Posted originally on Jan 20, 2026 by Martin Armstrong |  

The Board of Peace was established in November 2025 to champion the Gaza-Israel ceasefire. Donald Trump will act as the first chairman and has begun inviting nations to join, including Russia. The headlines are reacting as if this is some radical, unprecedented concept.

I have said repeatedly that the real objective for decades has never been “defense.” It has been control. NATO was transformed from a Cold War alliance into a political weapon, and once you turn something into an instrument of power, you can no longer negotiate honestly because your entire structure depends upon having an enemy. That is why every peace proposal gets attacked by the very people who claim they want peace. Their careers, budgets, and political relevance depend on conflict.

Here is what the press will not tell you. Russia was asked to join NATO in the 1990s. I have seen the declassified documents from the Clinton Administration and provided them in my book, The Plot to Seize Russia. Russia was offered the chance to join NATO. That was viewed internally as a surrender to the United States, and it fueled political backlash inside Russia. Yeltsin standing on the tank was not some Hollywood moment. It was the turning point where Russia’s internal struggle over its future collided with how the West was positioning itself behind the scenes.

The West had a window where it could have ended the Cold War properly. Instead, it pivoted into expansion, not because it was “necessary,” but because it was profitable and politically useful. They wanted a unipolar world. They wanted Russia down permanently. They wanted Europe locked into dependence. And now they stand there shocked that Russia will not play the role of obedient subordinate.

The Board of Peace is a public relations attempt to manage a crisis that has spiraled beyond anyone’s control. The bankers, the politicians, and the bureaucrats are all trapped. Europe is collapsing economically, and war has become the only policy tool they have left to distract the population from the failure of their fiscal mismanagement, their censorship, their energy suicide, and their endless taxation.

Trump’s instinct here is not wrong: peace comes from aligning interests, not moral posturing. If you want to stop wars, you have to remove the incentive structure that rewards war. Bringing Russia into a broader security framework is not a “gift” to Russia. It is a way to remove the excuse for escalation. It is what should have happened decades ago. But the Neocons cannot allow that because the moment there is peace, the public starts asking where all the money went, why their standard of living is falling, and why government debt has exploded to levels that cannot be sustained.

Europe claims Russia is the threat, yet they have been pushing NATO to Russia’s border for decades while pretending it was “defensive.” If Russia had placed a military alliance on the US border, Washington would have responded the same way. This is not complicated. It is human nature and geopolitics.

The world is moving into a Sovereign Debt Crisis. That is the real backdrop to all of this. Governments are desperate because they cannot fund themselves honestly anymore. They will use war to justify capital controls. They will use war to justify surveillance. They will use war to justify anything. That is why the trend is becoming far more hostile globally. This is not about one man, one country, or one election. It is the cycle of government itself. Confidence rises and falls, and when confidence collapses, governments always reach for force.

If Trump is serious about a new peace structure, it will not be popular among the establishment because it threatens the entire war machine. And if Russia joining NATO is even discussed, it will expose the biggest lie of the last 30 years — that this was ever about defense rather than domination. They had the chance in the 1990s. They rejected real peace then, because peace did not