Steve Witkoff reveals how Trump’s "peace through strength" approach—backed by clear directives and intimidation tactics—enabled him to broker Middle East deals, including indirect talks with Hamas via Qatar (despite their October 7th atrocities) and Israel’s push to dismantle Hezbollah. His Russia-Ukraine ceasefire proposals, including prisoner swaps and NATO non-membership for Ukraine, stalled due to Washington’s ideological resistance, yet Putin reportedly valued Trump’s direct diplomacy over Biden’s confrontational stance. Witkoff argues media censorship and proxy wars risk nuclear escalation unless leaders address historical grievances—like Russia’s WWII-era territorial claims—while leveraging backchannel deals on energy and Iran, proving dialogue over conflict could reshape global stability. [Automatically generated summary]
Just laughing because what you're saying is so obviously true.
It's a prerequisite to getting a deal.
And yet it is so different from the posture that the last couple of generations of diplomats have taken, which is like, here's what we want, shut up and do it.
And I just don't think, leaving aside moral considerations, I don't think that's been very effective.
Gaza. And what the president set forth is what he wanted to do with Gaza.
I came back from my first trip.
This is before he was inaugurated, where we had permission from the Biden administration to collaborate with them.
Yes. And the president said, when do you think Gaza can be reconstructed?
15 years was my answer.
Maybe 20. And he said, why?
I said, and I gave him the battlefield conditions.
I was in Gaza, actually, that it's been decimated.
It's been destroyed.
There are tunnels underneath, so think Swiss cheese underneath, and then they got hit with bunker buster bombs.
So there's no rock there anymore.
There's no place to put footings if you're going to build buildings.
And yet, the whole world thought that this was a five-year reconstruction plan.
And why?
Because the Biden May 27th protocol, which is the operating agreement pursuant to which the negotiation between Hamas and the U.S. government and Israel happen, talks about a five-year plan.
But that's a false set of facts.
Level setting the facts, you have to acknowledge that it's a 15- to 20-year plan.
When we first started talking 15- to 20 years, everyone said that, That we didn't know what we were talking about until the journal wrote an article and said 15 to 20 years.
Yes. So the president's plan about CASA was all about how do we put people back in a battle zone where there are munitions all over the field or where there are these latent conditions so that a kid could fall into a hole and go 40,
50, 60 feet down and you'd never know that he was there.
Who would do such a thing?
If we had buildings in those conditions in New York, there would be yellow tape all around and no one would be allowed in.
And then, of course, he got criticized for that as if he was looking to create a beachside community with gleaming towers and casinos.
It was preposterous.
He was being realistic about how you needed to consider Gaza.
I think it's really important that when you're making these decisions that you level set the facts.
And that was my instructions from President Trump.
Go out there, level set the facts, figure out what it is, and then we'll make decisions about where we want to see Gaza going to.
And I think we've got a better, that's a better program.
He was elected on it, which is we want stability and peace in the world.
It's not good for anybody when we don't have that.
But to the extent that you understand it, and since you're one of the few people who seems willing to say it out loud, can you just describe the three players in the current conflict in the Middle East, the big ones, can you go through and tell us what you think each one wants?
In the past, they've had some views that are a little bit more radical from an Islamist standpoint than they are today, but it's moderated quite a bit.
There's no doubt that they're an ally of the United States.
I went to Gaza and then I had this fabulous lunch with CENTCOM people, military guys.
I shook hands of everybody I met because who doesn't want to shake the hand of these guys who are out in the field?
They protect our country.
I'm talking about our military guys.
And then they showed me, this is Southern Command of Israel, then showed me a film of what happened on October 7th.
Yep. And the film is horrific.
Yes. It is about mass rapes.
Yep. There's pictures of Hamas people cutting the head off of an Israeli soldier.
I watched them saw the head off.
I mean, it's really terrible stuff.
And it's beyond what I've ever seen.
And it can taint you.
It can taint the way you're going to feel about these people.
And I think sometimes as a negotiator, you have to be dispassionate.
It's not easy to make decisions if you're going to...
But I had to see that film, Tucker.
I mean, that film is a reality.
I mean, we can't ignore the reality of what happened on October 7th.
Now, they would tell you that...
They've got justification, but there's no justification for what happened that day.
There just isn't.
And unfortunately, there were security lapses that day that shouldn't have happened, that accentuated what happened that day, which shouldn't have happened.
