Steve Witkoff Rolled Again
By
The “plan” brought back to Donald Trump by his ever-faithful golfing buddy Steve Witkoff, first of all, carves up Ukraine in just the way Russia would like. But there’s so much more wrong with it that shows Russia and the world exactly how ignorant the Trump team is.
As I’ve said before, even a very knowledgeable expert would bring a team of experts to talks like this. We don’t know who Witkoff had along with him this time, but there’s no reason to think he may have learned something. And the document shows that. The wording of several points is strange, almost as if it were translated from the Russian.
There are obvious errors that someone who knew what he was doing would have cleaned up, like not knowing that Ukraine is already a non-nuclear party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (Point 18).
The whole thing is what might be written out over coffee, on a couple of napkins. It’s an essential stage in developing a plan, but much, much more work is needed before any of the parties can evaluate it.
I was going to enumerate the kinds of questions that should have been asked before this was presented in public, but Lawrence Freedman and Sergey Radchenko have already done that. I can think of still more questions. I mostly like Freedman’s post, but Radchenko tries to figure out what might have been intended by the various inanities. As in Trump’s ravings, this is not worth doing and can actively mislead into the idea that the words on paper represent thought-out positions.
Oh, and the Kremlin says it’s not their plan. This is one of the advantages of having Kirill Dmitriev meet with Witkoff. Dmitriev is the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund. Like Witkoff, he is not a diplomat, and probably not well-versed in the issues surrounding the war. But he is anxious to move up and perhaps take Sergei Lavrov’s place as Foreign Minister. But he probably knows more than Witkoff does and is willing to transmit the Kremlin’s materials, along with being willing to have those materials disowned.
Sending a guy whose qualifications are golfing and real estate into international negotiations continues to be an embarrassment. Trump doesn’t know that because he doesn’t know anything about diplomacy or Russian and Ukrainian history, nor the positions of those countries today. Both think that this is like a real estate deal: trade off a bit here and a bit there, bluster and fake, and you’ve got a deal. Vladimir Putin sees his role as hinging Russian history.