The United States (US) under Trump continues to provoke and be involved in wars abroad. In March 2026, the US and Israel attacked Iran and assassinated some of the country’s key leaders, and then struck Lebanon. The latest offensive in the West Asia region follows the decades-long US backing of the Israeli occupation and the later genocide in Palestine.
Intensifying US militarism occurs today amid slow global economic growth after the pandemic crisis of the early 2020s. The US government has become brazen in its use of force against countries to secure its resource interests or advance regime change in smaller opponent countries. Great power competition is the primary focus against larger powers like China and Russia, over economic, industrial, military, and technological hegemony.
Current US strategy documents reflect these shifts, of a power engaged in geopolitical competition amid crises. The same is true in references to US or US-led economic and development institutions. Foreign assistance priorities is now explicitly about putting “American interests first,” confirming a decades-old point of critique from civil society.¹ International financial institutions (IFIs) are discussed in the same way, as being in service to US goals. The November 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) claims that “this [Trump] administration is dedicated to using its leadership position to implement reforms that ensure they [IFIs and multilateral development banks] serve American interests.”
Among global IFIs, the US is known to have dominant shares and voting power in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group (IMF-WB). The NSS framing is akin to a 2025 statement by the current US Treasury secretary, who directs US policies at the IMF-WB: “Far from stepping back, America First seeks to expand U.S. leadership in international institutions like the IMF and World Bank.” The US has indeed stepped back elsewhere, exiting from international institutions working on climate, gender, and other issues scorned by the current Republican administration. The US has also reversed prior work for these issues at the IFIs.
The role of the US-led IFIs in advancing US economic and geopolitical priorities has also been a long-standing point of critique by social movements and other voices critical of the IMF-WB. For instance, in 1968, after leading the US’ Vietnam War strategy, US Defense secretary Robert McNamara left the post and then served as the World Bank president. His Bank presidency, from 1968 to 1981, coincided with the IMF-WB’s deeper forays into the “Third World,” implementing structural adjustment in an era of national liberation movements and the IFIs’ support for Cold War military dictatorships, from Chile to the Philippines.
Today, this critique of the IFIs and US militarism may be most apparent with the World Bank’s involvement—and active role—in the Trump-led “Board of Peace.”
On September 29, 2025, Trump announced a Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict. Building on Trump’s document, a “Gaza peace plan” was signed by Israel and Hamas on October 9. This was two years since Palestinian armed movements launched a major operation, with the US-backed Israeli occupation using the offensive as a pretext for escalation, war crimes, and genocide.
The ceasefire created by the October agreement has been violated by the occupation through bombings and more killings of civilians. Hostilities against Palestinians and the Israeli annexation of land has only continued. But in the succeeding six months the US and the World Bank pushed a phase focused on supposedly reconstructing and stabilising Gaza. At its center is a US-led “Board of Peace” (BoP).
The October US peace plan described the BoP as a “new international transitional body” led by Trump to “set the framework and handle the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza.” By November 2025, the US succeeded in gaining approval of a UN Security Council resolution that welcomed the establishment of this BoP. The World Bank was involved early on. When the US resolution was at its draft stage, the World Bank President Ajay Banga wrote a supportive letter to the US ambassador to the UN. The US proposal “would provide the needed framework for engagement by the Bank,” Banga said.
The UNSC approved the resolution in the same month with abstain votes by China and Russia. Palestinians were notably absent from this conversation. The resolution contained language calling upon the World Bank and other IFIs “to facilitate and provide financial resources to support the reconstruction and development of Gaza” through a donor-based trust fund. The UNSC resolution created other mandates, allowing the BoP to enter agreements and establish governance, reconstruction, and coordination entities to actualise the US-led peace plan;² and to create an “International Stabilisation Force” condemned as being a military presence favouring the Israeli occupation.
Since then, the BoP has been evolving in the direction of being a parallel US-led institution outside the UNSC — a trend that is contested by Russia. All BRICS countries have been invited but have not yet joined the BoP; the same is the case for the European Union and a few other countries in Western Europe. Israel joined the BoP by mid-February 2026, through its Prime Minister Netanyahu who still faces an arrest warrant at the International Criminal Court. Trump has declared a pledge for USD 10 billion to finance the BoP during its first meeting in February in Washington DC.
