Introduction

Donald Trump’s new Board of Peace is a litmus test for governments trying to navigate a shifting global order. Conceived initially as a mechanism to oversee a ceasefire and reconstruction process in Gaza, it has been mandated through a UN Security Council resolution as part of Trump’s 20-point plan to “end” the Gaza war and supervise a transition to new governance arrangements in the strip. Official statements frame the Board as a vehicle for “strategic oversight” and post-conflict development. Invitations have gone out to dozens of governments, and public coverage has turned participation itself into a story of which states have joined , which have refused, and which remain uncommitted. Recent reporting shows a cluster of governments from the Middle East and beyond, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, signaling their intention to participate as a way to support Gaza reconstruction and “a just and lasting peace,” while several European states, such as France, Norway, Slovenia, and Sweden, have publicly declined or expressed strong reservations about joining. 

Standard international relations vocabularies can explain some of this pattern. Small and middle powers may be bandwagoning with the United States (US), “hedging” against its dominance, or seeking material benefits from access to a new US-chaired forum. Yet these familiar strategies do not fully capture the tone of the debate. Trump himself, speaking around the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, has promoted the Board in highly personalized terms and suggested it could eventually become “the Greatest and Most Prestigious Board ever assembled,” as an elite forum that might even overshadow the United Nations (UN) as a venue for conflict management and peacebuilding. Major outlets and regional commentary now routinely describe the Board as a potential rival to the UN system. Governments are therefore not simply balancing costs and benefits. They are also responding to an emotional pressure not to be left on the outside if this experiment in “minilateralism” — which refers to small and selective diplomatic groupings that try to act more flexibly than universal bodies such as the UN, often by bringing together a limited set of powerful or directly involved actors — solidifies into a new inner circle for peace diplomacy, reconstruction contracts for their respective domestic industries and institutions, and access to US favor.

This article argues that we should treat the politics around the Board of Peace as a case of diplomatic fear of missing out, or FOMO. Building on the broader “emotional turn” in international relations, exemplified by work such as Hutchison and Bleiker’s “Theorizing Emotions in World Politics” and Hall’s Emotional Diplomacy, and on emerging research by Nitoiu that uses FOMO to analyse how the European Union navigates an increasingly geopolitical order, ” I suggest that anticipatory anxiety about exclusion is becoming an important emotional logic of alignment and institutional choice. Diplomatic FOMO does not replace material or strategic explanations for state behavior on the international stage. Instead, it helps us see how uncertainty about future status, access, and voice interacts with more conventional concerns about power and interests.

From Social Media FOMO to Diplomatic FOMO

The concept of fear of missing out originated in studies of digital culture and social media. In psychology and media research, FOMO is typically defined as a “pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent,” accompanied by a desire to stay continually connected to what others are doing. People that self-report experiencing FOMO tend to have lower well-being and higher social media engagement. A more recent overview by Gupta synthesizes this work and shows how FOMO can produce compulsive checking behaviors and constant vigilance toward social cues in highly mediated environments.

Here, FOMO can be understood as a cycle in which actors perceive a gap between themselves and others, feel anxiety about falling behind, adopt compensatory behaviors to close that gap, and then reassess their position in light of new information. In the digital context, this may take the form of compulsive social media checking or overcommitment to activities that maintain visibility and participation.

Transposed to the interstate level, diplomatic FOMO refers to a similar pattern under conditions of geopolitical uncertainty. Governments perceive that others are gaining privileged access, whether to forums, information, reconstruction funds, or reputational benefits. They experience anxiety about being excluded from a club that may shape key decisions in the future. They then adjust their behavior by joining, endorsing, or at least not publicly opposing new initiatives, to secure material advantages and to avoid being seen as out of step or left behind.

This dynamic is especially strong when institutions are new, elite, and ambiguous. When the eventual value of membership is unclear, the cost of saying ‘no’ becomes harder to calculate. The fear that one might regret non-participation later can be as motivating as concrete benefits today. This is precisely the situation surrounding Trump’s Board of Peace.

Emotions and the Club Politics of Hegemony

The emotional turn in the field of international relations has made a strong case that emotions such as fear, anger, pride, shame and empathy shape how leaders interpret threats, manage alliances, and respond to crises. Reviews such as Koschut’s “Emotions and International Relations” and Solomon’s The Politics of Subjectivity in American Foreign Policy Discourses show that emotions are not irrational noise. In world politics, they stabilize or destabilize foreign-policy narratives, legitimise particular courses of action, and structure who gets to feel what, and whose feelings count.

Within this broad research field, FOMO has only recently begun to appear explicitly. Nitoiu’s work (2024) on the European Union’s experience of FOMO in a “more geopolitical” world order, for example, argues that EU policymakers oscillate between anxiety about being left behind by more muscular powers and a desire to remain a rule-setter rather than a rule-taker. 

The Board of Peace illuminates a related, but distinct, phenomenon. Here the relevant emotion is not only the anxiety of declining or middle powers, it is also the engineered sense of prestige and exclusivity that a hegemon can attach to a new institution. The Board is chaired by Trump and includes a high-profile slate of appointees such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and World Bank President Ajay Banga, announced in mid-January 2026. It is often framed as a possible rival or alternative to the UN system, with a reported one-billion-dollar fee for permanent membership and time-limited rotating seats. The board’s personalised structure is central to that concern. The charter names Donald Trump himself as inaugural Chairman, separately from the US representative, and gives the Chairman broad authority over membership, subsidiary bodies, and appointments. Trump also described it as the ‘Greatest and Most Prestigious Board ever assembled at any time, any place. 

