Washington Week with The Atlantic

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It was a homecoming of sorts for President Trump this week.

After being welcomed in royal style by Gulf leaders -- DONALD TRUMP, U.S. President: That's called white marble, it's very hard to buy.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: -- the president announced enormous deals.

DONALD TRUMP: It's the largest order of jets in the history of Boeing.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: -- and made new dramatic foreign policy decisions on the fly.

DONALD TRUMP: I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria.

Oh, what I do for the Crown Prince.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: He also advanced the cause of his family's businesses and showed us the outlines of America's newest foreign policy doctrine, extreme transactionalism.

Tonight we'll go deep on this new era for America and the world, next.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

This week, The Atlantic published a profile of Steve Witkoff, the Trump friend and special envoy, who is, in many ways, more important than the secretary of state, Marco Rubio.

Witkoff told staff writer Isaac Stanley Becker the following, quote, we're going to have success in Syria.

You're going to hear about it very quickly.

We're going to have success in Libya.

You're going to hear it quickly.

We're going to have success in Azerbaijan and Armenia, a place that was godforsaken almost, and you'll hear about it immediately.

And, ultimately, we will get to an Iranian solution and a Russian-Ukraine solution.

Trump and Witkoff are a promising world peace, of course, and not only world peace, but prosperity for everyone, including, by the way, the Trump family.

Tonight we'll examine the President's trip to the Middle East and what it tells us about America's place in the world.

Joining me at the table, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times, Steven Hayes is the editor of the Dispatch, David Ignatius is a columnist at the Washington Post, and Andrea Mitchell is the chief Washington and foreign affairs correspondent for NBC News.

Welcome, everyone.

Andrea, nice to have you back at Washington Week.

ANDREA MITCHELL, Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, NBC News: Thank you.

Great to be here.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Peter, let me start with you.

What do we know about Trump's foreign policy at the end of this week that we didn't know last week?

PETER BAKER, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Well, it's malleable, it's flexible.

It's not necessarily predictable.

We probably knew that a week ago too.

But it has been a remarkable week to watch, right.

You saw the president of the United States go to the Middle East without going to Israel, even though he's supposedly a great friend of Bibi Netanyahu.

He went to the Middle East to collect a $400 million plane.

Obviously, he hasn't yet brought it home.

He went to the release though to, you know, re-alter the dynamics by recognizing Syria's new government, announcing they're going to lift sanctions and effectively moving closer toward a deal with Iran.

That sounds an awful like the deal that he throughout in his first term.

So, you know, this is a different dynamic than we saw even just a week ago, I think.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And so it was the opposite of an Obama dynamic.

Obama couldn't really stand the Gulf States in a kind of way.

PETER BAKER: Yes.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I want to play something that Trump said while he was on the ground in the Middle East.

Let's just listen to Trump for one second.

DONALD TRUMP: The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the nation builders, neo-cons, or liberal nonprofits, like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop, Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities.

Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: David, frame that statement historically, if you could.

DAVID IGNATIUS, Columnist, The Washington Post: So, I mean, no one would call Donald Trump a nation builder, but we've been through arguably a generation Republicans and Democrats who did go to the Middle East and spoke about democracy, human rights, tried to build up countries whose governance was weak, tried to develop security partnerships, often doing that because it seemed to be good for Israel, in many ways, our closest ally, certainly in the region.

And Trump really reshuffled that deck this week in that speech but in every stop on the trip, created I thought a kind of personal diplomacy road show.

It did have a lot of energy.

It had surprises.

I thought, you know, these could have exclamatory comments about MBS in Saudi Arabia, you know, my guy the -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince.

DAVID IGNATIUS: Yes, the Crown Prince.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Who, four years ago -- DAVID IGNATIUS: was an outcast, I mean, properly.

So my colleague, Jamal Khashoggi, was murdered with his knowledge about the operation.

And he was rightly shunned for that.

That's over.

Donald Trump's embrace is the signal of that.

But it was a week that I think told us that Trump's kind of ad hoc, improvised diplomacy is attempting - - it's ambitious.

And with Iran, it may achieve a success that I think most of us, certainly me would applaud.

