US foreign policy under the Trump administration is effectively shaped by Steve Witkoff - a man whom geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan describes as "a slobbering moron who knows nothing about the world and is proud of that fact." In a blistering assessment on the Superpowers podcast, Zeihan explained how the special envoy's ignorance translates directly into White House decisions.
As "Hvylya" reports, Zeihan told former UK Armed Forces Minister James Heappey that understanding Trump's foreign policy requires grasping three factors: the President's mercurial nature, Witkoff's incompetence, and who accompanies Witkoff on trips abroad.
"When Witkoff conducts negotiations, his counterparts basically pour propaganda in his mouth. He goes back to the White House, vomits it out on the table, and that becomes policy," Zeihan said. "Because Trump doesn't bother to verify. He doesn't trust US foreign policy institutions - the ones he hasn't already gutted."
The picture changes when Witkoff is accompanied by Jared Kushner or Secretary of State Marco Rubio. "There's someone with a brain in the room, and the President gets a more balanced picture," Zeihan noted. He observed that "almost every knee-jerk response from Trump can be traced back to Witkoff being alone with foreign counterparts." At the time of the interview, Witkoff appeared to have been barred from traveling alone, which Zeihan credited with recent improvements in US policy coherence. As one analyst argued earlier on Hvylya, in this new reality Ukraine must learn to speak the language of deals, not values.
Zeihan described the broader dysfunction at the top of US foreign policy: Witkoff is "liked and respected by no one except the President himself." Secretary Rubio was sidelined for the first eight to ten months of Trump's second term - given the State Department and the NSC but physically kicked out of the White House, unable to get a meeting with the President. The only other inputs Trump received came from Vice President Vance - whom Zeihan called "a white nationalist" who views the world through a single ideological lens - and Tulsi Gabbard, whom he described as "basically a Russian plant."
It took First Lady Melania Trump to tell the President he was "just being played, again and again," after which Rubio was brought back into the inner circle when he pitched the Venezuela idea. The result, Zeihan said, is "a strange culture clash and internal infighting at the very top, with no middle layer doing the actual work underneath." Meanwhile, Zeihan has also warned that Europe's own decision-making paralysis leaves the continent unable to fill the vacuum created by US dysfunction.