The Trump foreign-policy team’s real problem – analysis

By going on Carlson’s podcast and speaking about his warm feelings for Qatar and his ideas regarding the Israel-Hamas conflict, Witkoff displayed judgment that was arguably even worse than that demonstrated in the Signal group-chat scandal.

By Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS

It was the gaffe that critics of the Trump administration have been praying for. However it happened, the inclusion of Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg in a group chat on the Signal app among the administration’s leading defense policymakers about an impending attack on the Houthis in Yemen was a gob-smacking blunder of epic proportions.

It not only embarrassed participants in the conversation, like Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

It called into question the competence of President Donald Trump’s national-security team and the process by which it communicates and shares information at the highest level.

If, as appears to be the case, it was Waltz’s office that was responsible for connecting Goldberg to the chat, it’s something he’ll never entirely live down, even if Trump is prepared to forgive him.

But as much as Goldberg’s unwitting scoop deserved the headlines and the endless discussions it generated, it was actually not the most troubling news event of the week for Trump’s national-security team.

The worst administration blunder didn’t involve the group chat about Yemen or any other issue that the president’s critics are obsessed with.

Instead, it was the comments of Steve Witkoff, his special envoy to the Middle East, on “The Tucker Carlson Show” podcast.

The interview made clear that the person Trump has tasked with conducting negotiations about the war in Gaza and the release of the hostages taken on Oct. 7, 2023, is utterly clueless about malign actors like Qatar, Iran, and the latter’s terrorist proxies.

Indeed, the more you listen to the 88-minute conversation, the more obvious it becomes that Witkoff knows nothing about the region.

He not only displayed a lack of moral clarity regarding the conflict demonstrated by his boss but also showed that he had little idea about the nature of the foreign policy realism the administration had embraced.

Trump may be able to count on Witkoff’s personal loyalty—an understandable need for a president who was often betrayed by establishment figures he employed in his first administration.

But Witkoff demonstrated, and not for the first time, that he is a liability that the administration can ill afford to have in such a key position.

More to the point, Witkoff’s decision to appear on a podcast that in recent months has been a platform for Holocaust deniers, antisemites, Israel-bashers and conspiracy theorists also shows that Carlson’s ongoing inclusion in the Trump family’s inner circle is a potential source of trouble that may come back to bite the president in the long run.

A stupid mistake

There’s no way to deny, excuse or spin the Yemen group-chat bungle as anything but an incredibly stupid mistake.

Nor can it be argued, as some Trump loyalists did, that the discussion didn’t involve classified information, since how else would one characterize a conversation among policymakers about potential strikes by the U.S. military?

That said, the expectation among the anti-Trump “resistance” that this is the moment when the country will turn on the president is wishful thinking.

It gave Trump and his team a tough news cycle, but once the president admitted the error, that was effectively the end of the story, despite the interest of left-wing media in keeping it alive.

This is, after all, not the moral equivalent of something like the disastrous August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. That was the moment when President Joe Biden’s polling numbers started to head south and from which he never really recovered.

No one died because of Waltz’s error. In contrast, the Afghanistan fiasco caused by the lack of judgment and competence on the part of Biden’s team led to the deaths of 13 Americans and a victory for the Taliban, which gained billions of dollars of U.S. military equipment.

Ironically, the credit for keeping the damage manageable goes to Goldberg, a vicious opponent of Trump’s who in the past helped float some of the most dishonest lies about the president.

Among these were the Russia-collusion hoax and the myth that Trump insulted American soldiers slain in the First and Second World Wars who are buried in France.

But when confronted with advance knowledge of an American strike on the Houthis, though not the specific details of the attack, Goldberg did the patriotic thing. He kept his mouth shut until the successful completion of the operation before writing about the breach of security.

Had he immediately publicized it on social media or on his magazine’s website, it might have compromised the mission.

In such a case, Waltz, a former congressman who was an excellent choice for the job and might have been set up by someone inside the administration, could well have been on the hot seat in Trump’s Cabinet.

Witkoff’s comments don’t involve the wrongful disclosure of classified information.

But by going on Carlson’s podcast and speaking about his warm feelings for Qatar and his ideas regarding the Israel-Hamas conflict, he displayed judgement that was arguably even worse than that demonstrated in the group-chat scandal.

Qatar’s man

Witkoff can be seen as just another example of how Trump prefers to employ cronies—especially those from the real-estate world—as envoys, rather than veteran diplomats or other members of the foreign-policy establishment.

But while the people he put in charge of Middle East diplomacy in his first term were just as inexperienced as Witkoff, they had a firmer grasp on reality and on how the players in the region operate.

And their success in brokering the 2020 Abraham Accords, which exceeded that of anything achieved by their predecessors in those roles, was based on elements in their biographies that stand in strong contrast to Witkoff’s.

Take, for instance, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, former bankruptcy attorney David Friedman and in-house Trump organization lawyer Jason Greenblatt, who served respectively as senior White House adviser, ambassador to Israel, and special representative for international negotiations.

Each had a huge advantage over Witkoff. All were longtime active supporters of Israel who, despite not having backgrounds in diplomacy, understood the conflicts in the region and the essential nature of the players far better than he does.

Indeed, as his interview with Carlson illustrated, Witkoff’s approach to the region reveals an unfortunate combination of gullibility and business dealings with Qatar, one of the parties to the ceasefire/hostage-release negotiations.