But it's just a much more intense personal involvement than we've seen for a long time.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Andrea, if you are Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, what do you think after watching him be feted in the Gulf and also after hearing him signal that he wants a deal with the Iranians?

ANDREA MITCHELL: Well, this has been the most remarkable shift because we all had expected because of his praise and his support for expanding the war in Gaza, his, you know, unconditional support of Netanyahu up until a couple of weeks ago.

And then he shocked Netanyahu by talking about opening direct talks with Iran while Netanyahu was sitting next to him in the Oval Office on a trip that had been scheduled, according to Netanyahu's, people to get approval, U.S. approval to support a military strike against Iran because of its new vulnerability because of what Israel had done against Hamas, Hezbollah, and the removal of Assad and all of that, plus removing many of the air defenses in a retaliatory strike.

This is a moment that Iran was weakened economically, but also militarily and vulnerable.

And instead of getting support for a military strike, he heard the president suggest direct talks, not the indirect talks, but direct talks with Iran and really reshaping diplomacy and proceeding with the Gulf and with Saudi Arabia, with security agreements and, you know, of course, the financial rewards without Israel, so not the normalization.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Are we heading to a moment when Donald Trump sends love letters to the ayatollah?

If you recall his relationship with the North Koreans, it was a big love letter phase.

Is that what we're looking at now?

ANDREA MITCHELL: Possibly, because Iran needs a deal.

They've got to get out from under the sanctions.

They want to get out from under the sanctions.

And as complex as it is, and I covered the negotiations for the previous agreement in 2015, negotiated by, you know, a nuclear physicist, Ernest Moniz, who is the energy secretary, all these experts, this could actually get done.

And it's Steve Witkoff probably who is the negotiator.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

Steve, let's talk about royal courts.

There's a symbiotic kind of thing going on here with Donald Trump and the way he runs his operation and the way many of these Gulf potentates run their operations.

He seems very at home in the Gulf.

Talk about that.

STEPHEN HAYES, Editor, The Dispatch: He does.

I mean, he clearly loves that.

I think he would like to run the U.S. government much the way that some of the people that he was celebrating this week run their own countries.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And to be clear, those countries are not democracies by any stretch of the imagination.

STEPHEN HAYES: Right, exactly.

And, look, I mean, some of this is -- it's fascinating to watch the change from, you know, certainly from the Bush era.

If you think back to George W. Bush's second inaugural and the triumph of democracy that he was proposing and caring about things, like human rights, women's rights, and where we are now, this, it seems to be, skips past realism, which is something that I think Trump -- the people who want to intellectualize what Trump is doing have talked about in this context to a real embrace of autocracies.

He clearly admires them.

I mean, the vow this week to protect Qatar, to protect the Saudis, these people with long histories of supporting anti-American terror.

There's quite a moment when you think about the rhetoric from Donald Trump this week.

Think about if Barack Obama had said the things about the new leader of Syria praising him as strong, yes, a fighter, this is somebody who's a longtime terrorist, there would've been outcry, literal -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Literally a member of Al-Qaeda.

STEPHEN HAYES: Correct, literally.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

It is hard to imagine a Democratic president getting away -- STEPHEN HAYES: Think about what Republicans on Capitol Hill would've said and what I, people like me, would've said if Barack Obama had said those things.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: David?

DAVID IGNATIUS: There is this element of Nixon to China.

Trump can get away with this in a weird way because he has the reputation of being a strong leader, a tough guy.

And so he's doing things that would be attacked as concessionary, you know, you're embracing the former Al-Qaeda affiliate.

You're really going to make a deal with the ayatollahs.

I think Trump has this sense of his own agency, the difference that he makes by getting involved in these things.

You talked about him meeting with the ayatollah.

Love letters, no, but the idea of a kind of culminating summit.

You know, Sadat went to Jerusalem.

I don't think it's crazy to think of Donald Trump flying to Tehran.

He'd love that.

What a moment on the stage.

PETER BAKER: Donald Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize.

It's really that simple.

He had talked about it and talked about it, and talked about it in his first term.

He actually even convinced Shinzo Abe, then the prime minister of Japan, quietly over dinner, he says, well, you'll nominate me for that, won't you?

