U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week that Washington has backed away from mediating negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv to end the war in Ukraine. In doing so, he acknowledged the failure of a diplomatic initiative that was once a priority for President Donald Trump but had long since been on life support. While it is too soon to know how this will impact prospects for ending the war, there is another lesson that can be drawn from the year-long saga of U.S. efforts to broker a peace deal in Ukraine: the dangers of working with amateurs.
On the campaign trail in 2024, Trump often proclaimed that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine had he still been president in 2022, and he promised to bring an end to the war within 24 hours were he to return to the White House. In light of this, soon after taking office last year, he named Steve Witkoff, a fellow former New York real estate developer, as his special envoy, entrusted with leading hastily arranged indirect negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. Witkoff was soon joined in his mission by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who also served as a senior White House adviser during Trump’s first term.
It’s not unprecedented for a U.S. president to rely on personal friends and confidants to serve as envoys, especially when they possess connections and expertise that are useful and relevant to the matter at hand. The problem with Witkoff and Kushner is that they possess neither. They also lack detailed knowledge about the history of the war and the psychology of the antagonists. As former State Department negotiator Aaron David Miller told Politico, that knowledge is “critically important to how the combatants in these conflicts actually see matters.” As a result, Witkoff and Kushner were vulnerable to getting played and strung along by Russian President Vladimir Putin, which is ultimately what happened.