other pet project, the creation of a new international forum that replaces the G7 and unites what Washington sees as the world’s foremost powers—the U.S., China, Russia, India, and Japan—could further modernise global governance and boost international stability. The concept would draw inspiration from Prince Klemens von Metternich’s 19th-century Concert of Europe, now effectively building a Global Concert, tasked with defining global zones of interest and preventing great power competition from leading to overt conflict. No human system is perfect, and neither would this be—but, whatever its flaws, they nevertheless seem milder than the real, palpable insufficiencies of today’s global institutions.

The merits of a new architecture of global governance that transcends the United Nations have, naturally, fallen victim to the Trump Derangement Syndrome that infects much of the Western world’s press and political classes. The White House’s convoluted presentation of the idea certainly made it easier to stain its reputation. But neither the Board of Peace nor Trump’s possible replacement for the G7 and the UN Security Council, possibly the ‘C-5’, should be rejected outright. We do need new institutions that are global without being globalist. We must, indeed, cleanse them from the consequences of decades of liberal ideological hegemony. In our new, tense era, we need organisations that are focused more on conflict resolution and less on ideological promotion. All that is true. And, if Trump’s proposal at least forces that important conversation to take place, it will already have been worth it.

Original article: The European Conservative