And Shinzo Abe obliged and nominated him for Nobel Peace Prize.

He has it in his mind that he can be this world history figure, right?

And look at the quote that you put up there on the board, not just Russia and Ukraine, not just Iran, but Azerbaijan and Armenia, for heaven's sake.

We're talking about, you know, intractable disputes that have been there for decades that people have basically forgotten about because we can't possibly ever solve them.

This is a very ambitious is one word, messianic might be another word, you know, agenda that he has set out for himself.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Andrea, stay on that point.

because it's very interesting when you have two secretaries of state at the same time, or three, because Donald Trump will act like a secretary of State whenever he wants to.

Steve Witkoff, key man in all of this, by his side through all of these negotiations, no experience in any of this.

Have you -- you've been covering American diplomacy for a little while.

Have you ever seen anything like this?

ANDREA MITCHELL: No.

Not like this, but he has some unique skills, and the most important is that he knows the president.

And when secretaries of state or national security advisers really understand their presidents, they have unique abilities that often, you know, you know, work to the disadvantage of whether it's the national security adviser or the secretary of state who is shut out.

We've seen that in the recent past with George W. Bush, for instance, and Colin Powell most, you know, really tragically.

Look, Steve Witkoff has a skill set.

And he has a good team that he's now surrounding himself with.

He's getting better depth.

And he dug in on some things that I'm aware of in Gaza, helping get children with, you know, cancer out of Gaza.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Out to Jordan.

ANDREA MITCHELL: To Jordan and elsewhere, and doing it very quietly with unlikely partners going into Gaza.

He's the first American official to go into Gaza since October 7th and starting early in the transition.

So, I wouldn't underestimate him, but I think that he does need support to do an Iranian deal.

And as Peter alluded to earlier, this deal that is shaping up is not that different than the deal that was derided by its critics in the Senate, the Republican Party, and certainly by Donald Trump when he pulled out of it, because it does not include missiles, delivery systems or proxies.

ANDREA MITCHELL: The terror proxies, of course, who have been largely eliminated or defanged, other than the Houthis, by Israel.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I need to ask all of you this question because it's fascinating.

Is Donald Trump turning Benjamin Netanyahu into a bit of a sucker?

DAVID IGNATIUS: Well, Bibi's yesterday's man.

You know, the centrality of Israel and Netanyahu was really eclipsed this week.

That was the biggest theme, unstated was where Trump wasn't, in Israel.

You know, I think Trump got angry in February when Netanyahu came to Washington in the expectation that he could push Trump towards military action against Iran.

And my sense is that Trump felt jammed.

And ever since then, as Andrea said, he has been pushing back.

I'm just very curious whether this is going to end up costing Netanyahu in Israel.

He's no longer the Trump whisperer.

ANDREA MITCHELL: Just one quick fact is that the Sunday before this trip, Netanyahu expanded the war in Gaza and called up the reserves against half of his own population and against the interests of the hostage families and against the former people in the IDF, including the defense ministry he had fired.

So, by expanding the war, he was going up against Donald Trump's stated desire to rebuild Gaza.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

ANDREA MITCHELL: And now we are reporting tonight that they are working on a plan to move 1 million Gazans to Libya.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Peter, stay on the subject of Bibi and also answer the question.

Well, it's almost a asked and answered question.

1 million Gazans are not being moved to Libya.

PETER BAKER: Yes.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Is that fair to say?

PETER BAKER: Look, I think we should learn in the last ten years not to make predictions, but it's awfully hard to see how that happens, right?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And Libya is a failed state right now.

PETER BAKER: Absolutely.

There's -- I mean, I think Donald Trump looks at a map and he says, huh, that looks like there's a good property there, right?

I mean, it's just something as that.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But we've all been to Libya, a lot of beachfront.

PETER BAKER: A lot of beach.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: A lot of beach.

ANDREA MITCHELL: But it's in exchange for unfreezing the Libyan asset.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

No, absolutely.

But it's a deal.

It's a deal.

STEPHEN HAYES: To get another deal.

Look, I think that's what we're looking at here.

Donald Trump wants to make deals.

He wants to make big deals.

