America’s Problem With Diplomacy Predates Trump

In practice, they have been largely unsuccessful, a fact often blamed on their relative inexperience with diplomacy. Indeed, the president’s son-in-law and friend are both real estate investors, better positioned to manage business mergers than complex questions of nuclear proliferation, war, and peace. But Kushner and Witkoff—and the Trumpian approach to diplomacy more broadly—are merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to America’s diplomatic problems. Until policymakers can figure out how to marry flexible thinking with expertise, America is likely to remain stuck in a diplomatic rut.

Few would doubt that diplomacy and peacebuilding are good things in theory. Indeed, as Trump chose to remind everyone last year in various tweets and speeches, the Bible tells us that peacemakers are to be especially revered. The moral obligation to seek peace is often emphasized by leaders of various faiths, most recently the new, unexpectedly American pope, who chose to emphasize the need for peace in his various Holy Week sermons.

In practice, however, there’s often a certain skepticism of diplomacy that pervades Washington’s political and media environment. Talking to adversaries can be wrongly portrayed as a concession, or even a reward that they do not deserve. This isn’t a new development: Ronald Reagan, for example, was infamously criticized by fellow conservatives for opening negotiations on arms control with the Soviet Union.

But whether diplomacy is seen as morally praiseworthy or foolishly sentimental, it is often a strategic good. America has won many of its greatest foreign-policy achievements not through the pure application of brute force, but rather through the negotiation of challenging diplomatic agreements, whether that be 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 mitigate the risks of conflict.

In that light, it’s undoubtedly a good thing that the Trump administration has chosen to emphasize peacemaking—and that it is willing to talk to adversaries like Iran, Russia, or China.

But it has become apparent that Witkoff and Kushner, for all their dogged determination to follow through on the president’s mandate to achieve peace in various intractable conflicts around the world, are not well-suited to the job. Neither has any significant experience with diplomacy, which is in many ways quite distinct from the world of real estate and business mergers. Worse, both appear to have financial and personal entanglements that may complicate their ability to act as proponents of American interests, from investment deals in the Gulf states to personal and business ties in Israel.

Both also appear ill-suited to the management of complex diplomatic issues. Witkoff, in particular, is known to have a distrust of expertise. The Trump team has correctly pointed out that Washington’s expert class too often tells us what cannot be achieved, rather than trying to achieve something better. But without some background knowledge, you are bound to repeat the same mistakes as your predecessors. For Witkoff and Kushner, it is less of a problem that they themselves have no deep expertise on the foreign-policy issues being negotiated, and far more of a problem that they are unwilling to build a team that can advise and support them.

Similar problems have bedeviled Ukraine negotiations, which have become bogged down in questions of territorial swaps, issues that do not necessarily reflect the desires or needs of any party to the conflict. The deep fixation on territory appears to reflect the real estate background of the negotiators rather than any specific focus on the conflict or its causes.

But fixing U.S. diplomacy will not be nearly as simple as subbing in better figures for Witkoff and Kushner. Diplomacy has become increasingly disfavored by presidential administrations in recent years. Even before the Trump-era hollowing out of the State Department and related institutions, these entities did not spend as much time on diplomacy—particularly with unfriendly states or on tough-to-crack subjects like arms control—as they did on process, interactions with allied counterparts, and public relations.

Consider the Biden administration, whose major diplomatic achievements were the wrangling of a cross-section of NATO and non-NATO allies to respond to the Russian war in Ukraine. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, arguably America’s primary diplomat during that period, rarely talked to or met with his counterparts in states with which the United States was at odds.

Even when such meetings happened between high-level officials, talks were often unproductive, as with National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s meeting with his Chinese counterparts in Alaska, which degenerated into an angry exchange of criticisms. When the Biden administration genuinely needed to conduct a high-stakes conversation with a U.S. adversary, it sent not Blinken but CIA Director Bill Burns to conduct such conversations in private. And ongoing diplomatic processes, like the attempt to restart the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action after the first Trump administration’s withdrawal, were hamstrung by a highly bureaucratic interagency process and a political worry that further concessions needed to be made by Iran to continue with negotiations.

The problem then is twofold: the over-personalized and ill-informed diplomacy of Kushner and Witkoff—which suggests a need for greater expertise and institutional backing—and an excessive focus on process, alliance management, and “safe” negotiations over real diplomacy with adversarial states. And unfortunately, the solutions to these two problems point in opposite directions. How can policymakers rebuild the talent bench of U.S. diplomacy in coming years while also allowing the flexibility and freedom from bureaucratic process needed to engage in innovative negotiating processes?

For the moment, the priority must be negotiations to end the war in Iran. This weekend will see negotiations in Pakistan between the U.S. and Iranian negotiators, with extremely high stakes. Six weeks of war have caused massive, ongoing disruptions in the global economy, created fuel rationing in parts of Asia, and caused death and destruction across the Gulf. To restart the war is in no one’s interest, and yet it remains highly unlikely that Witkoff and Kushner will be able to come to an acceptable agreement with the Iranians.

Indeed, 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 started to fall. It is no wonder that they are not viewed in Tehran as credible negotiators or as truthful interlocutors.

The administration’s choice to send Vice President J.D. Vance is therefore a good one. Vance has been active behind the scenes in diplomacy with his Iranian counterparts, and opposed the war, albeit quietly, from the start. He is a diplomatic novice and will likely struggle to find common ground with a distrustful Tehran, but he is still less likely to give carte blanche to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and more likely to engage in a genuine negotiation process informed by expertise.

For American diplomacy to succeed more broadly in the future, however, it will need to avoid the pitfalls of the last several years and avoid the extreme swings that we have seen in its conduct. It is all too easy to look at the Trump administration and conclude either that its botched attempts to forge diplomatic agreements discredit diplomacy itself, or to simply mock Kushner and Witkoff and the idea of sending business magnates to negotiate complex foreign-policy problems.

But neither response will help to solve America’s genuine problem with diplomacy, which is that we have yet to find an administration willing to marry openness and flexible thinking with expertise. If America is to rebuild its diplomacy for a complex era of multipolar politics, future administrations will need to relearn the lessons of our past diplomatic successes.