There’s
no precedent in the annals of U.S. diplomacy for a president turning
the efforts to resolve three historic conflicts simultaneously over to
his best friend and his son-in-law. Former U.S. National Security
Advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger pulled off a trifecta in
the 1970s: the opening to China; the Paris peace accords on Vietnam; and
three disengagement accords following the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. But
suffice it to say that Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner are no
Kissinger. And when it comes to strategic thinking, Trump is no Richard
Nixon.
There’s an upside, of course, for turning U.S. diplomacy over to Trump’s
family and friends. And that’s the personal access and trust that
mediators have with the boss and how that access allows them to gain
entry to principal decision-makers. But the downsides, particularly the
absence of adult supervision in the Oval Office, far outweigh those
advantages. Trump’s three-ring negotiating plays are failing, and here’s
why.
Strategic vacuum
U.S.
policy in all three conflicts—Russia-Ukraine, Iran, and
Israel-Palestine—is rudderless, with no overall strategy and little
coordination between means and ends. Trump has shown a deep bias against
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and an equally deep
unwillingness to press Russia, the clear aggressor in this conflict.
Whatever minor pressures have been applied on Russian entities via
sanctions pale in comparison to the pressure that Trump has put on
Ukraine by having Europe pay for U.S. weapons for Ukraine and denying
Kyiv long-range strike capability. U.S. negotiators are hamstrung by a
president who is not willing to press Russian President Vladimir Putin
to stop the war. On the face of it, Putin’s war aims make any deal
almost impossible. And yet, Kushner and Witkoff, directed by Trump, have
taken themselves out of the game by catering to Russia and refusing to
use the formidable leverage that Trump has.
The
current U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran similarly lack a strategic focus.
Trump and his spokespeople have been tripping over themselves trying to
describe a reason that is significant enough to warrant initiating a
war. Trump named regime change as the reason but has failed to mention
it in his subsequent remarks, while U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth
said it’s not regime change. Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the U.S.
Joint Chiefs of Staff, talked about destroying Iran’s capacity to
project its power abroad. Trump said Iranian missiles were poised to be
launched against the United States, but military briefers said there was
no evidence that Iran was planning to attack the country.
.
It
is clear that Witkoff and Kushner appeared to sense what Trump wanted
and, at his direction, played out a deception strategy by engaging with
Iran and making unrealizable demands while Trump and Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were plotting war. In the run-up to both the
June 2025 war with Iran and the current conflict, the Trump
administration scheduled follow-up talks and even a trip by U.S.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Israel when it knew war was imminent.
An unwitting foreign minister from Oman found himself haplessly isolated
in Washington the day before the United States went to war.
In
Gaza, Witkoff and Kushner’s charade is even more pronounced. Trump’s
success in forcing Israel to accept his 20-point peace plan, beginning
with a cease-fire, has been followed by a series of performative
actions, not serious negotiations. The so-called Board of Peace could be
a potentially useful instrument to fundraise for Gaza; but without
serious pressure on Hamas to begin demilitarizing and Israel to begin
withdrawing, there won’t be any construction to fund in the
Hamas-controlled zone. Netanyahu and Hamas clearly prefer the status
quo.
Kushner’s presentation at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland, of a day-after plan for Gaza was a fantastical,
Disneyland-esque illusion about a society in which homelessness, food
insecurity, and health trauma persist. There are no senior Palestinian
representatives associated with the Gaza plan, no serious role for the
Palestinian Authority, and no effort by the Trump administration to
constrain Israel’s annexationist policies on the West Bank, let alone
dislodge Israel from the more than 50 percent of Gaza that it currently
occupies. The U.S. war with Iran will only ensure delays in
implementation of Trump’s plan, leaving Gaza divided, dysfunctional, and
sporadically violent.