For a group of UN experts, the “creation of the Board of Peace is an illegal and illegitimate maneuver by powerful States driven by nostalgia and avarice”— with the World Bank supporting an illegitimate institution.
In November 2025, the same month as the UNSC resolution, the World Bank launched a Financial Intermediary Fund for Gaza Reconstruction and Development (GRAD).³ In the GRAD fund, the WB assumes a limited trustee role. It means that the WB has “no responsibility or accountability, fiduciary or otherwise, for the use of the funds after they have been transferred.” The WB claims a role only in managing the funds which ultimately comes from public and private donors.
The GRAD fund articulates the same private capital-first approach, repeated by the Bank across countries especially in the last ten or so years. Observers have noted the Bank’s prior failure to de-risk, attract, and catalyse trillions from institutional investors into low-resourced developing countries. Investors, in reality, flock to countries where profit margins are already higher and secure. Yet the Bank pushes the same approach for Gaza recovery and reconstruction: “initiatives [will be] designed to unlock private capital…and enhance the business environment,” while claiming to boost jobs and entrepreneurship.
The vision is to have Gaza “integrat[ed] into global markets.” In the last few decades, the record has been an integration into economic networks dominated by corporations and finance capital. The result has been resource drains, weakened domestic capacity, and increased risks from the volatilities of world markets. In the current time of America First, integration into the world economy faces added risks from US economic pressure.
The Bank’s GRAD approach puts centrality on what it calls a pivot to “private sector-led growth.” Given the explicit US foreign policy framing that IFIs’ and other development projects must serve US interests, there is the risk that the GRAD will benefit already-powerful US finance capital and investors. For instance, Marc Rowan, the billionaire CEO of US asset management firm Apollo Global Management, is part of the BoP Executive Board. This approach would expand the already-significant complicity of corporate actors in “illegal occupation, apartheid, and…genocide,” already evidenced in UN expert reports.
Ultimately at stake in the BoP and the World Bank’s GRAD fund is the question of who gets to decide on what to do, how to do it, and for whom. The scale of Gaza’s destruction in just two years since 2023 involved the complete razing of whole cities, famine, a water crisis, the loss of 97% of tree crops and 82% of annual crops.
By February 2026, the BoP announced that its Gaza plan is moving “from ceasefire to demilitarisation, technocratic governance, and reconstruction.” Donald Trump, months before the creation of the BoP, declared he will “redevelop” Gaza with the US “owning that piece of land.” This treatment of Gaza as akin to private real-estate property persists in the proposed visions of so-called reconstruction.
The US administration’s vision, presented at the 2026 World Economic Forum, turns Gaza into a zone with coastal tourism, data centres, economic zones, and recreational facilities. Leaked documents indicate that the US also has plans for a 142-hectare military base for the BoP’s International Stabilisation Force. Such a vision of reconstruction has been criticised as an “imperialist” project, a new phase in the US-backed Israeli occupation’s annexation, forced displacement, and exploitation of Palestine’s people and resources. Gazans’ economic, cultural, and social lives will be further erased as the city will be reconfigured for investors, violating their right of return and self-determination. In the process, Gazans may be “voluntarily relocated.”
US “reconstruction” proposals were once praised by Netanyahu, as Israel also expressed in 2024 a similar plan for turning Gaza into an economic zone.
For a group of UN Special Rapporteurs and Independent Experts, any vision of reconstruction should be led by Gaza’s residents: “[T]he occupation must end, and there should be guarantees for non-repetition as prerequisites for any sustainable and rights-based reconstruction process.” One example is the Phoenix Plan supported by the Union of Gaza Strip Municipalities, which is more focused on ensuring services, food production, local livelihoods and what the plan calls a “social economy.”
