Pictured: Donald Trump and Keir Starmer

Image credits: Flickr

Following the release of Trump’s 20-point plan for the demilitarisation of the Gaza strip in September 2025, it appears highly likely that Keir Starmer will join the US President’s ‘Board of Peace’, which intends to oversee the execution of the plan. This follows the announcement of the committee’s initial members on the 17^th January, including former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. 

While Downing Street insists that no formal invitation of membership has yet been extended to the Prime Minister, Starmer (in a speech to Labour MPs on the 12^th January), seemed to be enthusiastic about his potential membership, stating that ‘…in a world this volatile, you have to be on the pitch. You have to be in the room to tackle the issues working people care about.’

The gravity of this issue is ultimately too large for people to realise the irony of Starmer and Blair working together on ‘peaceful’ diplomacy in the Middle East. However, Blair’s sudden endorsement of Trump’s peace plan as the ‘best chance of ending two years of war, misery and suffering’ is nothing other than crass and politically uncanny. The adoption of the plan by a unanimous vote of the UN Security Council has provided many world leaders a chance to hop on the bandwagon of international peace advocacy. 

But for the British electorate, a disconcerting sense of déjà vu is creeping in (for those who remember Blair taking the UK into the 2003 Iraq War). It appears the Labour Party will forever be tainted by poor foreign policy decisions; any credibility Starmer may have gained from his voters will be ruined by mere association with Blair and his perceived diplomatic incompetence. 

The existing membership of this ‘Board of Peace’ is indicative of the true purpose behind the Trump administration’s foreign policy. The prospect of collaboration with names such as Marco Rubio, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Ajay Banga, and Marc Rowan, will most certainly earn Starmer few political points on the international stage, and even fewer at home. It is baffling that the UK government fails to see this initiative for what it truly is: Trump’s definitive attempt to win the Nobel Peace Prize he so desperately covets.

It does not require much political knowledge to know that every name on the membership list is a ‘Yes man’ for the President’s every whim and will. The British cabinet’s inability to recognise that now is the time to ‘jump ship’ on their friendly accords with the White House is concerning, given the bi-partisan call for Trump’s impeachment at the upcoming 2026 mid-term elections – spearheaded by Minnesota representatives.

The ominous agenda behind the peace plan itself is as transparent as a windowpane. It draws troubling parallels with Trump’s justification for the US occupation of Venezuela, as evidenced by Article 10 of the plan: ‘A Trump economic development plan to rebuild and energise Gaza will be created by convening a panel of experts who have helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East.’ As stipulated in Article 9, this will be carried out under the governance of an ‘apolitical Palestinian committee…with oversight and supervision by the ‘Board of Peace’, which will be headed and chaired by President Donald J. Trump’.

These provisos seem set to make Gaza (like Venezuela) an economically dependent puppet state of the US. This is indicative of the White House’s true intention of siphoning off natural resources from countries in which they have intervened militarily and making massive profits for the supposed benefit of the American taxpayer. And yet the ‘smoke and mirrors’ used by Trump’s cronies to portray him as a benevolent intermediary of international peace has apparently fooled Blair, Starmer, and the entirety of the UN Security Council.

The President has recently claimed he will be in receipt of 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil worth $2.8 billion within 18 months. In May 2025, he claimed that the US will make ‘much more’ than $350 billion out of the US-Ukraine minerals deal. Why do global leaders fail to acknowledge his not-so-hidden agenda, which is more evident than ever before in this ‘Board of Peace’? 

Republicans and other misguided souls in favour of the ‘Board of Peace’ will ask me what gives me the right to be so damning of what they believe to be the only coherent proposal for an end to the pain and suffering in the Middle East.

What gives me such a right is my knowledge that however many points Trump puts into his peace plan (20, 50, 100, even 287), his entire administration is out of its depth. True to his brand, the President is trying to deal with a centuries’ old religious conflict as if it were a high-profile business merger. The sole reason it has garnered international traction is through the bluff and bluster, which has also become a trademark of Donald J. Trump.

Blair and Starmer (among countless others) forget that global peace will always play second fiddle to this man’s nefarious intentions. I thought the British government was past the days when it would drop its bloomers for a charming American GI!