Donald Trump says he foresees an ‘everlasting peace’ — Immanuel Kant would have found the flaws in that vision

A colorized portrait of German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Photo by Science Source/Photo Researchers History/Getty Images

Robert Zaretsky November 24, 2025

When Donald Trump announced that the remaining Israeli hostages had been released, he remarked, “I think it’s going to be a lasting peace, hopefully an everlasting peace.”

This prediction, predictably hailed by his cabinet members, predictably failed to win the attention of the Nobel Prize committee. The following day, the committee awarded this year’s peace prize to the Venezuelan activist Maria Corina Machado. But last week, Trump did get a welcome nod from, of all places, the United Nations when the Security Council voted 13-0 (with Russian and China abstaining) to endorse Trump’s peace plan. In a post on Truth Social, Trump hailed the vote as a “moment of true Historic proportion.”

While the capitalized “Historic” might suggest that Trump has been dipping into G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, his use of “everlasting peace” points to an earlier German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. In 1795, the elderly Kant published an essay in an age as unsettled and unsettling as our own. An event of truly historic proportion, the French Revolution, had burst into being six years earlier. What William Wordsworth described as the “dawn of a new age” — yet another phrase borrowed by Trump, though he replaced “new” with, of course, “golden” — soon became a blood-dimmed age with the advent of the Terror and revolutionary wars.

In faraway Königsberg, the East Prussian city where he spent his entire life, Kant nevertheless believed a republican France, born in violence, would usher in an age of perpetual peace. Titling his essay “Toward Perpetual Peace,” Kant set out the conditions, based on the dictates of reason, for a peace worthy of the name. In the 230 years since its publication, the essay has become a touchstone in democratic peace theory, which argues that democratic and republican nations are less likely than authoritarian nations to go to war.

Briefly, Kant sets out several negative conditions for a lasting peace. These forbid a state making a temporary peace treaty while planning for future wars, annexing part of another state, interfering in the internal affairs of another state, and engaging in acts that create mistrust in another state, thus rendering a lasting peace impossible. He then follows with three positive conditions, most importantly that every state must be a republic. The reason Kant emphasized this condition was his conviction that a republican state, where decisions are made by citizens, will think twice, for reasons of economics and ethics, before going to war.

Democratic peace theorists argue that history offers several cases where Kant’s theory has been borne out. But our administration’s current peace plan serves as an obvious counterexample, one unlikely to be provisional, much less perpetual. Let’s tick off the conditions, starting with the ban on planning for future wars. Only someone asleep for the past 60 years would believe that either side satisfies this criterion. As for the ban on annexing another state’s territory, Israel’s creeping annexation of Palestinian land has, under the present government, become a mad land rush. Until now limited to Palestinian land in the West Bank, Gaza is next if the extreme rightwing settler movement has its way. And when it comes to the ban on internal interference in another state’s affairs, this has long been a feature, not a bug, of both Hamas and Israeli government policy.

But the biggest hurdle is Kant’s positive condition, namely that lasting peace can be only achieved between democratic republics. We know that Gaza under the rule of Hamas was no more a democratic republic than, say, the Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea. But the present-day Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — busy neutering the judiciary, monopolizing the media, and pursuing the destruction of Gaza against the wishes of an overwhelming majority of Israeli citizens — is authoritarian-adjacent. (Last month, Harvard’s Steven Levitsky, the leading scholar on the decline and fall of democracies, declared in Ha’aretz that “Israel has crossed the line [and] is sliding into competitive authoritarianism.”)

By the time Kant died in 1804, his expectation that 1789 would lead to an era of lasting peace instead led to an era of lasting war that left millions of men, women and children dead and maimed in its wake. Nevertheless, Kant remained convinced that reason and reason alone could and should govern not only our ethics but also our politics. He did so precisely because, as he famously wrote, no straight thing was ever made from the crooked timber of humankind.

Since the timber of the political actors involved in the current plan could hardly be more crooked, reason tells us there is little hope that something straight will ever be made.