He wants to be flashy.

He wants to be in the center of it all.

And he wants to be in charge.

And I think if you go back to that quote from Steve Witkoff, the word I come up with when I see that is naive, I mean, how hopelessly naive is it?

I like the ambition.

There's room for disruption.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You know, I don't appreciate your cynicism here.

STEPHEN HAYES: I'm sorry to be cynical.

I mean, I probably should have been more cynical than I have been over the past decade, would've been right more.

But, look, I mean, I think it, it's hopelessly naive to say the kinds of things that he's saying.

And Netanyahu in this case is really only the latest of U.S. allies whom Donald Trump has sort of cast aside.

I mean, think about things that he's been saying about European leaders, about Canadians, about NATO.

I mean, longtime, decades-long allies, he's sort of cast aside in part because they don't get him the deal.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

David, it is interesting to note that yes, he didn't go to Israel, he also has no interest in going to -- taking a long, grand tour of Europe with all of our friends and allies.

DAVID IGNATIUS: He doesn't.

He wants to go to Moscow and see Vladimir Putin and end the war in Ukraine.

You know, that's - - the real showdown for Trump, I think isn't the Iran negotiation.

It's whether and how he can deliver on his promise over and over again to end the war in Ukraine.

And the big fear I have given that he has not really pressured any compromises yet from Russia is that he will go there, meet and it'll be kind of Yalta 2.

And that's -- the Ukrainians you know, are hanging tough but it would be very hard for them to do it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: David, you're just back from Kyiv.

Have the Ukrainians figured out the puzzle that is Donald Trump?

DAVID IGNATIUS: So, I was there a week ago.

I felt that Ukraine was in much better shape, more confident, more resilient than six months before when I was last there.

They learned how to speak Trump.

Zelenskyy, when he was rebuffed in the Oval Office, came back, he was very popular, people at homes, you know, kind of rallied around him.

And the Ukrainians have realized that they are now part of Europe.

The leaders of Europe stand with them against Russia, and that means an enormous amount.

That's really what this war is about, is Ukraine becoming European.

So, I came away actually feeling a little more hopeful for.

PETER BAKER: In fact, look at who was on the phone today, right, when the president leaves the Middle East on his plane ride home.

This is the old Air Force 1.

He takes a call from Zelenskyy, who's on the line with Zelenskyy is Starmer from Britain, Duda from Poland, and Merz from Germany, his friends.

Coaching him, right, they are his validators, right?

It's not just Zelenskyy, it's his friends.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And what's the theory of having them all on the phone?

That Trump is not going to bully Zelenskyy if all of the European leaders are on the phone?

PETER BAKER: In a way, they're tutoring Zelenskyy, okay?

They showed repeatedly, how do you deal with Trump?

Flattery?

Gratitude?

Yes, and, not, yes, but.

You know, you say you're exactly right.

And then you restate what your position is, even if it's complete opposite of what he said and you just don't try to poke at him.

And I think the solidarity there is important.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Peter, let me play devil's advocate, triangulate devil's advocacy against Steve for a second and ask you.

Yes, Witkoff, these statements, I mean, throwing in Armenia, Azerbaijan was sort of just like about a cherry on top, like you're not busy enough.

PETER BAKER: Yes.

If it's Tuesday, it's (INAUDIBLE).

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

But are we being overly cynical and saying, well, maybe everything is so fluid now and maybe Trump keeps everybody so unstable?

PETER BAKER: We should be skeptical.

But David's made I think a fair point, which is that Donald Trump is not locked into the old rules, right?

Steve Witkoff, as Andrea said, he can come into a meeting saying, hey, I'm sorry I'm late, I was just on the phone with Hamas, right.

Obviously, Brett McGurk couldn't have done that for Joe Biden when he was his special Middle East coordinator.

No Obama person could have talked with the Iranians.

Remember when Obama wanted to have a phone call with the Iranian president during a U.N. meeting, it was this big negotiation, oh my God, first time in three decades, any America -- and Trump doesn't care about that, and Witkoff doesn't care about that.

He may not even know what the rules are as he's violating them because he is maybe naive or innocent or whatever word we want to use.

