At Davos, Trump’s Gaza Peace Board Opens a New Era of Achievement

The opening meeting of the Gaza Board of Peace at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland was an extraordinary event — within a week of extraordinary events. President Trump reached out and named a former British prime minister, Tony Blair, as one of the first members of the board. This brought to the board a distinguished senior world leader whose knowledge of the region and efforts for peace have made him a serious and thoughtful participant.Mr. Blair served Britain between 1994 and 2007. He is a remarkably competent man who unfortunately suffered from being too moderate for the increasingly left-wing, activist Labour Party. While he was in office — and for the last 18 years — Mr. Blair has spent a lot of his time on Middle Eastern issues. He heads up the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which he founded in 2016.Given Mr. Blair’s background, after the meeting I asked him why he thought Mr. Trump and his team had been able to accomplish so much in such a short period of time. In essence, Mr. Blair remarked that the people involved around Mr. Trump are not politicians. As a consequence, they approach all these long-term challenges from a different mindset and skillset. Britain’s former prime minister, Tony Blair, on October 13, 2025 at Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. Suzanne Plunkett/pool/Getty ImagesIf you spent some time with Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, Secretary of the Treasury Steve Bessent, or Jared Kushner (who gave a remarkable briefing on Gaza at the board meeting), you would understand just how insightful Mr. Blair’s comment is. These are people who focus on getting things done. They want to accomplish goals — not talk about them.I must confess my own thinking has been reshaped by watching the Witkoff-Kushner team. Empowered by Mr. Trump’s leadership, they have assembled a visionary-entrepreneurial plan for a dramatically bolder, more beautiful and more transformational Gaza.If you have not watched Mr. Kushner’s presentation at the Board of Peace, you really should take the time to see the scale and boldness of what they want to do — and the spirit with which they are trying to accomplish it.One of the real surprises to me (and it should not have been given Dubai’s enormous, modern skyscrapers) is the scale of engineering and construction available in the Middle East.President Trump and world leaders at the signing ceremony for the ‘Board of Peace’ at the World Economic Forum on January 22, 2026. Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesAfter Mr. Kushner outlined a remarkably ambitious, optimistic project of rebuilding Gaza, a fellow attendee turned to me and said that the plan could be completed quickly — because Mr. Kushner’s team would rely on engineers and entrepreneurs rather than lawyers and bureaucrats. Making these huge achievements on a short timeline will be immensely important for proving to people in the region that a better, peaceful, cooperative future was attainable.This discipline of focusing on end results and achievements rather than process and excuses may be one of the primary ingredients in Trumpism. The president’s own career in entrepreneurship and construction has clearly taught him a set of powerful habits of achievement. These habits have led him to bring together one of the most results-oriented and entrepreneurial cabinets in American history.As my wife Callista (there in her role as America’s ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein) and I participated in the World Economic Forum, it was clear that Mr. Trump has begun to shape an entirely new pattern of positive vision and endless action.Despite the liberal press’s myopic focus on Greenland, there was a real sense that America is on a path of greater engagement and cooperation with allies to create a better future. It could lead to an entirely new dynamic of leadership than anyone could have imagined just a few years ago. And Mr. Blair may have had the most profound insight into why it is happening.

At Davos, Trump’s Gaza Peace Board Opens a New Era of Achievement

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