Amateur Hour

Steve Witkoff’s efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine underscores the danger of outsourcing critical diplomacy to people who don’t have the experience or knowledge necessary to get a deal.

Steve Witkoff interview with Tucker Carlson. Photo from recording on X.com.

The 28-point “peace” plan presented to Ukraine late last week is the product of Steve Witkoff’s months-long discussions with Kirill Dmitriev, the US-educated head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund who is close to President Putin. Indeed, some of the points seem to have been directly translated from Russian into English.

How could this ever happen? And who is Steve Witkoff anyway? That’s the question I sought to answer in my latest piece for The Observer.

Marco Rubio has many jobs in the second Trump administration. He is secretary of state, national security adviser and even chief archivist, having also until recently been the administrator of USAID.

What he’s not is Donald Trump’s chief diplomat. That job belongs to Steve Witkoff, the billionaire property developer who is also the president’s golfing partner. In the first 10 months of Trump’s second administration, Witkoff has emerged as his dominant peace envoy.

He works largely on his own, flying around the world on his own aircraft, using unsecured communications to talk to interlocutors and report back from the road. To educate himself on international affairs he has read a lot of books and watched Netflix documentaries, he has said, but he neither claims to be an expert nor thinks he needs to be one. After all, he said: “Diplomacy is negotiation. I’ve been doing it my whole life.”

So how is the self-described “amateur diplomat” doing?

Read the entire article in The Observer.