Donald Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ Convenes Its First Meeting

Mr. Schmemann, an Opinion writer, is a former Moscow bureau chief of The Times.

To anyone who spent time in the old U.S.S.R., President Trump’s newly hatched “Board of Peace,” which holds its first meeting on Thursday at the newly rechristened Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, evokes worrying echoes.

Nobody loved peace as much as the Soviet people, or at least it seemed that way in the cascade of official proclamations. It was professed on billboards and May Day slogans and in “peace cruises” down the Volga at which starry-eyed foreigners were invited to sing “We Shall Overcome” with brightly dressed schoolchildren or met with peace-loving “ordinary” (read: carefully primed) Soviet citizens to discuss American militarism.

“Mir i druzhba” — “peace and friendship” — was often the first toast in any formal meeting between Soviet officials and foreigners, with the subtext that we, the foreigners, were the warmongers. A colleague of mine dubbed these toastmasters the “peace and friendship hard-liners,” and the underground humor mill suggested that many Soviets agreed. “Mir” also means “world” in Russia, which made for a neat anti-slogan: “We want mir! The whole mir!”

The Kremlin did not have a “Board” or an “Institute” dedicated to peace, like Mr. Trump now does, but it did have a “World Peace Council,” a “Soviet Peace Fund” and a “Soviet Peace Committee,” headquartered in Moscow on Prospekt Mira, the Avenue of Peace. The groups were a major weapon in Soviet foreign policy, organizing regular international peace conferences and providing generous secret funding for many international antiwar movements that were, in fact, glorifying the Soviet Union.

Like any concerted effort to fool people, it worked some of the time. I met Russians who seemed to really believe that America was itching for war. On one news-gathering trip deep into Russia, I was asked so often why “you Americans” want war — either naïvely or provocatively — that I finally snapped at one questioner. We can’t help it, I said; we just love war so much.

It’s not clear whether Mr. Trump is aware of how much the Soviets loved peace, too, though he has offered a seat on his Board of Peace to Vladimir Putin, the successor to the Bolshevik bosses, whose invasion of Ukraine has so far led to almost two million people being killed, wounded or missing.

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Serge Schmemann joined The Times in 1980 and worked as the bureau chief in Moscow, Bonn and Jerusalem and at the United Nations. He was editorial page editor of The International Herald Tribune in Paris from 2003 to 2013.

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