The man placed in charge of dealing with the Middle East and Ukraine is proving to be utterly hopeless

Steve Witkoff is a close Trump ally Credit: Evan Vucci/AP

Stephen Pollard

April 18, 2025

Steve Witkoff’s diary must be quite something to look at. Formally the United States Special Envoy to the Middle East, who is the US’s point man on both the Gaza war and nuclear negotiations with Iran, Witkoff has also been given the role of envoy to Vladimir Putin, tasked by Donald Trump with representing the US president in direct talks with the Russian leader over Ukraine.

Marco Rubio may nominally be the Secretary of State, but it is Witkoff who is doing the shuttle diplomacy that has always gone with that role. And that is a disaster, because Witkoff is cluelessly – and dangerously – out of his depth.

His first task was to negotiate with Hamas over release of the hostages and a cease fire. The terrorists duped Witkoff completely, persuading him that they were not, as he later put it, “ideologically intractable”, leading him to break with all precedent and authorise a US official to hold direct negotiations with Hamas, rather than through the agreed mediator, Qatar.

And it’s not me asserting Witkoff was duped by Hamas. That’s what Witkoff himself said: “I thought we had an acceptable deal. I even thought we had an approval from Hamas. Maybe that’s just me getting duped.” See what I mean about clueless.

His role in tackling the Iranian nuclear programme has been even more dangerously clueless. On Monday he announced that the key to any deal with Tehran was that “they do not need to enrich past 3.67 per cent.” But the fatal flaw in the 2015 Obama nuclear deal with Iran – which Donald Trump rightly ripped up in 2018 as “the worst deal ever” – was allowing any enrichment, which gives the mullahs a pathway to a nuclear weapon.

Iran is far weaker than it was when the Obama deal was negotiated. Its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas are a shadow of their former strength, its air defences have been crippled by Israel and Syria is no longer a bridge to Lebanon as it was under Assad. Now is the time to end its nuclear programme. So what did Witkoff do? Concede enrichment at the very start. On Tuesday, when it dawned on the White House what Witkoff had done, he tried to reverse ferret, saying the US was demanding Iran dismantle its enrichment programme. But the damage has been done.

Now Witkoff is back dealing with Ukraine, having spent the past few weeks fan-boying Putin as “a super smart guy… I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy… I liked him… I thought he was straight up with me.” That may be embarrassing, but worse is his repeated regurgitation of Russian propaganda, such as his assertion that “there have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule.” The “referendums” were about as legitimate as the elections won by Putin.

Witkoff may mean well, although it’s impossible to tell from the drivel that comes out of his mouth. But whatever he means, he is a man so far out of his depth that his involvement threatens catastrophe wherever he goes and whatever he does.

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Hapless Rubio must twist and turn as Trump sees war through Putin’s eyes

If the US secretary of state wants to survive, he must continually do his master’s bidding, even at the expense of his personal credibility

Marco Rubio’s problem is that he lives one social media post away from being sacked by Donald Trump Credit: Julien de Rosa/AFP

David Blair Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator

18 April 2025

Less than six weeks have passed since Ukraine agreed to America’s proposed ceasefire and Marco Rubio declared the “ball is now in Russia’s court”. Yet after the latest talks in Paris, the US secretary of state spoke as if none of the above had happened.

The central fact of recent diplomacy is that on March 11 Ukraine said “yes” to a ceasefire, but Russia did not. The ball landed in Vladimir Putin’s court and he did far worse than simply watch it bounce and come to rest.

Putin responded by launching a series of strikes on civilian targets across Ukraine, firing two ballistic missiles into the centre of the city of Sumy on Palm Sunday, killing at least 36 people, including two children.

On March 11, Mr Rubio said that if Russia rejected a ceasefire “then we’ll know unfortunately what is the impediment to peace here”. By his earlier logic, America should now be identifying Russia as the “impediment” and joining its European allies to exert maximum pressure on Putin to accept the truce.

But there was no hint of that in Mr Rubio’s latest pronouncement. Instead he gave warning that if a deal was no longer “do-able” then America would just “move on”.

Rather than name the only belligerent who has failed to agree a ceasefire and respond accordingly, Mr Rubio would prefer to turn away from the whole blood-soaked business of Europe’s biggest war since 1945 and concentrate on what he called “other priorities”.

As one of the youngest holders of his office, Mr Rubio, 53, is unlikely to be suffering from amnesia. He remembers full well the sequence of events and his own earlier words. He must understand that Putin started the war in Ukraine and remains the barrier to peace.

Mr Rubio’s problem is that he lives one social media post away from being sacked by a president who consistently believes the best of Putin and remains viscerally unwilling to exert any further pressure on Russia.

On the contrary, Donald Trump prefers to use America’s leverage against the target of Putin’s aggression, Ukraine, including by halting the flow of US weapons and intelligence for a vital period last month.

By his own convoluted logic, Mr Trump hammers the country that obliges him and indulges the adversary that defies him.

If Mr Rubio wants to survive, he must continually bend with the wind and do his master’s bidding, even at the expense of his personal credibility and self-respect.

Might Mr Trump’s patience with Putineventually crack? Will he ever see how Putin is making him look a fool not just by declining to accept a US-proposed ceasefire, but firing missiles at a Ukrainian city and still paying no price?

Previous secretaries of state would have seen it as a duty to tell their president some hard truths. But Mr Rubio, fearing the humiliation of being sacked within months of taking office and still living down his past rivalry with Mr Trump, is clearly not in that mould.

It remains just possible that Mr Trump will grasp the obvious and respond to Putin’s defiance by increasing US help for Ukraine and turning the screw on Russia. He has threatened as much in the past and this option would accord with the plan proposed by General Keith Kellogg, the US peace envoy.

But does the president care about his own peace plan devised by his own envoy? So far, the evidence suggests that Mr Trump sees this crisis through Putin’s eyes and the hapless Mr Rubio must twist and turn.