And then you've got to figure out what you can give them that allows them to walk out.
Because that's what's needed here.
You know, what we heard in the beginning of this conflict is, Hamas is ideological, they're prepared to die.
For a whole variety of reasons, I personally, and I talked to the president about this, there's nothing I don't talk to the president about before we're going to make a decision.
Because he is the guy.
He was elected, I was not, none of the other people were, he was elected.
I think that's how we have to function.
With that said, I said to him, I don't think that they are as ideologically locked in.
They're not ideologically intractable.
I never believe that, by the way.
I believe they strap on the suicide vests onto young kids who don't know what they're doing, right?
And they tell them a story.
And once you understand that, once you understand that they wanted to live, then you were able to talk to them in a more effective way.
I get a lot of intelligence reports, so I'm able to read things.
And it just felt to me that the rhythm and the cadence of the negotiation, that's part of it too, right?
If I'm not there all the time, I'm getting secondhand information.
I had to feel it for myself.
I had to be able to sort of live it in...
And that's when I sort of came to the conclusion that they wanted alternatives.
We're in a negotiation right now to maybe stop some of these Israeli strikes and maybe finish this conflict with dialogue.
And if I don't have a feeling that we can accomplish that, why would I waste my time?
Or the United States time?
And worse yet, why would I come to the president, recommend to him that we could finish something with dialogue, and then we can't be that effective?
That's a bad policy prescription, if I'm not in this thing, making those sort of assessments, and being able to come back to the president and say, I think we can finish it with dialogue, or not.
And those, by the way...
Those calculations are going to be the same with the Iranians, and they're going to be the same with the Russians and the Ukrainians, and they're going to be the same with Azerbaijan and Armenia.
So those principles apply to all of these conflicts that we're going to...
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I'm just going to say this for a third time.
I won't keep repeating myself, but that's just such a different way of looking at the conflict, not just in Gaza, but in all the places you just mentioned, acknowledging that, you know, we're sympathetic to one side, but both sides have an interest and,
And it's connected to what you've been saying for the last 20 minutes, which is you have to understand all sides if you want to affect the outcome that you've decided you want.
Correct. Yes.
Again, that's a revolutionary.
Development in American diplomacy.
And I just am thrilled to see it.
So finally, the biggest player in all of this, of course, is the government of Israel.
What is the government of Israel?
Leaving aside the population of Israel, I have no idea.
But what does the government making these decisions want?
I think it might be helpful for everybody if there was just a clear picture of when this is all done, here's what we want the map to be, and then we can debate that.
Do you have any sense of what the map would look like from Israel's perspective?
They're not part of Israel, but they control them.
So when all this is over, what does the Israeli government hope to control?
And then if that were clear, then I think people would say, you know, they could either live with it or they can't, but it would have a calming effect if people knew what the goal was.
So I would say the goal begins with how do we deal with Iran?
That's the biggie.
So the first is nuclear.
We cannot have that.
And we can talk about it in this session.
Yes. And have outsized influence.
That doesn't work.
So if we can solve for that, which I'm hopeful that we can, and we can talk about that too, the next thing we need to deal with Iran is that they're being a benefactor of these proxy armies.
Because we've proven that that's not existential.
They, for all intents and purposes, destroyed Hezbollah.
So they're not really an existential risk.
Hamas, same thing.
The Houthis, we're having...
You know, we're in a conflict with them today.
I think we'll prove that they won't be an existential risk either.
But if we can get these terrorist organizations eliminated as risks, not existential but still risks, they're destabilizing risks, then we'll normalize everywhere.
I think Lebanon could normalize with Israel, literally.
Normalize meaning a peace treaty with the two countries.
That's really possible.
Syria too.
The indications are that Jelani is a different person than he once was.
And people do change.
You at 55 are completely different than how you were at 35. That's for sure.
And I say to myself, I'm a different person today at 68 years old.
I'm not the person I knew 30 years ago.
So maybe Jelani in Syria is a different guy.
They've driven Iran out.
Imagine if Lebanon normalizes Syria normalizes, and the Saudis sign a normalization treaty with Israel because there's a peace in Gaza.
They must have that as a prerequisite.
That's a conditioned precedent to Saudi normalizing.
But now you'd begin to have a GCC that all worked together.
Correct. But looming over all of these countries and their remarkable success, both economically and socially.
