Condo Diplomacy

The Trump court is a royal progress that moves between Palm Beach and the White House, for the most part in private planes. But the interests of the US government require that at least some of its members be willing to travel farther afield than Florida. Trump talks of putting the US economy behind a great tariff wall, but he also wants deals, which means he needs dealers.

America’s official chief diplomat is the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, but so far his activities have been fairly limited. Instead, the role of principal US emissary is currently filled by the unlikely figure of the property developer Steve Witkoff.

Witkoff first met Trump in a deli in New York in the 1980s, where he paid for Trump’s sandwich. He got his start in property by driving around Harlem and Washington Heights in a ‘beat-up Buick’ looking for apartment buildings to buy. He later moved on to downtown office buildings, often borrowing money from Lehman Brothers to pay for them. One of his business partners was Mark Walsh, described by the New York Times as ‘one of Lehman’s biggest profit producers’, ‘skilled at making all that debt vanish’ – until the bank collapsed in 2008.

The appointment of ‘the king of condo financing’ as the president’s special envoy might have been taken as a sign of American disengagement from world affairs. But Witkoff has been busy. In January he was tasked with pressuring Israel to pull its forces back from Gaza and declare a ceasefire (and, in the process, with reminding Netanyahu who’s boss). Witkoff demonstrated that word from Washington was enough to force Israel to accept terms that had been on the table all along. But it was hardly a diplomatic achievement. Trump’s attention has since wavered and Israel has renewed its assault, declaring its intention to occupy the whole of Gaza indefinitely.

Yet his special envoy’s work was good enough for Trump, who cares more about being able to proclaim that a deal has been cut than on its concrete effects. Witkoff was charged with taking over negotiations with Russia, suspended since late 2021. He has met Putin four times as well as sitting down with his foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov. Some of the criticism of Witkoff has come from people who believe the US shouldn’t be negotiating with Russia at all. But the accusation that the US team is out of its depth has obvious merit.

According to Trump, Witkoff is ‘a natural born winner’ with plenty of common sense. He’s certainly an experienced gladhander with some useful friends (including the prime minister of Qatar, Muhammad bin Abdulrahman al-Thani). In negotiations between the US and Iran over Iran’s nuclear programme, Witkoff sat across from Abbas Arraghchi, a thirty-year veteran of Iran’s foreign ministry, who has been posted everywhere from Japan to Jedda and Helsinki.

Trump appears to see Witkoff’s inexperience as a positive attribute. Rubio is involved in the talks with Iran, and the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, has also been speaking with Russia’s intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin. But channels that were previously run by one of the most experienced American diplomats and securocrats, Bill Burns, are now run by a New York landlord who says he ‘suffers from wanting to be well liked’.

Witkoff’s current position most closely resembles the role played by Jared Kushner (with whom he is friendly) in Trump’s first term. Except Kushner never took on the entire international file. A succession of secretaries of state and CIA directors, along with the US trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, shared the load.

Witkoff says that his personal relationship with the boss is what matters. He never misses an opportunity to compliment Trump, whom he refers to as ‘the master’, casting himself as a mere protégé. Still, he has ventured some comments on American strategy: Russia should be accommodated; Iran having a nuclear weapon would give it ‘outsized influence’ in the Gulf, and the US can’t allow that. ‘This whole peace through strength thing is not just a slogan,’ he says. ‘It actually works.’ Witkoff claims that American diplomacy has entered a new golden age: the US is ‘curing and solving conflicts all around the world’.

The US has had ambassadors without portfolio before, and close associates of sitting presidents have been made diplomats. Biden made Rahm Emanuel his ambassador to Tokyo, a sign that Japan could have direct access to the president if need be. But it’s difficult to see Witkoff’s rise as anything other than a debasement of the diplomatic métier. Substantial tasks lie ahead for the US. There will need to be real diplomacy with China. Shouldn’t the imperial envoy be a cold sophisticate, rather than one of the president’s golf partners, a cigar and steakhouse poser?

Perhaps Witkoff merely reflects Trump’s propensity to value loyalty over competence and schmoozing over government. The emperor’s personal envoy need not be a Metternich or Hardenberg. The imperial family needs hotels in Dubai, golf clubs in Qatar and cryptocurrency deals in Abu Dhabi (the latter organised by Witkoff’s son). If you see the world as a collection of properties, what you really need is an estate agent.