'Amateur diplomat' Steve Witkoff has swallowed Putin's line

Marco Rubio has many jobs in the second Trump administration. He is secretary of state, national security adviser and even chief archivist, having also until recently been the administrator of USAID.

- Ivo Daalder

What he's not is Donald Trump's chief diplomat. That job belongs to Steve Witkoff, the billionaire property developer who is also the president's golfing partner. In the first 10 months of Trump's second administration, Witkoff has emerged as his dominant peace envoy.

He works largely on his own, flying around the world on his own aircraft, using unsecured communications to talk to interlocutors and report back from the road. He goes without note takers and relies on foreign interpreters. He's recently read a lot of books and watched Netflix documentaries, he has said, but he neither claims to be an expert nor thinks he needs to be one. After all, he said: "Diplomacy is negotiation. I've been doing it my whole life."

So how is the self-described "amateur diplomat" doing? Nuclear weapons negotiations with Iran didn't go far, and he often got the finer details of nuclear enrichment and Iranian commitments wrong. In the end, Israel and the US sought to end the nuclear programme with bombs rather than talk.