Steve Witkoff: Truth bombs
Steve Witkoff is shaping up to be the most influential diplomat of this century. A friend of Donald Trump’s since 1987, a fellow New York real estate developer and billionaire, who was playing golf with President Trump when assassination attempt #2 occurred last summer… Steve near single-handedly brought about the January 20th ceasefire in Gaza, and has in the past few weeks spent more than eight hours one-on-one with President Putin in Moscow.
If you want to know what’s actually happening geopolitically, there are few better things to listen to than this 90-minute interview just posted:
I’m sending three Substack posts inside 12 hours, but what’s happening (and what appears permissible to say) is shifting at great speed.
A few principles from the above that stood out to me:
- “Putting yourself in the shoes of the other side” (remarkable how many times both Steve and Tucker say the words “the other side” – and why I chose that as the name for my site, proposing such creative diplomacy, despite the name getting a lot of criticism)
- You have to be dispassionate and see reality
- Dialogue can play a role! “Trying to understand all sides… is a revolutionary development in American diplomacy”
- Everybody needs to be able to live with the deal! It actually needs to work for all sides.
- Interesting Steve can’t recall the name of the four disputed Ukrainian regions. But this only proves the wisdom of Jean Monnet’s principle: In negotiation, you have to go for the “essence of the problem”. Details are not important, if you understand, and can align, high-level incentives. A real-estate developer is better suited to deal-making than an academic. This should not surprise people.
- Article 5 could be extended to Ukraine, without NATO. (Exactly what I’ve been saying for a year. And developed a plan for.)
- “Without getting into names, I’ve talked to multiple European leaders, and I’ve said to them: the more you encourage Zelensky not to be proactive at the peace table; the more you suggest that aid will continue without any conditions attached to it… Nobody says we shouldn’t aid Ukraine – today and in the reconstruction – but it’s got to come with certain conditions. If we’re going to give a lot of money to Ukraine, we want to hear the business plan of how this [the war] is going to get resolved. Because it’s unsustainable if they don’t have a plan for how it gets resolved. We can’t just forever give money. Because they’ll get ground down.”
- Tucker: “There has to be some reason that none of this has been acknowledged for three years. Why the effort to prevent Americans [and Brits] from hearing the other side, from understanding the conflict in its totality, not just parts of it but the whole thing; why the censorship designed to keep us from knowing what’s actually happening?”
Steve: “Because that’s what we’ve been enduring: censorship. We’ve been enduring a media that, they all march together.”
- Tucker: “What is – if I can just say – what the hell is going on with European leaders? Keir Starmer is saying we’re going to send British troops… What are they thinking?”
Steve: “I think it’s a combination of a posture and a pose. And a combination of also being simplistic. There’s a notion of thinking ‘we’ve all got to be like Winston Churchill’. We don’t need that [to protect wider Europe]. We have NATO.”
I am not being unpatriotic highlighting this. What Starmer is saying is really, really dumb (and dangerous), and the Prime Minister needs to stop saying it.
- This is also remarkable – Steve: “Who doesn’t want to have a world where Russia and the United States are doing collaboratively good things together?… Thinking about how to integrate their energy policy in the arctic (we wrote a plan for); share sea lanes; send LNG gas into Europe together (we also wrote a plan for)… What about the Presidents being able to talk to one another about Iran?”
Tucker: “But nobody wants that in Washington.” [And definitely not SW1.]