They're just like great countries, in my opinion.
Is this, you know, is the conflict in Gaza, and not just Gaza, but the idea that, wow, this could all blow up tomorrow because we don't know what the Israeli plan is.
And even people who should know don't seem to know.
And do you think at some point they will articulate, like, here's our plan?
First of all, I think that the president, President Trump's...
This approach to Gaza has engendered a lot of lively discussion about different ways to deal with Gaza.
We're now seeing an Egyptian plan.
We're seeing the Saudis put together a white paper.
So I think what we're going to do with Gaza is going to become much more apparent over the next 6 to 12 months.
But Gaza is a flashpoint, and we've got to figure that out.
And I agree with the president when he said the old plans don't work.
The old plans, the last 40, 50 years of policy prescription in Gaza, meant war, rebuild, more war, more rebuilding.
It's just, that's not something that made any sense, which is why the president began to say, maybe we need to think about it in a different way.
Now he got criticized for it.
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One question, I don't know if it's answerable.
I've just noticed it.
I was talking to some Israeli government people yesterday.
And so here you have, you know, October 7th, obviously traumatic to Israel.
But you get the destruction of the leadership of Hamas.
You expelled, you broke.
Hezbollah, Nasrallah's dead.
I was there for the 2006 war.
No one ever thought that was going to happen.
I didn't anyway.
That happened.
And Bashar al-Assad's gone from Syria, and there's a more kind of pro-Israel Jelani leader in Syria.
So that seems, like from an Israeli perspective, those seem like massive wins that nobody thought were possible.
And yet I detect in the people I know in Israel a feeling like they feel more under threat, almost.
But what's interesting is it happened at exactly the moment that it felt like things were on track to get better.
I mean, Abraham Accords have been signed.
Saudi didn't sign.
Right. But, you know, there was some thought that they might, I think.
I mean, it was.
And so, like, the trajectory was like that.
And all of a sudden, it just went in the opposite direction.
And so then the question becomes, well, like, how do...
How do you build a framework where there's an enduring peace and everyone can just go on with living their lives and building their businesses and all that?
There is huge concern, as I know you know, from a lot of the neighboring countries that the conflict in Gaza, which is, of course, streamed in everyone's iPhone, a lot of people will be killed in Gaza, a lot of kids.
And that's inflaming the populations of some of these countries, again, specifically Egypt and Jordan, to such a point that those governments could fall and cause massive chaos, including in Europe.
First of all, I think a lot of these newspaper stories are agenda-driven.
People start out saying, I support the Ukrainians, so I'm going to write the article in a certain way.
Look, we want to...
I want to see Ukraine come out of this okay.
I want to see Russia come out of it okay.
Again, we're outcome-oriented.
In this circumstance means that we need a deal that the Ukrainian people can live with.
We have to sell it.
There's going to be various Senate approvals that we may need here.
And that's the political system we're in.
That we're going to want everybody to be, in some respect, satisfied.
So we're going to want the Russians to be satisfied in some respect.
We're going to want the Ukrainians to be satisfied in some respect.
We're talking to the Europeans.
When I say satisfied, feeling that we came out of this thing, okay, with a deal that everybody can live with.
I think that we have moved Russia in ways that no one thought was possible.
So in the last conversation, they agreed to an energy infrastructure ceasefire, which means...
Russia is not going to target Ukraine's energy infrastructure, and Ukraine will not target Russia's energy infrastructure.
They've never talked about that before.
Here we are talking about that.
They've never talked about reinstituting the Black Sea moratorium on maritime hits.
Ukraine firing on Russian ships, Russia firing on Ukrainian ships.
We're down to, and that's going to be implemented over the next week or so.
There are some details that need to be discussed, but that became a part of that conversation.
That's big stuff, really big stuff.
What's the ultimate goal?
The ultimate goal is a 30-day ceasefire, during which time we discuss a permanent ceasefire.
We're not far away from that, but a 30-day ceasefire is something where we have to figure out what all the battlefield conditions are, which is why I began with Kursk.
But Kursk is just the beginning of it because there's this 2,000-kilometer, that's 1,200 miles, this 2,000-kilometer border between Ukraine and Russia where the Russian and Ukrainian troops are involved in, I don't know, 50,
60, 70, maybe 80. Firefights throughout this border with all kinds of different conditions.
