With the eleventh-hour announcement of a two-week ceasefire with Iran on Tuesday night, two of America’s most prominent diplomats are poised to once again take center stage in this weekend’s talks in Pakistan. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff they have been important to the foreign policy of this administration, and to US President Donald Trump’s desire to resolve conflicts better around the world through mediation.
In practice, they were largely unsuccessful, which is often blamed on their relative inexperience with diplomacy. Indeed, the president’s son-in-law and friend are both real estate investors, better placed to manage business integration than the complex questions of nuclear proliferation, war and peace. But Kushner and Witkoff—and Trump’s approach to diplomacy more broadly—are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to America’s diplomatic problems. Until policymakers figure out how to marry common sense with expertise, America may remain stuck in a diplomatic rut.
With the eleventh-hour announcement of a two-week ceasefire with Iran on Tuesday night, two of America’s most prominent diplomats are poised to once again take center stage in this weekend’s talks in Pakistan. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff they have been important to the foreign policy of this administration, and to US President Donald Trump’s desire to resolve conflicts better around the world through mediation.
In practice, they were largely unsuccessful, which is often blamed on their relative inexperience with diplomacy. Indeed, the president’s son-in-law and friend are both real estate investors, better placed to manage business integration than the complex questions of nuclear proliferation, war and peace. But Kushner and Witkoff—and Trump’s approach to diplomacy more broadly—are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to America’s diplomatic problems. Until policymakers figure out how to marry common sense with expertise, America may remain stuck in a diplomatic rut.
Few would doubt it that diplomacy and peace building are good things in theory. Indeed, as Trump chose to remind everyone last year in various tweets and speeches, the Bible tells us that mediators should be highly respected. The moral obligation to seek peace is often emphasized by leaders of various faiths, most recently the unexpected new US pope, who chose to emphasize the need for peace in his various Holy Week sermons.
In practice, however, there is often a certain skepticism of diplomacy that permeates the political and media environment of Washington. Talking to opponents can be mistaken for approval, or even a reward they don’t deserve. This is nothing new: Ronald Reagan, for example, was criticized by fellow conservatives for opening negotiations on arms control with the Soviet Union.
But whether diplomacy seems morally laudable or foolish, it is often strategically good. America has won most of its foreign policy successes not through the use of brute force, but through the negotiation of challenging diplomatic agreements, whether it was arms control with the Soviet Union, Henry Kissinger’s opening to China, or the creation of the United Nations after World War II. At its best, diplomacy offers a way to reduce unnecessary arms races and reduce the risks of conflict.
In that context, it’s certainly a good thing that the Trump administration has chosen to emphasize peacemaking—and that it’s willing to talk to adversaries like Iran, Russia, or China.
But it has become clear that Witkoff and Kushner, for all their determination to follow the president’s order to achieve peace in various intractable conflicts around the world, are not up to the task. Neither has any useful experience and diplomacy, which in many ways is quite different from the world of real estate and business connections. Worse, they all appear to have financial and personal connections that could hamper their ability to act as advocates of American interests, from investment deals in the Gulf states to personal and business ties in Israel.
All of them also seem inept in the management of complex diplomatic affairs. Witkoff, in particular, is known to have a distrust of expertise. The Trump team has rightly pointed out that Washington’s professional class often tells us what cannot be achieved, rather than trying to achieve something better. But without some background knowledge, you will be bound to repeat the same mistakes as your predecessors. For Witkoff and Kushner, it is not a small problem that they themselves do not have deep expertise on the foreign policy issues being discussed, and more problem that they are not ready to build a team that can advise and support them.
There are such problems negotiations bedeviled Ukrainewhich are based on issues of exchanging areas, issues that do not necessarily reflect the wishes or needs of any party to the conflict. A deep fix on the scene is visible show real estate history of negotiators instead of focusing on any conflict or its causes.
But fixing US diplomacy won’t be as easy as putting a better figure on Witkoff and Kushner. Diplomacy has become increasingly out of favor with presidential administrations in recent years. Even before the Trump era separated the State Department and related institutions, these agencies did not spend as much time on diplomacy—especially with unfriendly nations or difficult issues like arms control—as they did on process, interaction with their allies, and public relations.
Consider the Biden administration, whose greatest diplomatic achievement was the bickering of various parts of NATO and non-NATO allies in response to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was arguably America’s top diplomat at the time, rarely spoke to or met with colleagues in states with which the United States disagreed.
Even when such meetings were held between high-level leaders, the talks were often fruitless, as was the case with National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and his entourage. their Chinese counterparts in Alaskawhich turned into an angry exchange of criticism. When the Biden administration needed to conduct high-level negotiations with an enemy of the United States, it did not send Blinken but CIA Director Bill Burns to conduct the negotiations in private. And ongoing diplomatic processes, as an attempt to restart The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, after the first Trump administration withdrew, was stymied by a bureaucratic bureaucratic process and political concerns that more concessions needed to be made with Iran to continue negotiations.
The problem then is twofold: Kushner and Witkoff’s over-personalized and ill-informed diplomacy – which suggests the need for more expertise and institutional support – and an excessive focus on process, coalition management, and “safe” negotiations over actual diplomacy with adversary countries. And unfortunately, the solution to these two problems points in different directions. How can policymakers rebuild the talent bench of American diplomacy in the coming years while also allowing for the flexibility and freedom from bureaucratic process needed to engage in innovative negotiation processes?
For now, the priority must be to negotiate an end to the war in Iran. This weekend there will be talks in Pakistan between the US and Iranian negotiators, with very high stakes. Six weeks of war have caused severe, ongoing disruption to the world economy, creating oil rations in parts of Asia, and causing death and destruction in the Gulf. Restarting the war is in no one’s interest, and it is still highly unlikely that Witkoff and Kushner will be able to reach an agreement acceptable to the Iranians.
In fact, this conflict marks the second time in less than a year that Witkoff and Kushner have been actively engaged in negotiations with their Iranian counterparts as the bombs begin to fall. It is not surprising that they are not seen in Tehran as credible mediators or as genuine interventionists.
Therefore, the administration’s choice to send Vice President JD Vance is a good one. Vance has been working behind the scenes in diplomacy with his Iranian counterparts, and opposed the war, albeit quietly, from the start. He is a diplomat and will likely work to find a compromise with a distrustful Tehran, but he is still less likely to give way to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and is more likely to engage in a genuine negotiation process due to expertise.
For American diplomacy to succeed more broadly in the future, however, it will need to avoid the pitfalls of the past several years and avoid the dramatic changes we have seen in its conduct. It’s all too easy to look at the Trump administration and conclude that its flimsy attempts to forge diplomatic deals undermine diplomacy itself, or scoff at Kushner and Witkoff at the idea of sending business magnates to discuss difficult foreign policy problems.
But none of these answers will help solve America’s real diplomatic problem, which is that we have yet to find an administration willing to marry openness and flexible thinking with expertise. If America is to reinvent its diplomacy for a complex era of multiparty politics, future administrations will need to relearn the lessons of our past diplomatic successes.