In such a setting, hegemonic power operates through club design. Invitations are extended selectively: some governments are publicly named as early joiners, while others are known to be hesitating or excluded. The prestige of the forum is repeatedly emphasized in Trump’s own rhetoric. All this makes declining an invitation more than a simple policy choice. It becomes a decision to stand outside a potentially influential inner circle at a time of acute crisis.

Trump’s Board of Peace as a FOMO Machine

The Board of Peace is unusually well suited to generate diplomatic FOMO. Several features matter.

First, the Board was anchored in a specific, high-salience conflict, as the War on Gaza, but it has also been framed as having a wider remit to address global disputes. For governments in the Middle East and the broader Global South, joining the Board is presented as a way to influence Gaza reconstruction, humanitarian access, and security arrangements. At the same time, Trump and his advisers have suggested that the Board’s mandate will expand beyond Gaza, raising the fear that those who stay outside could find themselves marginalized in future crises as well.

Second, membership is public and politically performative. Media outlets and official statements have circulated partial lists of states that have already agreed to join, naming actors such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Egypt, Kazakhstan, and Argentina, while noting others, such as France, Norway, Slovenia, and Sweden, that have declined or expressed concern. The question of who has joined and who has not has become a story in its own right, producing reputational pressure. Non-participation can be read domestically and internationally as skepticism about the Board, reluctance to align with Washington or indifference to Gaza’s fate.

Third, the Board’s institutional status and longevity are deliberately ambiguous. It has been acknowledged in a UN Security Council resolution as part of the Gaza ceasefire framework, but it is not a UN body, and its authority outside and inside Gaza is undefined. Trump has alternated between insisting that “you have got to let the UN continue” and hinting that his board might outshine the UN in effectiveness. Under these conditions, governments cannot easily know whether membership will, in five years, look like a wise investment in a key global forum or a costly association with an experiment that failed.

This is precisely the kind of uncertainty under which FOMO thrives. The more difficult it is to predict the payoffs of joining, the more leaders may worry that saying no will be judged harshly by future publics, partners or rivals. That anxiety is amplified when the United States, as the global hegemon, signals that it will remember who supported its initiative and who stood aside.

It is also visible in the way some governments explain their decisions. Reports about reluctant or critical capitals, such as France or Norway, emphasize tensions between normative concerns about undermining the UN or legitimizing a highly personalized structure and a perceived need not to isolate oneself from a process that may shape Gaza’s future and global diplomatic hierarchies. Even actors as symbolically powerful as the Vatican have framed their response in terms of carefully evaluating Trump’s invitation, which implicitly acknowledges that the stakes are material as well as  reputational and symbolic.

What Diplomatic FOMO Adds to IR Explanations

Conceptually, diplomatic FOMO helps refine several aspects of existing international relations explanations. First, it clarifies the emotional texture of alignment. Traditional accounts of bandwagoning and hedging focus on risk calculations under anarchy. Diplomatic FOMO draws attention to how those calculations are saturated with affect, such as anxiety about being absent when decisions are made, pride in being recognized as a “player,” and shame or embarrassment at being publicly listed among the hold-outs. These emotions do not automatically determine policy outcomes but rather they condition what leaders perceive as politically possible or socially acceptable.

Second, it underscores the importance of institutional design as emotional engineering. The Board of Peace’s exclusive branding, high financial threshold for permanent seats and personalized leadership are not merely organizational quirks. They help produce a hierarchy of insiders and outsiders that makes non-participation feel risky in itself. In this way, club-like forums become tools through which hegemons can harness the material dependence and the fears of exclusion.

Third, and more normatively, diplomatic FOMO highlights a tension between inclusion and pluralism. When governments join an initiative like the Board primarily to avoid missing out, rather than because they are convinced of its legitimacy or design, this may narrow the space for open contestation of institutional alternatives. It becomes harder to say “this is not the right forum” when the emotional stakes of appearing absent from the table are high.

Taking diplomatic FOMO seriously suggests several directions for research. At the empirical level, scholars could analyze the affective signifiers underpinning how leaders and diplomats discuss the Board of Peace and similar forums; how domestic media in joining and non-joining states narrate the costs of being inside versus outside such clubs; and how other emotions, such as fear, pride, or humiliation, interact to shape policy  decisions toward U.S. hegemony and initiatives. 

For practitioners, the argument is not a recommendation either to join or to boycott the Board of Peace. Instead, it offers a way of assessing the political implications of participation. Before committing to a new hegemon-led forum, policymakers should consider what concrete advantages membership is expected to deliver and whether concerns about exclusion are driving the decision. They should also examine whether participation risks reinforcing an institutional arrangement that centralises authority, reduces transparency, or sidelines existing multilateral mechanisms. Engagement may at times be strategically useful, but it should not come at the cost of losing the ability to question, challenge, or resist the forum’s claims to authority. 

Conclusion

Trump’s Board of Peace is not only a controversial experiment in conflict management. It is also a revealing case of how emotional outlooks can influence international alignment in an era of contested hegemony. The rush of some governments to sign up, the hesitation of others and the language used on all sides suggest that diplomatic FOMO, an anticipatory fear of being excluded from key decisions and future benefits, is doing important work in states’ strategic calculations.

By bringing FOMO into the broader conversation on emotions in International Relations, this article has argued that we can better understand why states sometimes join institutions whose mandates they question, and why even powerful actors find it hard simply to say “no.” As new “minilateral” forums emerge around peace, trade, climate, and technology, the Board of Peace may prove to be only one early example of a wider pattern. If scholars and practitioners want to understand, and resist the quiet pressures that shape who sits at which table where necessary, they will have to take seriously not just the distribution of capabilities, but also the distribution of fears about missing out.

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