Putin asked me in the meeting, what should I do in a particular area where we have people surrounded and they don't want to give up?
I got a call from a friend of mine yesterday, honestly, true story, who said his girlfriend had just broken up with him over Alp.
He wouldn't stop.
And I thought to myself, that's kind of sad.
And he said, no, it's not sad.
Imagine if I'd married her.
Now I know.
I was saved.
Then the next day, this same friend is driving at twice the speed limit through a major American city, pulled over by a cop in a speed trap.
Cop takes his license and registration, goes back to the patrol car, runs him, comes back, looks in the window, and sees a tin of ALP on the dashboard.
Pauses. Stunned.
Says to my friend, you use ALP?
Yeah, I do.
Says my friend.
So do I, says the cop.
We all do.
He looks at my friend thoughtfully and goes, drive safely, sir, and hands back his license and registration.
No ticket!
So in two days, he's saved from a tragic marriage to a girl who doesn't like Alp and a speeding ticket.
All true.
It's more than a nicotine.
In an age of 350 million people, we're guessing there are about 350 million Alp stories.
So Russia, Putin, who's been in power 25 years, has been consistent for the whole duration of his presidency in one demand, which is that NATO stop encroaching on its borders, and specifically that Ukraine, which is the largest country that borders Russia, not be in NATO.
And that is my understanding, my certainty, is that that still remains the central demand, period.
No Ukraine and NATO can't have peace without that, in the same way that Israel doesn't want Hamas in its border.
The elephant in the room is there are constitutional issues within Ukraine as to what they can concede to with regard to giving up territory.
The Russians are de facto in control of these territories.
The question is, will they be...
Will the world acknowledge that those are Russian territories?
Will it end up, can Zelensky survive politically if he acknowledges this?
This is the central issue in the conflict.
Absolutely that.
On NATO, I think that Zelensky, and he's got a right-hand guy, Jermak, I think that they've largely conceded that they are not going to be a member of NATO.
I think it's accepted.
That Ukraine and Russia, if there's going to be a peace deal, Ukraine cannot be a member of NATO.
So you spent sort of an amazing story that got downplayed in the media, but you go to Moscow and then you wind up meeting directly with Putin for a long time.
Every American president until Biden has said that.
Every single one.
Bill Clinton said that.
George W. Bush said that.
Barack Obama said that.
Every president around the world I've ever spoken to is like, they may disagree with what Russia's doing or whatever, but they're like, yeah, Putin's a straightforward guy.
When I came back after, before the first meeting with President Putin, when President Trump said to me, go over and have that conversation.
I think we're going to have a good, healthy conversation.
Before that conversation, there was no talk about a Black Sea moratorium.
There was no conversation about an energy infrastructure moratorium on hits, you know, between the two countries.
We were not talking about prisoner exchanges and all kinds of other stuff.
After one meeting, and I am saying to you, not because of me, because this was President Trump sending a signal to President Putin that he wanted to resume his relationship together and that they were going to be two great leaders figuring out this conflict.
That was the message.
That was me coming there.
That was my message to President Putin.
I was directed by President Trump to deliver that message, that we were here to begin a real discussion, a productive discussion about how to end this conflict.
And President Putin, to his credit, sent all kinds of signals back to the president that this is the path that he wanted to be on, including statements that he made.
In the second visit that I had, It got personal.
President Putin had commissioned a beautiful portrait of President Trump from the leading Russian artist and actually gave it to me and asked me to take it home to President Trump, which I brought home and delivered to him.
It's been reported in the paper, but it was such a gracious moment and told me a story, Tucker, about how when the president was shot, he went to his local church.
And met with his priest and prayed for the president, not because he could become the president of the United States, but because he had a friendship with him and he was praying for his friend.
I mean, can you imagine sitting there and listening to these kind of conversations?
And I came home and delivered that message to our president and delivered the painting.
And he was clearly touched by it.
So this is the kind of connection that we've been able to reestablish through, by the way, a simple word called communication, which many people would say, you know, I shouldn't have had because Putin is a bad guy.
I don't regard Putin as a bad guy.
That is a complicated situation, that war, and all the ingredients that led up to it.
I mean, you know, you can blame the other person all you want, but you're implicated in it too.
So, that's just human nature.
So, it does raise the question.
Everything you've said, I don't think any fair person, everything you've just said about Russia-Ukraine, Any fair person would acknowledge, yeah, that's true.
