By T N Ashok
NEW YORK: Donald Trump has never met a geopolitical catastrophe he couldn’t rebrand as a development opportunity. His latest venture—the risibly titled “Board of Peace” for Gaza—is perhaps his most audacious grift yet: a scheme to dress up territorial control as portfolio management, to transform military occupation into a construction contract, and to trick the world’s rising powers into providing diplomatic cover for what is, stripped of its gold-plated branding, a straightforward imperial project.
The con is elegant in its cynicism. By styling Gaza’s future not as a question of Palestinian self-determination but as a “reconstruction investment opportunity,” Trump has found a way to sideline inconvenient questions about sovereignty, international law, and human rights. More crucially, he’s discovered that nations desperate for global prestige—or, in India’s case, hungry for lucrative construction contracts abroad—will happily play along, provided they get a seat at the table and a slice of the action.
The invitation to India is the masterpiece of this hustle. New Delhi has watched with envy as Chinese state enterprises have built half of Africa and most of the Belt and Road. India’s construction giants—Larsen & Toubro, GMR, Adani—are capable but underemployed internationally, perpetually losing bids to their Chinese rivals or hamstrung by India’s cautious foreign policy. The prospect of rebuilding an entire territory, with American financing and Gulf money in the mix, is catnip to an Indian establishment that measures its great-power status in cranes erected and highways poured.
Trump knows this. He’s dangling Gaza as the kind of mega-project that India craves: visible, prestigious, and—most importantly—legitimized by a “coalition” that provides political cover. Never mind that the Palestinian Authority, the nominal government of these people, has been iced out of the process. Never mind that the “Board of Peace” bypasses every international legal framework painstakingly constructed since 1945. India gets what it wants: a construction bonanza and a seat at a table usually reserved for old Western powers.
The genius is that India’s participation then provides Trump with exactly what he wants: legitimacy. When critics howl that this is neocolonialism with a condo tower aesthetic, Trump can gesture at the Board’s roster and say, “Look, the world’s largest democracy is on board. Pakistan too. This is a global consensus.” It’s the geopolitical equivalent of getting your mark to recruit other marks—multi-level diplomacy.
Pakistan’s inclusion is almost cruelly calculated. Islamabad, perpetually cash-strapped and chronically insecure about its status relative to India, is being offered something it can rarely afford: parity. To sit on the same “peace board” as India, to be consulted as an equal stakeholder, to matter in a room where decisions are made—this is intoxicating for a country that usually gets attention only when it’s teetering toward collapse or accused of harboring terrorists.
Trump is betting that Pakistan’s generals will swallow their ideological objections—and there will be many, given that joining this board means tacitly endorsing a process that treats Palestinian sovereignty as negotiable real estate—in exchange for American favor and the associated IMF lifelines. He’s probably right. Pakistan has a long history of choosing proximity to American power over solidarity with Muslim causes when the price is right. The board seat is the price.
And once both India and Pakistan are in, Trump has performed an alchemical trick: he’s transmuted a blatantly self-interested American land grab into an “international initiative” blessed by South Asia’s rival powers. The presence of these two countries doesn’t make the scheme legitimate—it makes the scheme laundered.
To understand just how brazen this Gaza gambit is, consider the Venezuelan prequel. Trump ordered the “extraction”—let’s call it what it was, an abduction—of NicolásMaduro on January 3rd, celebrated it as restoring “law and order,” and then sent American oil companies scrambling to Caracas like prospectors to a gold rush. That the oil hasn’t flowed as promised is irrelevant. The message was sent: sovereignty is fungible when Trump decides it is, and if you control enough military force, you can simply take things and retroactively justify it as liberation.
Gaza is the same playbook, but with better optics. Instead of Navy SEALs, it’s “investment committees.” Instead of regime change, it’s “technocratic administration.” Instead of plunder, it’s “reconstruction partnerships.” The substance is identical—external powers seizing control of a territory and its resources—but the packaging is designed for an audience that still cares, however faintly, about international norms.
The Gaza board doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s part of a broader Trump doctrine that treats sovereignty as a REIT—something that can be bought, sold, or foreclosed upon depending on market conditions. His renewed push to acquire Greenland isn’t a joke or a distraction; it’s the logical extension of the same philosophy. If you can assemble an “international board” to administer Gaza, why can’t you assemble one to facilitate the “purchase” of strategic Arctic territory from Denmark?
