President Donald Trump is often accused of being a warmonger and a rogue leader who acts in defiance of international law and global opinion. His menacing plan (abandoned for now) to seize Greenland from Denmark, the “easy way” or the “hard way,” shows why that characterization has become so widely accepted outside his MAGA base.

As if to refute the allegation, Trump last week rolled out a Board of Peace designed — as he wrote in a gushing invitation letter to the prime minister of Sweden — to “bring together a distinguished group of nations ready to shoulder the noble responsibility of building LASTING PEACE.”

But whatever the superficial differences between Trump’s contemplated annexation of Greenland and his attempt to create what the invitation bills as “the most impressive and consequential Board ever assembled,” they are manifestations of the same impulse: Trump wants to do whatever he wants, wherever he wants, unconstrained by any checks or balances, and he would like to make a lot of money doing it.

The U.N. Security Council presumably had no idea, when it approved in November the creation of the Board of Peace, that it was bringing into existence a potential competitor to the United Nations itself. The council’s intent was to create a Gaza governing mechanism free of Hamas control. That goal hasn’t been achieved: Hamas still controls half of Gaza (Israel has the other half), and it refuses to disarm. That........

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