Steve Witkoff and the art of the spiel
Why nuclear talks with Iran will be both easier and harder than the rest of his portfolio
If you thought America’s nuclear talks with Iran would be exempt from the general chaos that has characterized Donald Trump’s policymaking, I have bad news for you. We haven’t even reached the second round of negotiations and Trump’s aides are already fighting a very public battle over what kind of deal they want.
Which is not to say the effort is doomed to fail. Trump raised a few eyebrows earlier this week when he claimed that a nuclear deal was one of the simpler issues on his foreign-policy agenda.
“We’ve got a problem with Iran. I’ll solve that problem. It’s almost an easy one.”
The thing is: he’s not wrong. Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy, hasn’t had much luck brokering ceasefires in Gaza or Ukraine, in part because he is just a mediator between warring parties with their own interests and demands. But when Witkoff meets with the Iranians, he is the other party to the negotiation. To a striking extent he is the only other party, since the Europeans who played such a big role in negotiating the JCPOA, the previous nuclear deal, seem to have been sidelined.
That makes the whole thing easier. If Trump wants to make a deal, he can make it; he doesn’t need to convince someone else to accept it.
On Friday, before the first round of Iran talks, Witkoff told the Wall Street Journal that America wasn’t dead-set on dismantling Iran’s nuclear program: “Our red line will be, there can’t be weaponization of your nuclear capability.” That was smart to say on the eve of the meeting. If the goal was dismantlement—which Iran categorically rejects—there would have been nothing to discuss. Setting the bar lower gave the Iranians confidence that this would be a real negotiation.
But then Witkoff muddied the waters. In an interview with Fox News on Monday night he implied that a deal would allow Iran to continue enriching uranium to 3.67% purity, much as the JCPOA did. Less than a day later, though, he walked that back, saying in a statement that Iran must “stop and eliminate” its uranium-enrichment program.
It seemed as if one of two things happened. Either Witkoff caved to pressure from Iran hawks in Washington, or he didn’t understand the distinction around enrichment. My understanding is that it was the former. The hawks were already upset that dismantlement was not the goal. They were furious to hear Witkoff concede on zero enrichment as well—especially at the start of the negotiations, before Iran offered any concessions of its own.
But this also wasn’t the first time Witkoff said something seemingly off-script. There was an odd moment earlier this month, for example, when he responded positively to a tweet from Iran’s foreign minister, only to delete it a few minutes later.
Watching the Gaza ceasefire talks go round in circles over the past two months, I started to develop a theory about Witkoff: much of what he says is chimerical. His public statements aren’t meant to reiterate America’s positions or convey updates about negotiations. They’re a sales pitch, a spiel, a long-running effort to tell people what they want to hear (or what they don’t).
In February he said that regional real-estate developers would soon hold a summit to discuss Trump’s Gaza riviera fantasy. I never heard a shred of evidence that this was in the works. Claiming it was, though, might have given Arab leaders added incentive to draw up their own plan for post-war Gaza, which is what they hastily did. A few weeks later Witkoff sounded pretty upbeat about that plan, even though it was unrealistic and glossed over hard issues like what to do with Hamas.
Last month he told Tucker Carlson that Hamas was not as rigid as people think: “They’re not ideologically intractable.” That was a surprisingly sympathetic thing to hear from an American official. It was also hard to square with the experience of the past 18 months, in which Hamas was willing to let Gaza be destroyed rather than relinquish its hold on power. He also said that Netanyahu was defying the will of the Israeli people by resisting a hostage deal. Again, surprising to hear (but accurate).
No matter: The next day, on Fox News, he said that Hamas may have “duped” him in negotiations. Less sympathetic (and oddly self-reproachful).
Lately he has been telling the families of Israeli hostages that a big ceasefire deal is close (“a matter of days”). Never mind that the last round of talks, in Cairo, ended in failure—for the same reasons as umpteen rounds before.
The charitable view is that Witkoff is triangulating his way through negotiations. One day he’s empathetic toward Hamas and critical toward Netanyahu; the next day he describes Hamas as untrustworthy. He seems to have no fixed views on anything (except, I’m told, a genuine concern for the plight of the Israeli hostages). There’s also a less charitable interpretation, of course: that he’s out of his depth and bluffing his way through complex geopolitical issues.
Triangulation might be fine for mediating conflicts. When Witkoff speaks about an Iran deal, though, he’s not a mediator. He’s expressing the official position of the United States.
The Iranians already suspect that America is an unreliable negotiating partner—that it will make commitments and then renege on them. An about-face on a major issue, less than a week into the negotiations, will only reinforce that suspicion. The administration is now also publicly committed to a goal (zero enrichment) that will be very hard to achieve.
And this is where we get to a deeper issue. Witkoff’s defenders like to say that he speaks for Trump. That seems true. Unlike most of Trump’s underlings, Witkoff has regular, direct access to the president (they speak on the phone several times a day) and the latitude to say basically anything.
It does no good to speak for the president, though, if the president doesn’t know what he wants. I’ve written before that Trump wants a deal with Iran and doesn’t want to push for dismantlement. I’m less convinced that he has strong opinions about, say, the appropriate level of uranium enrichment at Natanz. In a normal administration, you would have had an interagency process to work these questions out before the talks started. But this is not a normal administration: the president is not a policy guy.
Witkoff will need to be a lot more on-message in dealing with Iran. Equally, though, he needs to know what the message is.