You read here and there that Kushner and Witkoff’s undertakings with Moscow and Tehran reflect a diplomatic “style.” On we go to the normalization of stupidity and hubris as merely a new form of statecraft.
Jared Kushner, investor and founder of Affinity Partners on left with the U.S. president’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff on right in foreground, in Moscow in December 2025. In background is Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund. (Kremlin)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
Ours is an age of “normalization” — the gradual if not subtle acceptance as normal of realities that are objectionably, often criminally, very often stupidly abnormal. Normalization, let’s mention right away, is an essential trick of the powerful in a world as aberrant and self-destructive as ours.
This process of normalization is in the most obvious cases impossible to miss.
It took official power and the media serving power… what?… a year or so to normalize the genocide in Gaza. Zionist terror is now normalized. U.S. complicity in this daily terror is now normalized; the criminal regime in Tel Aviv is normalized.
Patently disturbed and incompetent, Donald J. Trump is now normalized as president, dwelling in the same house as Jefferson, Lincoln, F.D.R., Kennedy.
In his Substack newsletter the other day, Simplicius put this tendency down to “normalcy bias,” meaning the prevalent acceptance of what is, simply because it is. In history, this is a common feature of late-phase empires. Under the headline, “Encore at the Cirque de Hormuz—the Greatest Show on Earth,” this:
“American society lives in a state of Normalcy Bias, as spray-tanned politicians bleat about some kind of ‘Golden Age,’ while virtually everything associated with the American empire slowly goes to hell in a hand basket.”
P.D.G., I would say. Maybe even P.F.G.
Then there are the cases of normalization that are not so commonly remarked upon. And here I turn to the Trump regime’s way at diplomacy and statecraft.
You never read in the corporate press about how far beyond accepted practice the Trumpster’s emissaries operate, or how ruinous are their ideological compulsions, or of their divided loyalties, or how incapable they are of carrying out their duties or altogether how destructively ignorant of the world they are: No, all this has been normalized.
There is the case of Charles Kushner, Trump’s ambassador to Paris. Charles Kushner is a convicted felon — tax evasion, witness tampering, illegal political contributions — with a prison term on his record. Charles Kushner is a fanatical Zionist who, earlier this year, refused to oblige the French Foreign Ministry when summoned to answer for his anti–Semitism-everywhere provocations, which prompted the ministry to note his “incomprehension” and ban him, briefly, from contact with French officials.
Charles Kushner, second from right, with President Donald Trump at right, at the White House in June 2025, with family members. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner on left. (The White House /Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
France, Belgium, Poland, Italy: Trump’s appointees make messes all over Europe, typically by intervening in the host country’s domestic affairs, which even a first-year student in international relations knows is a diplomatic not-done. They all share various attributes: They are all Zionists, they have no idea what they are doing as ambassadors and, acting instead as imperial consuls, they have no readily evident interest in any kind of workable, constructive U.S. foreign policy.
This brings me to Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoys at large. These are the truly consequential cases of normalized incompetence. They are, like all the others, Zionists ever attentive to the interests of the Jewish state. And like the others, they also display no grasp of what they are doing or, indeed, anything that would pass as a coherent U.S. policy. None of this is ever noted in corporate media: This is how the abnormal is normalized.
Together, Kushner and Witkoff have been running Trump’s diplomatic relations with Iran and Russia. And they know nothing about Iran, nothing about West Asia other than what the Zionist ideology to which they adhere tells them to know, nothing about either Russia or Ukraine and nothing about Europe altogether. They are ignorant, certainly, of the history of all these nations and regions.
Normalizing Incompetence
Russian President Vladimir Putin with Witkoff meeting at the Kremlin on Aug. 6, 2025. Putin’s aide Yuri Ushakov, in background. (Kremlin.ru/ Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 4.0)
The working assumption shared by Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff and the man who appointed them — and this is the salient point — is that there is no need to know anything about the things just mentioned. These three, along with Charles Kushner, Jared K.’s father, are New York landlords. This is on occasion mentioned in the media, but never as more than a passing curiosity of no great import.
It would be hard to overstate the gravity of this normalization of incompetence.
You may assume you know little or nothing of the practices of New York property people, but if you have followed the progress of Witkoff and Kushner the younger — is “progress” my word? — you know more than you think. In the world of real-estate “deals” it is of no importance whatsoever what those on the other side of the mahogany table think, or to what they aspire, or what their interests might be. Prevailing in one’s own interest is all that matters.
You read here and there that Kushner and Witkoff’s undertakings with Moscow and Tehran reflect a diplomatic “style.” On we go to the normalization of stupidity and hubris as merely a new way at statecraft. To understand the perspectives of others is elemental to sound diplomacy. This thought appears never to enter the minds of the people I name here. “Stupid” is not too strong a term for all of them.
In the Russian case, readers may recall the 28–point plan Kushner and Witkoff negotiated with the Russians last November in the cause of a settlement of the Ukraine crisis. As I wrote at the time, I found that document remarkable for the extent to which it acknowledged Moscow’s legitimate diplomatic and security interests.
But as things turned out this was only because neither Witkoff nor Kushner understood anything about the East–West security relationship, and the 28–point plan, after the Europeans disemboweled it, was soon a dead letter.
You read now that Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov won’t even speak to these two, Russia’s president and his FM seeing no further point in doing so. Apart from what may be going on in back channels, at the moment there are no diplomatic contacts at all between Moscow and Washington. Good work, Special Envoy Kushner and Special Envoy Witkoff.
It is the same with the Iranians. Witkoff and Kushner infamously betrayed Tehran last year and earlier this, as it became evident they were working as much or more in Israel’s behalf as the United States’.
More than once negotiations turned out to be cover for imminent attacks. This may be an excellent tactic if you want to trick a competitor in the New York property market in the cause of ruining him or her, but, once again, Iranian diplomats, on down from Abbas Araghchi, Tehran’s highly professional FM, reportedly don’t want even to be in the same room with these two.
This is not diplomatic style. There is no mastery here — only, to take the French term, incomprehension. And it is the collapse of American diplomacy in the hands of these two, as much as any other hell-in-a-handbasket failure, that accounts for the prevalent peril with which humanity must live.
This is how Kushner and Witkoff are best understood. On they will go. Their ignorance, incompetence, corruptions, divided loyalties, and serial perfidies have been normalized; let us not miss that this is a betrayal of us all.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being censored.
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The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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