From: The Guardian April 25, 2025 Steve Witkoff: from property developer to global spotlight
Ukraine, Gaza and Iran: can Witkoff secure any wins for Trump?
To solve these three conflicts simultaneously would be a daunting task for anyone, but it is especially so for a man entirely new to diplomacy and, judging by some of his remarks, also equally new to history.
Donald Trump’s version of Pax Americana: the idea that the US can through coercion impose order on the world, is facing its moment of truth in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran.
In the words of the former CIA director William Burns: it is in “one of those plastic moments” in international relations that come along maybe twice a century where the future could take many possible forms.
One withering European diplomat says:
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“It is as if Steve Witkoff is trying to play three dimensional chess with chess grand-masters on three chess boards simultaneously, not having played the game before.”
Witkoff simply does not have the institutional memory available to his opposite numbers in Iran, Israel and Russia.
For instance, most of the Iranian negotiating team, led by the foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, are veterans of the 2013-15 talks that led to the original Iran nuclear deal.
In the follow-up talks in Istanbul on 10 April, Aleksandr Darchiev, who has spent 33 years in the Russian foreign ministry and is Russian ambassador to the US, was pitted against a team led by Sonata Coulter, the new deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, who does not share Trump’s benign view of Russia.
The risk for Trump is that the decision to address so much so quickly ends up not being a show of American strength but the opposite — the public erosion of a super power.
In the hurry to seal a deal with Iran inside two months, Trump, unlike in all previous nuclear talks with Tehran, has barred complicating European interests from the negotiation room.