After supporting the UNSC resolution that created the BoP, and heeding the UNSC resolution’s call for a Gaza fund, the World Bank President Ajay Banga was among the seven individuals appointed by Trump to the BoP’s founding Executive Board. Announced in January 2026, the Executive Board is a body tasked to operationalise the BoP’s plans. For Banga, the country members of the BoP remain to be the “deciders” and the Executive Board serves as the “worker bees.” The Executive Board is directly chaired by Trump (as chairman for life), with US Secretary of State Rubio, Trump’s son-in-law and appointed “peace envoy” Jared Kushner, and the US Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff. The latter two, like Trump, are billionaire real estate magnates. The CEO of finance capitalist firm Apollo Global Management is also a member.
The Bank president’s presence in the Executive Board has so far divided opinions. For some, this compromises the Bank’s supposed neutrality as a multilateral institution; for others, the Bank lends the assurance of expertise for investors who may be wary of the BoP’s politicised nature. For UN independent experts and some special rapporteurs, the BOP is illegitimate as its “creation…contravenes the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice of July 2024, demanding the immediate end to Israel’s occupation.” The BoP’s work, then, is “the antithesis of a human rights-based approach to reconstruction.”
The history of Bretton Woods institutions themselves has always been political and intertwined with US goals. This continues to this day as the Bank serves to legitimise the BoP and support US interests. In 2024 Ajay Banga claimed that Trump understands the value of the World Bank as an institution “delivering greater value for that dollar,” and remarked: “At the end of the day, if by doing the right development overseas, we can help to drive markets for American companies, that’s great.”
The first article of Trump’s September 2025 Comprehensive Plan, affirmed by the November UNSC BoP resolution, is founded on US “counter-terror” language: “Gaza will be a deradicalized terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbors.” The US responses that followed this plan continued the worn-out approach of equating peace with so-called counter-terrorism and dismantling armed movements. Since 9/11 this policy has largely subsumed development projects to military objectives. As in past US counter-terror operations, this approach tends to leave unresolved the primary grievances of the decades-old Palestinian people’s struggle.
Arguably, a sustainable peace can only be founded on the achievement of justice for the genocide and the occupation’s crimes, and the Palestinian people’s rights (including their right of return) and sovereignty. As affirmed in a 1990 UN General Assembly resolution, “the Palestinian people and all peoples under foreign occupation and colonial domination [have the inalienable right] to self-determination, national independence, territorial integrity, national unity and sovereignty without foreign interference.” The same resolution “[r]eaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means.”
The destiny of Gaza, especially in these times of unilateralism and growing disregard for international law, still rests in the hands of the Palestinian people’s organisations and social movements who continue to oppose the current phase of expansionism.
Solidarity movements can continue to campaign against different actors’ economic, political, and cultural entanglements with the Israeli occupation. The World Bank’s ongoing involvement in Gaza establishes its clear link to the system of genocide, apartheid, and rights violations. Movements opposing genocide from both global North and global South, and even civil society organisations engaging the Bretton Woods institutions, can work on questioning the World Bank’s role in current expansionist plans—from its GRAD to the WB President’s presence in the BoP.
Social movements and their allies at the Annual Meetings of the IMF-World Bank in Bangkok this coming October, or even those based in the headquarters of these institutions, can also engage in campaigning against the Bank’s role in the BoP and the colonial reconstruction of Gaza. With the Bank entrenched in US security strategy, the long-standing aspiration of anti-imperialist social movements’ to shut down the IMF-World Bank can only be part of the bigger struggle against militarism and genocide, and for liberation. #
Endnotes
[1] For instance, civil society and activists have criticised how USAID advanced US interests instead of its claims to supporting development, such as post-9/11. The central critique of neocolonial dynamics remains applicable to the Trump administration’s shift from soft power and influence to more direct war offensive and unilateral pressure. In shifting tactics for influence, the abrupt closure of USAID has also cut off resources to various programmes on health and services around the world.
[2] More recently, the BoP has been evolving in the direction of a parallel US-led institution that is outside the UNSC, without the membership of Russia, China, and other countries. Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu, who still faces charges at the ICC, is part of the BoP.
[3] The new fund is not the first WB trust fund for occupied Palestinian territories. Prior Palestine-related WB trust funds have channeled resources to the Palestinian Authority that governs the West Bank; Palestine cannot receive direct loans as it is not a member of the World Bank nor the IMF.
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