+ The Davos debut of Trump’s Board of Peace, his scheme to replace the United Nations and international law, with a group of like-minded autocrats willing to pony up $1 billion a seat, was a bust. No wonder, given that its first project is to finish the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza so the strip can be transformed into beachside resorts, gambling casinos and data centers for the Davos set. Only 19 client-state countries signed up and Netanyahu was forced to skip the signing ceremony after Switzerland confirmed it would enforce the ICC arrest warrant against him over war crimes in Gaza.

+ Isa bin Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, minister of the prime minister’s court, Bahrain
+ Nasser Bourita, minister of foreign affairs, Morocco
+ Javier Milei, president, Argentina
+ Nikol Pashinyan, prime minister, Armenia
+ Ilham Aliyev, President, Azerbaijan
+ Rosen Zhelyazkov, prime minister, Bulgaria
+ Viktor Orban, prime minister, Hungary
+ Prabowo Subianto, president, Indonesia
+ Ayman Al Safadi, minister of foreign affairs, Jordan
+ Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, president, Kazakhstan
+ Vjosa Osmani-Sadriu, president, Kosovo
+ Mian Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif, prime minister, Pakistan
+ Santiago Peña, president, Paraguay
+ Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, president, Qatar
+ Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, minister of foreign affairs, Saudi Arabia
+ Hakan Fidan, minister of foreign affairs, Turkey
+ Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, special envoy to the U.S. for the UAE
+ Shavkat Mirziyoyev, president, Uzbekistan
+ Gombojavyn Zandanshatar, prime minister, Mongolia

+ Trump couldn’t even get Bukele to pony up, apparently.

+ We destroyed your schools, mosques, hospitals, water treatment plants, orchards, libraries, fishing fleets, cemeteries and houses and gave you….AI data centers!

+ Yaroslav Trofimov, WSJ’s foreign affairs editor: “Trump’s Board of Peace looks very much like a plan to replace the UN Security Council with an imperial court of vassals in which he is chairman for life, even after leaving the White House, with veto over every decision and the sole right to designate a successor. And a $1 billion fee for aspiring permanent members.”

+ Israel just demolished the Jerusalem headquarters of UNRWA, yet Israel remains a member in good standing of the UN. Why?

+ At an Israeli-American Council session, Miriam Adelson was asked: How do you buy and exercise influence over politicians in the US?

Adelson: “Can you allow me not to answer? … I want to be truthful and there are so many things I don’t want to talk about.”

+ A straightforward headline for once from the Washington Post on the latest Israeli atrocity, with no weasel words or caveats…

+ But how did Bari Weiss report Israel killing one of her own staffers on the homepage of CBS News? By eliding the identity of the killers…

+ Stephen Semler: “By the time the House passed the State Department bill with $3.3 billion for Israel last week, the US had already given Israel $352 billion in aid since its founding.”

+ Is Obama’s silence during the mauling of the country and ransacking of the Constitution a sign that he recognizes his deep complicity in what’s going on, or is he just permanently checked out? 

+ Trump is the first US president to be gifted a Nobel Peace Prize from someone whose country he just bombed. But he still can’t top his bitter rival, Barack Obama, who is the first Nobel Peace Prize winner to bomb another Nobel Peace Prize winner, Doctors Without Borders, in Kunduz, Afghanistan.

+ Nicolas Kristof: “As Trump was saying in his press conference that America was never more respected, I took a call from a prominent European. He heard Trump’s voice and asked if I was listening to the ‘rambling mendacities’ of ‘the demented leader of the free world.’ So much for global respect.”

+ What is the Board of Peace meant to do? Only Trump knows for sure. He’d kept the charter for the organization secret until someone leaked the document to the Times of Israel. It’s the Trump-Kennedy Center on steroids. Trump has appointed himself the chairman for life. Yes, he will remain its leader well after his presidency ends, if it ends. He alone invites the board members, who will serve a three-year term, unless they pay (him) a cool billion, which secures them a lifetime seat (unless he decides to evict them). All serve at Trump’s pleasure. Although originally conceived as a governing board for the reconstruction of Gaza, the charter doesn’t even mention the Strip. Instead, it indicates a willingness to intrude anywhere it wants “to promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict.” Humanitarian interventionism, Trump-style. Trump reserves the right to veto any policies adopted by the board, kick people off the board (no refund), choose his own successor as chairman and impose his own policies by executive fiat. Pax Trumpiana, in other words.

+ Meanwhile, already bored with peace, Trump has sent the USS Lincoln carrier fleet to the western Indian Ocean with new threats to bomb Iran. With his latest spat of cruise-missile rattling, Trump seems to be doing everything in his power to rescue the Mullahs. Nothing will unite the feuding factions in Iran like a US attack on the faltering regime.

+ Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi: “Years of austerity alongside the rise of an increasingly kleptocratic and predatory elite have steadily eroded the state’s capacity to respond to crises, while the language of ‘resistance’ has long since ceased to mean anything to the population at large. Many Iranians blame their country’s isolation and economic immiseration on their leaders’ foreign policy decisions, which have long been decoupled from the people’s will and their democratic aspirations.”

+ The Israeli military has acknowledged that the Gaza death toll is at least 71,667. But Ralph Nader puts the real number at more than 600,000. 

+ Lyin’ Ted (Cruz) Unbound…Axios got hold of hitherto “secret” audio recordings of Ted Cruz unloaded on his 2026 rival for the presidency, JD Vance, calling him Tucker Carlson’s puppet: “Tucker created JD. JD is Tucker’s protégé, and they are one and the same.” Cruz blamed Carlson and Vance for the ouster of Mike Walz as Trump’s National Security Adviser, supposedly because Walz supported a bombing campaign against Iran, and his replacement, Daniel Davis, didn’t. Cruz called Davis “a guy who viciously hates Israel” and bragged about getting him fired.

On the tape, Cruz describes a meeting in April with Trump, who he described as being “in a bad mood,” where Cruz warned the president that his tariffs were going to be his downfall: “Mr. President, if we get to November of 26 and people’s 401(k)s are down 30% and prices are up 10-20% at the supermarke we’re going to go into Election Day, face [sic] a bloodbath…You’re going to lose the House; you’re going to lose the Senate; you’re going to spend the next two years being impeached every single week.”

Trump snarled, “Fuck you, Ted.”