Five Questions About American Foreign Policy

A few thoughts inspired by the WSJ exclusive regarding Steve Witkoff

Photo by aurora.kreativ on Unsplash

There have been a fair number of groundbreaking stories over the Thanksgiving week:

• The Washington Post blockbuster by Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth authorizing the murder of two people who survived an initial airstrike of a boat in the Caribbean. Oh, does murder sound too harsh? Read Jack Goldsmith on why that is the appropriate term.

• The New York Times’ Katie Rogers and Dylan Freedman reporting on increasingly obvious signs that Donald Trump is old and is losing his stamina;

• The latest polling numbers from Gallup and Politico showing that Trump’s popularity floor — which was always believed to be pretty high due to his MAGA base — might not be as high as previously assumed.

However, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World would like to focus on the Wall Street Journal’s team of five reporters who did a deep dive on Russia’s efforts to woo the Trump administration into coercing Ukraine to end the way by proffering some sort of commercial entente.

The key section revolves around the negotiations in Miami between Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Putin crony and Russian sovereign-wealth fund head Kirill Dmitriev:

Dmitriev was pushing a plan for U.S. companies to tap the roughly $300 billion of Russian central bank assets, frozen in Europe, for U.S.-Russian investment projects and a U.S.-led reconstruction of Ukraine. U.S. and Russian companies could join to exploit the vast mineral wealth in the Arctic. There were no limits to what two longtime adversaries could achieve, Dmitriev had argued for months: Their rival space industries, which raced one another during the Cold War, could even pursue a joint mission to Mars with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

For the Kremlin, the Miami talks were the culmination of a strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity, according to Western security officials. By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.

Dmitriev, a Goldman Sachs alumnus, had found receptive partners in Witkoff—Trump’s longtime golfing partner—and Kushner, whose investment fund, Affinity Partners, drew billion-dollar investments from the Arab monarchies whose conflict with Israel he had helped mediate.

The two businessmen shared President Trump’s long-held approach to geopolitics. If generations of diplomats viewed the post-Soviet challenges of Eastern Europe as a Gordian knot to be painstakingly unraveled, the president envisioned an easy fix: The borders matter less than the business. In the 1980s, he had offered to personally negotiate a swift end to the Cold War while building what he told Soviet diplomats would be a Trump Tower across the street from the Kremlin, with their Communist regime as a business partner.

You’ll have to read the whole thing to unpack all of the spicy details. But here are five larger takeaways (and questions) that I have after reading it.

First, the WSJ story highlights all of the downsides to Trump’s brand of start-up diplomacy. Both Witkoff and the Russians had little interest in consulting with “the traditional U.S. national security apparatus.” Witkoff disdained using secure fixed lines to communicate with allies. He met Putin in St. Petersburg for three hours, during which, “Witkoff took his own notes, relying on a Kremlin translator, then briefed the White House from the U.S. Embassy.” He failed to brief either the CIA or State about a proposed prisoner exchange that fell through.

The motivation for the Russians in bypassing the U.S. national security bureaucracy is obvious. Witkoff no doubt thought he was cutting through red tape to get to a deal. The problem, as previously noted in by the hard-working staff, is that Witkoff is spectacularly out of his depth — which means that he’s ginning up ideas with little understanding of the problem that he is trying to solve. This comes through most clearly in this paragraph:

Witkoff, who hasn’t traveled to Ukraine this year, is set to visit Russia for the sixth time next week and will again meet Putin. He insisted he isn’t playing favorites. “Ukrainians have fought heroically for their independence,” said Witkoff, who has tried to inspire Ukrainian officials with the idea of soldiers disarming to earn Silicon Valley-scale salaries operating American built AI data centers. “It is now time to consolidate what they have achieved through diplomacy,” he said.

Witkoff is not just uninspiring to Ukrainian officials — his actions highlight why his approach will not be likely to work. Without additional consultation Witkoff’s initiatives will continue to be leaked and he will face a steady barrage of external criticism. This will sabotage whatever slim chance he has of succeeding.

Second, what exactly are multinational firms thinking?! The WSJ story reports on a few minor deals, but also that, “in secret talks, Exxon Mobil Senior Vice President Neil Chapman met Rosneft boss Igor Sechin, Putin’s former private secretary, in the Qatari capital Doha, to discuss Exxon’s return to the massive Sakhalin project, an investment stranded after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.”

The history of Western energy investments into the Russian Federation has been a recurring tale of woe: when energy prices are low and Russian coffers are lean, Putin is very friendly towards Western investors. When energy prices rebound and Russia’s economic picture brightens, Putin puts the screws on his Western partners.

Despite this cycle, the energy multinationals always come back to the lure of Russia. I’ve seen this behavioral pattern before:

Third, what are these guys’ precise theory of commercial peace? Witkoff told the WSJ,. “Russia has so many vast resources, vast expanses of land. If we [all become business partners], and everybody’s prospering and they’re all a part of it, and there’s upside for everybody, that’s going to naturally be a bulwark against future conflicts there. Because everybody’s thriving.” Similarly, the Journal reports, “For many in the Trump White House, that blurring of business and geopolitics is a feature, not a bug. Key presidential advisers see an opportunity for American investors to snap up lucrative deals in a new postwar Russia and become the commercial guarantors of peace.”

This jibes with how Dmitriev thinks. He said in one interview, “We can transition investment trust into a political role.” He told the Journal, “We believe that the U.S. and Russia can cooperate basically on everything in the Arctic. If a solution is found in Ukraine, U.S. economic cooperation can be a foundation for our relationship going forward.”

It is certainly true that the commercial peace can be a thing. Russia and the United States have never really had a large enough amount of cross-border trade and investment to enjoy anything approaching a commercial peace, so that could be a good long-term goal. But this faith in the commercial peace by Trump appointees seems… how to put this… “odd” given the Trump administration’s efforts to, you know, do the exact opposite thing in its foreign economic policy?!

The answer to this question could be that Trump likes foreign direct investment (FDI) because it is more tangible and equates with his folk beliefs about wealth. Or it could simply be that in 2025 what used to be called FDI should now be considered a form of paying off cronies of national leaders. Call it neo-royalism.

Fourth, does anyone in this administration actually understand national power? Trump and his acolytes like to hammer home the point that Russia is more powerful than Ukraine. Sure, that’s an important reality to acknowledge. So are the following:

• The most powerful actor does not always win the war — a fact that Trump of all people should know. He is the president who negotiated the deal that basically surrendered the U.S. position in Afghanistan to the Taliban.

• Even if Russia is more powerful than Ukraine, NATO is way, way more powerful than Russia.

For an administration that firmly believes in a world dominated by great power politics, it sure seems fold when it comes to dealing with Russia.

Finally, hey, this story provided some confirming data points huh?! Read this about the administration’s start-up diplomacy and this about Steve Witkoff being out of his depth.

Now re-read the WSJ story. Unfortunately, both of those posts hold up pretty well.