Qatar’s anomalous position in the region has long been a problem for U.S. policymakers. It has an ongoing relationship with the United States and allows an American air base on its territory.

But it’s also been in bed with Iran for decades and is openly hostile to genuine U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel.

It is not only the primary funder of extremist Islamist education around the world—a nefarious activity that the Saudis have largely abandoned as they seek to modernize and moderate their position in the region; it is deeply connected to Iran’s terrorist proxies like Hamas and linked to the explosion of antisemitism in the United States since Oct. 7, 2023.

But to Witkoff, his business partners in Doha are “good, decent people,” no different from the Swiss or Norwegians. He dismisses the ample evidence of their ties to Iran and Hamas as “preposterous.”

It’s a blatant lie that pleased Carlson, who himself recently interviewed the prime minister of Qatar in an even more craven and dishonest manner than that of his notorious show with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

That podcast was primarily devoted to whitewashing Iran’s threat to the region and the West, one of the former Fox News host’s obsessions.

Misunderstanding Hamas

Then, further playing to Carlson’s consistent anti-Israel slant, Witkoff proceeded to declare that the Islamists of Hamas were not “ideologically intractable.”

For Witkoff, Oct. 7 was a terrible atrocity—though he spoke of a film that showed what actually happened on that black Simchat Torah as if he needed to apologize to Carlson for watching it—but didn’t demonstrate that Hamas means what it says when it declares its intention to destroy Israel and perpetrate the genocide of the Jewish people.

That attack on Israel was just a trailer for what Hamas wants to do to the rest of Israel. But to Witkoff, these bloodthirsty terrorists are just human beings like the rest of us, with whom he can do business.

Just as bad, in an echo of the conventional wisdom peddled by the foreign-policy establishment and the Biden administration, he declared that Hamas couldn’t really be defeated because it was an “idea.”

To Carlson’s delight, he also spoke of the absurd possibility of Hamas voluntarily disarming and engaging in normal political activity, and even revived the idea of a “two-state solution.”

That’s something that Oct. 7 proved again is merely a recipe to continue the Palestinian Arabs’ century-old war on the presence of the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland.

Carlson may praise Witkoff as the man who is resisting the influence of “warmongers” in Trump’s administration.

But, unlike the main players in Trump’s current administration and his first-term Middle East team, Witkoff is, at best, an innocent abroad mouthing the foreign-policy establishment’s conventional wisdom about terrorists and rogue states.

At worst, he’s someone who has become Qatar’s man in Washington.

It can be argued, as Witkoff asserts, that the job of American envoys is to serve Washington’s interests and get deals done with all sorts of bad actors, when necessary, rather than mouth moralistic sermons.

There’s some truth to that. But it only works when you succeed in getting deals done that actually strengthen the security of the United States and its allies.

Foreign-policy realism

That is pretty much the opposite of what Witkoff did in January when, acting on Trump’s orders, he pushed a cease-fire/hostage-release deal between Israel and Hamas over the goal line.

The terms of that agreement were set by the Biden administration. They were extraordinarily generous to the terrorists, to the extent that they gave Hamas the possibility of remaining in power in Gaza.

A purely moralistic foreign policy—such as that pursued by President George W. Bush in his disastrous quest to democratize the Arab and Muslim world via wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and push Palestinian elections—is a fool’s errand.

What American diplomats do is more important than what they may say in an effort to achieve a deal with a problematic negotiating partner.

Yet, as the eminent historian, Niall Ferguson, has pointed out, American foreign policy that completely discards the moral element—such as that promoted by Henry Kissinger when he served in the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations—must be successful.

Otherwise, it will fatally undermine U.S. influence around the world.

Americans don’t want foreign crusades that, in John Quincy Adams’s famous phrase, venture abroad seeking “monsters to destroy.” This is part of the reason why they elected Donald Trump president last year.

But the essence of his “America First” approach is not isolationist; it’s a realistic pursuit of American interests. Bolstering an Islamist regime in Tehran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, doesn’t serve American interests.

Nor does a policy that aids a rogue state like Qatar to expand its influence or allows a terrorist entity like Hamas to survive the genocidal war it started.

Nevertheless, Trump has put Witkoff, who is favorably inclined to America’s enemies, in a position of influence.

In Israel, he behaved like the hostile envoys whom Biden and former President Barack Obama sent there, rather than one who works for the most pro-Israel president in the history of the modern-day Jewish state.

Witkoff may be a Trump golfing buddy, but seen in this context, he is a liability to the president’s realistic vision for American foreign policy.

Moreover, the fact that he chose to appear on Carlson’s show to vent such foolish comments also demonstrates another problem. Carlson has retained his position as a favored Mar-a-Lago courtier, yet he has shown no ability to influence Trump to shift from his pro-Israel policies or his tough stand against Iran.

If, unlike Adam Boehler, another clueless Trump envoy who seems to have lost his job due to a willingness to appease Hamas, Witkoff survives and continues to serve Qatar’s interests more than Trump’s agenda, it will be a sign that the small but loud anti-Israel faction on the right is gaining influence.

A shift toward Carlson’s views will send American foreign policy down a disastrous anti-Israel rabbit hole. It would guarantee that Trump’s second administration does not repeat the Middle East success of his first. That will do more damage to Trump than including a hostile journalist in a Signal chat group.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.