American Imperialism Masquerading as a Peace Process | Audio Essay by Jeffrey Sachs

## A showdown over peace or a new mandate in disguise? The audio essay by Jeffrey D. Sachs frames a dramatic claim: what is being packaged as a peace process at the United Nations is instead an extension of American imperial control operating to extinguish Palestinian sovereignty. This framing insists that the draft Security Council resolution circulating under U.S. auspices is not a neutral attempt to stabilize Gaza but a bid to institutionalize external domination—mirroring colonial mandates of the past while insulating Israeli security priorities from international accountability. The stakes are existential not only for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, who face what Sachs characterizes as genocide, but for the credibility of the U.N. system and the wider architecture of international law. Interpreted in these terms, the debate at the Security Council becomes less a technocratic arrangement of reconstruction and more a political gambit over who legitimately exercises sovereignty and security in Palestine. ## The proposed board: structure and implications Central to the critique is a specific institutional design: a U.S.-U.K.-dominated “Board of Peace,” chaired, in the present draft, by the United States’ president. As described in the essay, this body would assume sweeping powers over governance, borders, reconstruction, and security inside Gaza. Such a construct effectively places Gaza under an externally controlled trusteeship, with Palestinian authority subordinated to the board’s judgment about when Palestinians are “ready” to govern. The mechanism reads like a modern reincarnation of a mandate: external administrators with veto over political self-determination, the ability to deploy and direct security forces answerable to the board’s “strategic guidance,” and discretion to deny transfer of authority indefinitely. Viewed from institutional theory, this would be perverse not only because it displaces Palestinian sovereignty, but because it contravenes the principles of self-determination enshrined in the U.N. Charter. If the board can determine the timetable for Palestinian governance, then sovereignty becomes conditional and revocable at the pleasure of external actors. The draft’s language, as summarized in the essay, transforms a peace operation into an apparatus of control—one that may be permanent by design rather than a temporary step toward Palestinian statehood. ## Imperial continuities and the politics of mandate Sachs’s comparison to the British Mandate is more than rhetorical flourish. Mandates historically were instruments through which imperial powers justified stewardship while retaining authority over subject territories. Replacing Britain with the United States, and cloaking the arrangement in multilateral trappings, would repeat that pattern: international legitimacy used to camouflage what is effectively unilateral control. The danger is twofold. First, it normalizes a hierarchy in global politics where sovereignty is distributed asymmetrically, and second, it signals to other states that great-power prerogatives trump collective commitments to equality of states. The farce-tragedy formulation in the essay—history repeating first as tragedy, then as farce—captures the bitter irony. The tragedy is the human cost: civilian deaths, displacement, and the hollowing out of Palestinian civic life. The farce is institutional: drafting resolutions that mimic peace while embedding structures that preclude genuine self-rule. That irony should trouble advocates of international law and practitioners of diplomacy alike: the mechanisms that are supposed to protect weaker parties may be repurposed to contain and dominate them. ## Levers of coercion: economic and military pressure Beyond institutional redesign, the essay points to a suite of coercive tools the United States and Israel allegedly deploy to secure compliance. These include withholding access to advanced technologies, conditioning World Bank and IMF financing, and leveraging military cooperation or the threat of force against states that resist alignment. Such tactics amount to a blend of soft and hard coercion—a protection racket in Sachs’s words—whereby states are incentivized, or compelled, to acquiesce to the U.S.-Israel line. The regional spillovers are significant. If countries that challenge the draft resolution can face economic and even military consequences, then voting dynamics at multilateral institutions become distortions of genuine preference aggregation. Countries with limited capacity to resist American influence may vote in favor or abstain, not because of conviction but due to pressure. The result is a shrinking political space for principled multilateralism. It also intensifies regional polarization, as Arab and Muslim-majority states are offered inducements or punished, thereby eroding trust and intensifying patterns of alignment that escalate rather than resolve conflict. ## Legal and humanitarian stakes: genocide, statehood, and security Sachs’s language is blunt: he describes the situation facing Palestinians as genocide. Whether one adopts that legal categorization or not, the collapse of civilian protection and the scale of suffering in Gaza demand urgent legal and humanitarian scrutiny. International humanitarian law obliges occupying powers and others to protect civilians and to allow humanitarian relief; any resolution that sidelines Palestinian agency and curtails oversight risks enabling impunity. At the same time, Sachs emphasizes a countervailing legal fact: Palestine already enjoys recognition as a state by a substantial majority in the U.N. General Assembly. The persistent U.S. veto on Security Council membership, he argues, is a political barrier to full international equality for Palestine. Restoring legal parity—recognizing Palestinian statehood within the 1967 borders and guaranteeing territorial integrity for both states—would align the U.N. system with its own normative commitments and could create the scaffolding for mutual security arrangements. For the essayist, a legitimate peace framework must combine recognition, protection, and disarmament: admit Palestine to the U.N., affirm 1967 borders, provide a U.N.-mandated protection force drawn from Muslim-majority states to offer salience and legitimacy in the eyes of regional actors, and disarm belligerent non-state actors who perpetuate violence. Only such measures, Sachs contends, can shift the dynamic from domination to a reciprocal security logic where both Israelis and Palestinians can claim safety under law rather than subordination to external patrons. ## Strategic and moral costs for the region and beyond The essay situates the Gaza question within a wider map of conflict and confrontation. Sachs connects U.S.