Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, speaking to JNS following the inaugural meeting of the Board of Peace in Washington on Thursday, acknowledged the immense challenges ahead while asserting that the gathering had produced genuine momentum — including troop commitments from five Muslim-majority countries and major pledges of reconstruction funding that underscored broad international buy-in for the Trump-led Gaza peace framework.

Blair, a member of the Board of Peace’s executive board, struck a note of cautious determination in his remarks. Despite acknowledging a long and often frustrating personal history with the Middle East peace process, he insisted the current moment carries unique weight. “The challenges are still immense, and you’d have to be foolish — especially after I’ve been dealing with this issue for so long — to be sort of blindly optimistic,” Blair told JNS. “But there is a plan.”

🕊️ A Framework Built on Demilitarization

At the heart of Blair’s message was a clear articulation of the plan’s two essential pillars: the demilitarization of Gaza, and the empowerment of a new technocratic committee to govern the enclave with genuine authority. Both conditions are prerequisites, in Blair’s framing, for the reconstruction funding and international troops to flow. “It depends crucially on demilitarization of Gaza, of ensuring that this new technocratic committee can govern with authority,” he said. “We just got to try and make it work.”

The Board of Peace has faced persistent questions since its inception about whether international partners would commit in any meaningful way. Countries have hesitated to fund reconstruction as long as Hamas remains armed and in control. Troop contributions to the International Stabilization Force — designed to enforce the Israel-Hamas ceasefire and stabilize the territory under a new governing structure — had been slow to materialize. Thursday’s meeting appeared to shift that calculus, at least for a significant subset of participating nations.

🌍 America at the Center — By Design

Blair was unusually direct about the broader geopolitical logic underpinning the board’s structure. Drawing a pointed contrast with the United Nations, he noted that neither the U.N.’s existing mechanisms nor its institutional culture had produced the kind of actionable peace frameworks the current moment demands. “The U.N. hasn’t produced the 20-point plan for Gaza. President Trump did,” Blair told JNS. “The U.N.’s not handling the Russia-Ukraine peace talks. President Trump is.”

Far from a rebuke of multilateralism, Blair framed the board as its reinvention — one that places American leadership at the center while deliberately distributing ownership across a coalition of supporting states. “The Board of Peace is a recognition that the peacemaking is going to be effectively led by America, but with a coalition of supporting countries — for it not to be American unilateralism, but America bringing countries together in support of a common objective peace,” he explained.

👮 Building a New Police Force

One of the most concrete signals of progress came from Nickolay Mladenov, the board’s high representative for Gaza, who revealed that 2,000 Gazans had expressed interest in joining a new enclave police force within hours of an application being published online. Blair described this as an essential building block for any stable post-conflict order. “There’s got to be a new police force — people who will be vetted by the government of Israel to make sure that we don’t allow people who are going to take that in the wrong direction for the people of Gaza,” he said.

The vetting requirement is significant. It speaks directly to one of Israel’s core conditions for any governance arrangement: ensuring that Hamas-affiliated or sympathetic individuals do not embed themselves within any new security structure under international cover. Blair’s explicit acknowledgment of this requirement signals an attempt to build the kind of Israeli trust without which any reconstruction effort would collapse.

🤝 Winning Over Skeptics — Including His Own Country

Not all countries are convinced. The board must still build broader legitimacy, and one of its most notable holdouts is Blair’s own United Kingdom. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been publicly critical of the Board of Peace, and London sent its Washington ambassador — rather than a senior minister — to Thursday’s meeting, a deliberate signal of ambivalence. Some nations have cited constitutional obligations requiring parliamentary approval before joining international bodies. Others have raised concerns that the board is designed to sideline the United Nations.

Blair pushed back on both objections. “I think people will want to join in the end,” he told JNS, before addressing the U.N. displacement argument directly. His message to hesitant governments appeared designed to lower the bar for participation: whatever a country brings to the table — whether money, troops, or capacity-building support — constitutes a meaningful contribution. “Come to the table with something, and it’s an open door,” he said.

The 49 representatives at Thursday’s inaugural session — among them 23 observer states and entities — suggest that the board is generating genuine international interest even if formal membership remains contested. Blair’s closing message was one of inclusive pragmatism: the board does not need unanimity to move forward, but it does need enough committed actors to make the plan viable. On Thursday, he argued, that threshold was reached.