No expertise, no process
Real-estate
people are better suited than we to assess the ability of Witkoff and
Kushner to make real-estate deals. As diplomats, with decades of
experience between us, we are well-suited to conclude that this team is
clearly uninformed or ignorant about the deep roots of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the overlapping nature of shared religious
space, and the demands and needs of both sides. This partly is a
real-estate deal, but it’s also so much more. In Trump’s first term,
Kushner told one of us that he wasn’t interested in hearing about any
previous agreement or negotiation; he later announced there was nothing
to learn from the previous efforts to negotiate peace between Israel and
the Palestinians. Kushner had more success with the Abraham Accords.
But the Trump administration’s policy toward Palestinians was an abject
failure. Indeed, Trump’s decision in his first term to disengage from
the Palestinians and to put forward a one-sided plan that would have
blessed Israel’s annexation of 30 percent of the West Bank—on top of the
78 percent of historic Palestine/Eretz Israel that Israel already
controls—illustrated how divorced the diplomacy was from reality.
In
Ukraine, Trump has directed Witkoff and Kushner to press Zelensky to
relinquish a strategically valuable part of his country’s territory to
an aggressor that has shown little inclination to abandon its
long-standing aim of subjugating the entirety of Ukraine. Putin’s envoy,
Kirill Dmitriev, has sought to entice the Trump administration with
proposals for commercial deals in Russia that could benefit the business
interests of Trump, his close advisors, and their families. The U.S.
negotiators have shown minimal interest in the nuances of the conflict
and its wider implications for trans-Atlantic and global security,
preferring instead to push for a deal that rests on Ukrainian
capitulation to Russia’s demands.
Similarly, in Iran, the Omani hosts and intermediators have stripped
away the illusion that Witkoff and Kushner were negotiating in earnest.
After Trump pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)
in 2018, his bar to achieve a new agreement became impossibly high to
overcome. Iranians might have accepted limits on enrichment and
intrusive inspections, but it was never in the cards to expect them to
go to zero enrichment. Did Witkoff and Kushner seriously believe that
Iran would find it credible to accept promises of free enriched uranium
from the same president who broke the JCPOA? Witkoff’s interview with
Fox shortly before the war commenced revealed his astonishment that Iran
had not ”capitulated” to U.S. pressure.
No discipline
Trump
and his negotiators have shown no discipline in negotiations or
strategic communications, either at home or abroad. On Gaza, Trump’s
identification with Netanyahu’s goals and subordination to Israeli
interests is a fatal flaw that has undercut most U.S. mediation efforts
since the mid-1990s. There are two parties to the Israel-Palestine
conflict, but Witkoff and Kushner have only tried to address Netanyahu’s
interests.
Whatever
advantages that Trump’s Truth Social platform provide for him in
domestic politics, it has become a tremendous liability in foreign
policy, particularly in these three negotiations. While Witkoff and
Kushner are engaging with the Russians, Ukrainians, Israelis, and
Omanis, Trump is blustering and bloviating on social media. As a result,
the United States’ negotiating partners simply don’t know what to
believe.
We
know how difficult it is to conduct this kind of diplomacy, especially
with leaders who are more invested in keeping their seats and adhering
to ideologies, rather than ending conflicts. We’ve both been there and
have experienced successes and failures. Thus, it’s an open question as
to whether, if you brought back Kissinger, paired him with James Baker,
and put a president with foreign-policy judgment and experience like
George H.W. Bush in the White House, you could crack Russia and Ukraine,
let alone solve the Iran and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. No matter
how talented the mediator, the parties to a conflict need to possess a
shared urgency that a deal is desirable and possible, which would allow
the mediator to use incentives and disincentives to move the parties
toward an agreement.
However,
a mercurial president, a lack of strategy, strong biases, amateur and
over-extended negotiators, and a heavy dose of self-dealing add up to
failure and account for why Witkoff and Kushner have been so
unsuccessful in all three negotiations. It is not clear that any of
these conflicts would have been amenable to a diplomatic solution under
the best of circumstances. But under Trump’s failed leadership, as well
as Witkoff and Kushner’s failed negotiations, the situation has only
worsened. The United States, Israel, and Iran are at war; Russia and
Ukraine remain at war; and Israel and Hamas may as well be. To be
charitable, we might give Kushner and Witkoff an incomplete for the
semester. But until they actually produce something consequential, we’d
give them an F.