Witless Witkoff
By 
Steve Witkoff is a catastrophe:
People familiar with Witkoff’s style liken it to Trump’s free-wheeling approach of doing business.
His staff, to the extent he has any, often doesn’t know where he is or what he is doing, according to four people familiar with the dynamics of the office. They said he spends most of his time at his office in the White House, while the rest of his team is at the State Department.
“The thing is, Witkoff isn’t consistently engaged. He will pop in for a visit to Vladimir Putin, say a bunch of stuff, not tell anyone what really happened and then just fuck off to his life again. Meanwhile, the Russians are talking to you about how ‘Witkoff says…’ and you don’t know whether they’re right or not, but you can’t get a readout from the Russians,” the U.S. official said.
Witkoff at times appears to struggle to focus on more than one task at a time, the U.S. official and another one of the people said, adding that when a flurry of developments occurs in one portfolio, say Gaza or Iran or Ukraine, other priorities take a backseat. He is not a voracious consumer of his intelligence briefing materials and doesn’t read them every day, the second person said.
Witkoff rarely reads his government email, according to one of the people and the U.S. official familiar with his role.
The Russians simply find him useless:
Witkoff’s Russian interlocutors are also frustrated, particularly with his inability to properly convey Putin’s messages and red lines to Trump, according to the person familiar with his diplomatic efforts, another person familiar with the matter and the first U.S. official.
Russian officials value that Trump has sent someone who is close to the president and can speak for him, but are concerned that Witkoff doesn’t fully understand what Putin is telling him, they said.
Witkoff made a trip to Moscow this month to try to make headway with Putin before Trump’s now-lapsed deadline on steep tariffs for purchasers of Russian oil.
Witkoff left his August visit with Moscow convinced that Russia had agreed to significant territorial concessions — shaping his advice to Trump that the president should grant Putin the one-on-one summit he had long sought, the second U.S. official said.
When he returned to the U.S., Witkoff and Trump both touted those concessions on territory in Eastern Ukraine. His European and Ukrainian interlocutors did not see it that way, the second U.S. official and one of the people familiar with the diplomacy said.
Diplomacy is work. It is difficult even when it is conducted by seasoned professionals with significant skills and substantial area expertise. Witkoff has no idea what he is doing and the rest of the administration either a) doesn’t understand this, or b) is too scared to talk about it.
Photo Credit: By U.S. Embassy Jerusalem – https://www.flickr.com/photos/46886434@N04/54518336831/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=165727613