But there has to be some reason that none of this has been acknowledged for three and a half years.
Like, why the effort to prevent Americans from hearing the other side, from understanding the conflict in its totality, not just parts of it, but the whole thing.
Like, why the censorship designed to keep us from knowing what's actually happening?
I give interviews about President Trump, and guess what?
All the nice things I have to say about him, because I believe in that, that sort of gets excised out of my interviews.
Not with you, I know, because you're a fan too.
I'm a great fan of his, you know, so you hear it.
But guess what?
Trump derangement syndrome still exists out there today.
You know, he said it at the State of the Union.
If I came here, and he was looking at the Democrats, if I came here, I had the cure for cancer, and I had a magic pill that would cure all conflicts all over the world, nobody would cheer for me on your side.
And it really is true, by the way.
Look at how all the different things he's involved in now.
I mean, we are out there curing and solving conflicts all over the world.
It's unbelievable.
No one's ever seen this sort of progress before.
And the Russians want to engage with us once again because we have a real decision maker.
So, without getting into names, I've talked to multiple European leaders, and I've said to them, The more you encourage him not to be proactive at the peace table, the more you suggest that aid will continue without any conditions attached to it.
No one says that we shouldn't aid Ukraine today and in the Reconstruction later on, but it's got to come with We've
discussed this in the administration.
Ultimately... What you can't have here is risk of any kind of nuclear action, even the tactical nuclear action.
I mean, even if it's not a big bomb explosion, just a tactical nuke would take stock markets down all over the world.
First of all, why would they want to absorb Ukraine?
For what purpose?
Exactly. They don't need to absorb Ukraine.
That would be like occupying Gaza.
Why do the Israelis really want to occupy Gaza for the rest of their lives?
They don't.
They want stability there.
They don't want to deal with that.
But the Russians also have what they want.
They've gotten, they've reclaimed these five regions.
They have Crimea, and they've gotten what they want, so why do they need more?
He said, Putin's a very smart guy.
You know, someone said to me that someone, I was talking to someone in the administration, and they said, well, you've got to watch it because he's an ex-KGB guy.
I mean, we just came out of a world where a judge who was not even an elected judge could tell a man that he was going to spend 10 years in prison, you know, and he had 80 million votes in this country.
It's so, I can't tell you, I'm not sucking up, I mean this, I can't tell you how refreshing it is to see someone, hear someone tell the truth, obvious truths, and I do think it makes a huge difference to say the truth out loud.
We should create a verification program so that nobody worries about weaponization of your nuclear material.
And I'd like to get us to that place because the alternative is not a very good alternative.
That's a rough encapsulation of what was said, roughly.
And the president has said that.
He's said that, so I'm not telling you anything top secret or anything of that sort.
The Iranians have reached back out.
And I'm not at liberty to talk about the specifics, but clearly through back channels, through multiple countries and multiple conduits, they've reached back out.
I think...
That it has a real possibility of being solved diplomatically, not because I've talked to anybody in Iran, but just because I think logically it makes sense that it ought to be solved diplomatically.
It should be.
I think the president has acknowledged that Iran, that he's open to an opportunity to clean it all up with Iran, where they come back to the world and be a great nation once again.
Not have to be sanctioned and being able to grow their economy.
I mean, these are very smart people.
Their economy was once a wonderful economy.
They're being strangled and suffocated today.
There's no need for that to happen.
They can join the League of Nations and we can have a better relationship and grow that relationship.
And that's what he's presenting.
That's the alternative he's presenting.
I think he wants to deal with Iran with respect.
He wants to build trust with them if it's possible.
And that's his directive to his administration.
And hopefully that will be met positively by the Iranians.
I'm certainly hopeful for it.
I think anything can be solved with dialogue by clearing up misconception and miscommunication and disconnects between people.
I believe that, by the way.
And yet, and the president is a president who doesn't want to go to war.
And he'll use military action to stop a war.
That's when he actually wants to use military action.
In this particular case, hopefully it won't be necessary.
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
On one level, that's not surprising.
That's what they do.
But on another level, it's shocking.
With everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics, with the wars on the cusp of fighting right now, Google has decided you should have less information rather than more.
And that is totally wrong.
It's immoral.
What can you do about it?
Well, we could whine about it.
That's a waste of time.
We're not in charge of Google.
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