The Gaza model is the proof of concept. If the world accepts that a coalition of interested powers can override Palestinian sovereignty because the territory is “devastated” and requires “management,” then what principle prevents the same logic from applying to Greenland, which is “underdeveloped” and has “strategic resources”? Trump is stress-testing how much sovereignty can be eroded before the international system pushes back. So far, he’s discovering that the answer is: quite a lot, provided you offer the right inducements to the right players.
Nothing reveals the true nature of this enterprise quite like the personnel. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff—a real estate developer and a real estate developer—are on the board’s executive committee. Not diplomats. Not humanitarian experts. Not Middle East scholars. Developers.Men whose expertise is in constructing buildings and arranging financing, not in healing seventy-five years of bloody conflict.
This isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. Trump sees Gaza the way he sees any distressed asset: as a problem of capitalization and management. Clear the rubble, install compliant local managers (the “technocratic administration” that will inevitably be staffed by whoever is least likely to challenge American interests), bring in the construction firms, float some bonds, and presto—you’ve turned a humanitarian catastrophe into a portfolio asset. The participation of India’s construction conglomerates isn’t a side benefit; it’s the entire point.
For India, the temptation is obvious and the trap is total. Accept the invitation, and Indian firms get access to what could be tens of billions in reconstruction contracts. Refuse, and India remains a regional power that talks about multipolarity but can’t deliver when the deals are actually being cut.
But here’s what New Delhi will be endorsing by joining: the principle that powerful nations can simply bypass inconvenient legal frameworks when there’s money to be made. That “peace” is whatever process delivers construction contracts, regardless of whether it delivers justice or self-determination. That the Palestinian people’s political future can be decided in a boardroom in which they have no seat, no vote, and no veto.
India prides itself on its anti-colonial credentials, on being a voice for the Global South, on championing sovereignty and non-interference. Joining Trump’s Gaza board obliterates that claim. It reveals that India’s principles extend exactly as far as its commercial interests, and not one inch further. It announces to the world that India is for sale, and the asking price is a construction contract.
Trump has done something remarkable: he’s figured out how to privatize imperialism. The old model required formal annexation, colonial administrations, and the inevitable backlash from independence movements. The new model is cleaner. You create a “board,” invite nations that are either desperate for status (Pakistan) or hungry for contracts (India), add some Gulf money for capital, and suddenly you’re not occupying—you’re “administering.” You’re not stealing resources—you’re “facilitating reconstruction.” You’re not destroying sovereignty—you’re “providing governance during a transitional period.”
The people of Gaza, who will be the subjects of this experiment, don’t get a vote. They get, if they’re lucky, jobs on the construction sites. They get to watch as their future is negotiated by a cartel of foreign powers who view their homeland as a turnaround project. They get to be grateful for whatever crumbs fall from the boardroom table.
And the beautiful thing, from Trump’s perspective, is that every nation that joins the board becomes complicit. India can’t later complain about Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea without someone pointing out that it helped legitimize American assertiveness in Gaza. Pakistan can’t invoke Islamic solidarity without someone noting that it sold out Palestinian Muslims for a seat at Trump’s table. Each participant becomes a hostage to the scheme’s success, because its failure would reveal their participation as the mercenary calculation it always was.
History has a tendency to send bills to the forwarding address. When this “Board of Peace” inevitably produces not peace but a permanent state of managed occupation, when the construction contracts enrich foreign firms while Gazans remain stateless and dispossessed, when the “Singapore on the Mediterranean” turns out to be a surveillance state with good infrastructure—who will be held responsible?
Not just Trump, who will have moved on to his next grift. But every nation that provided him with the legitimacy he needed to pull it off. Every construction company that bid on the contracts. Every diplomat who sat in those meetings pretended that “reconstruction partnerships” were a substitute for political rights.
India and Pakistan are being offered a chance to play at the great power table. What they’re actually being offered is a chance to be Trump’s accomplices. The question is whether they’re smart enough to see the difference, or hungry enough that they don’t care.
In the world Trump is building, everything is for sale, and everyone is for rent. Gaza is just the pilot program. The real question isn’t whether the “Board of Peace” will bring peace—it won’t. The question is whether the rest of the world is willing to pretend it might, in exchange for their thirty pieces of construction contracts. (IPA Service)
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