Okay, there's an advantage of that, Nixon and China.

But Nixon was a very canny operator.

He had Kissinger at his side.

And to say that Donald Trump and Steve Witkoff are Nixon, Kissinger may be asking a lot, right?

We don't know.

ANDREA MITCHELL: When I say that Witkoff has his utility, I think his big misstep so far was in parroting Vladimir Putin's, you know, propaganda when he came back, but that was also playing up to the boss, Donald Trump.

And so maybe that was tactical.

I just think that he could be more effective as an opening act and then bringing in the experts along the way, which is what you'll have to do with the new -- DAVID IGNATIUS: They're going to need help to pull off the thing, the agenda that they've now set.

They're going to need real expertise.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: How stable is that team inside though?

If you're the secretary of State you're competing against J.D.

Vance in 2028 -- (CROSSTALKS) DAVID IGNATIUS: Stable is a word a lot -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Stable, yes.

DAVID IGNATIUS: Yes, that's a word you thought there.

There are internal deep fractures here, but between the so-called neo-cons and the MAGA group, you know?

So, that's all papered over because of the intense personal involvement of Witkoff.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That's a very interesting point, Steve, and you've covered this issue for years.

The, quote/unquote, neo-con faction in the Republican Party, even the White House is not dead, it's not gone, Mike Waltz, the defenestrated national security adviser ostensibly heading to the U.N., Marco Rubio, obviously they come from that -- Lindsey Graham came from that, we have something to tell the world about our system mode.

They're on their back foot, but I don't think that they're gone forever or are they?

STEPHEN HAYES: I mean, it's hard to tell.

Marco Rubio, remember, this week he said something about the president -- praising President Trump for moving beyond the rhetoric of 30 years of failed Washington establishment foreign policy.

I would argue that until very recently, Marco Rubio was one of the most effective advocates of that 30-year consensus, American foreign policy.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: He was one of the most important.

STEPHEN HAYES: And he's not.

He isn't any longer, not just in his public statements, which certainly huge to this sort of MAGA line, and often I think go further than President Trump in his public statements, but also behind the scenes.

I don't think Marco Rubio is sort of this bulwark of, you know, conservative internationalism or neo-conservatism any longer.

I don't think he's making those arguments.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But speaking of cynicism, this was -- everything about this foreign policy is extremely transactional.

It's Russia -- it's not that Russia is wrong, it's just that the war has to end.

It's not that -- the fact that MBS oversaw or a ceded to the murder of a Washington Post columnist irrelevant.

There has never been less morality informing -- even hypocritical morality informing U.S. foreign policymaking.

ANDREA MITCHELL: Well, in talking to diplomats, including our closest diplomats, members of the Five Eyes, you know, that circle -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Great Britain and the English speaking countries.

ANDREA MITCHELL: Right.

The real game changer is the level of open corruption.

In the first term, Donald Trump promised to not be involved in the Trump organization and made a big show of that.

He cared about that.

There were a lot of conflicts of interest, but they were not open.

On this trip, the deal-making of the sons in the two weeks before, the cryptocurrency, selling of access to the president, the airplane, we haven't spoken about Qatar, remaking the image of Qatar.

They were apparently, according to reporting tonight, today, trying to unload this older plane because of the maintenance costs.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: We are going to talk about corruption in the weeks to come because it's pretty extraordinary.

I do have one question, one final question.

Peter, you're the unlucky soul.

Donald Trump tweeted at the tail end of his trip, has anyone noticed that since I said I hate Taylor Swift, she's no longer hot?

That's a real Truth Social tweet.

You have ten seconds to explain this, down to eight.

PETER BAKER: He was on the plane, his own plane on the way home.

Clearly, he watched something that involved Taylor Swift and it got him thinking.

He just starts -- he also did, by the way, the same thing on Bruce Springsteen went after him in the same trip.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Oh, we're going to - - we'll be talking about -- well, no, we're going to spend time next week talking about Syria and Taylor Swift, but we're going to have to leave it there for now.

I want to thank our guests for joining me and thank you at home for watching us.

For that close read of Steve Witkoff's plans, please visit theatlantic.com.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Goodnight from Washington.

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