-Israel operations to a range of theaters—Horn of Africa, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and tensions involving Iran—arguing that the alliance’s posture has converted the wider region into a zone of continuous low- and high-intensity conflict. The cumulative effect undermines regional development prospects and heightens the risk of miscalculation and escalation. There is also a reputational cost for the United States and the U.N. If Washington champions multilateralism rhetorically while engineering outcomes that privilege its close allies’ strategic aims, the credibility of the international system erodes. That delegitimization feeds narratives used by local actors to justify unilateral violence, and by larger powers to argue that the U.N. is ineffective or biased. Sachs’s warning is therefore systemic: the consequences of the proposed resolution extend far beyond Gaza, because they signal what kind of international order will prevail—one where great-power prerogatives can redraw rights and sovereignty under the guise of peace. ## Paths toward a defensible resolution and renewed diplomacy If the Security Council is to live up to its mandate under t

American Imperialism Masquerading as a Peace Process [Reupload] Palestine remains the endless victim of US and Israeli maneuvers. The results are not just devastating for Palestine, which has suffered an outright genocide, but for the Arab world and beyond. Read by Jeffrey D. Sachs. Read the essay here: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion /trump-s-ploy-at-the-un-is-american-imperialism-masquerading-as-a-peace-process More from Jeffrey D. Sachs: https://www.jeffsachs.org [A previous version of this essay was uploaded on this channel containing an error. We re-recorded the essay and are uploading it here again.] #Jeffrey Sachs Trump's ploy at the United Nations is American imperialism masquerading as a peace process. The Trump administration is pushing an Israeli-crafted resolution at the U.N. Security Council this week, aimed at eliminating the possibility of a state of Palestine. The resolution does three things: it establishes U.S. political control over Gaza, it separates Gaza from the rest of Palestine, and it allows the United States—and therefore Israel—to determine the timeline for Israel's supposed withdrawal from Gaza, which would mean never. This is imperialism masquerading as a peace process. In and of itself, it's no surprise. Israel runs U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. What is surprising is that the United States and Israel might actually get away with this travesty unless the world speaks up with urgency and indignation. The draft U.N. Security Council resolution would establish a U.S.-U.K.-dominated Board of Peace, chaired by none other than Donald Trump himself, and endowed with sweeping powers over Gaza’s governance, borders, reconstruction, and security. This resolution would sideline the State of Palestine and make any transfer of authority to the Palestinians dependent on the indulgence of the Board of Peace. This would be an overt return to the British Mandate of a hundred years ago, with the only change being that the United States would hold the mandate rather than Britain. If it weren't so utterly tragic, it would be laughable. As Marx said, history repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce. Yes, the proposal is farce. Yet Israel's genocide is not—it is tragedy of the first order. Incredibly, according to the draft resolution, the Board of Peace would be granted sovereign powers in Gaza. Palestinian sovereignty is left to the discretion of the board, which alone would decide when Palestinians are, quote, “ready,” unquote, to govern themselves—perhaps in another hundred years. Even military security is subordinated to the board, and the envisioned forces would answer not to the U.N. Security Council or to the Palestinian people, but to the board’s, quote, “strategic guidance,” unquote. The U.S.-Israel resolution is being put forward precisely because the rest of the -- 1 of 2 -- world—other than Israel and the United States—has woken up to two facts. First, Israel is committing genocide, a reality witnessed every day in Gaza and the West Bank, where innocent Palestinians are murdered to the satisfaction of the Israeli Defense Forces and the illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Second, Palestine is a state, albeit one whose sovereignty remains obstructed by the United States, which uses its veto in the U.N. Security Council to block Palestine's permanent U.N. membership. At the U.N. this past July, and then again in September, the General Assembly voted overwhelmingly for Palestine's statehood—a fact that sent the Israel–U.S. Zionist lobby into overdrive, resulting in the current draft resolution. For Israel to accomplish its goal of Greater Israel, the United States is pursuing a classic divide-and-conquer strategy, squeezing Arab and Islamic states with threats and inducements. When other countries resist the U.S.-Israel demands, they’re cut off from critical technologies, lose access to World Bank and IMF financing, and suffer Israeli bombing—even in countries where U.S. military bases are present. The U.S. offers no real protection; rather, it orchestrates a protection racket, extracting concessions from countries wherever its leverage exists. This extortion will continue until the global community stands up to such tactics and insists on genuine Palestinian sovereignty and U.S. and Israeli adherence to international law. Palestine remains the endless victim of U.S. and Israeli maneuvers. The results are not just devastating for Palestine, which has suffered an outright genocide, but for the Arab world and beyond. Israel and the U.S. are currently at war—overtly or covertly—across the Horn of Africa, Sudan, Somalia, North Africa, Libya, the Eastern Mediterranean, Lebanon, Syria, the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen, and Western Asia, including Iraq and Iran. If the U.N. Security Council is to provide true security in accordance with the U.N. Charter, it must not yield to U.S. pressure but instead act decisively in line with international law. A resolution truly for peace should include four vital points. First, it should welcome the state of Palestine as a sovereign U.N. member state, with the U.S. lifting its veto. Second, it should safeguard the territorial integrity of the State of Palestine and Israel according to the 1967 borders. Third, it should establish a U.N. Security Council–mandated protection force drawn from Muslim-majority states. Fourth, it should include the defunding and disarmament of all belligerent non-state entities and ensure the mutual security of Israel and Palestine. The two-state solution is about true peace—not about the politicide and genocide of Palestine or the continued attacks by militants on Israel. It’s time for both Palestinians and Israelis to be safe, and for the United States and Israel to give up the cruel delusion of permanently ruling over the Palestinian people. -- 2 of 2 --