Dollar Diplomacy: Why Trump's Envoys Are Getting Nowhere in Moscow

In late August, OSINTdefender—an open-source intelligence account on X—posted that a U.S. Air Force C-17A Globemaster III had arrived at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport. Not long after, it emerged that the aircraft was carrying Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John Ratcliffe. Ten days later, President Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, made their first visit to Russia and Ukraine in the administration’s latest push for peace talks. These visits come after a long pause in U.S. attempts to end the Russian war on Ukraine. Yet it takes little more than watching how Trump carries out these negotiating efforts to see that peace, as Washington imagines it, may easily turn out to be another castle in the air.

The U.S. peace envoys travelled to Moscow only a week after the director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, flew to Russia unannounced. While the White House refused to disclose the reasons behind Ratcliffe’s visit, media outlets proposed several possible explanations, such as a push for a trilateral meeting between Trump, Putin, and Zelensky or Washington’s frustration with Moscow for still sharing intelligence with Iran. 

The purpose of Ratcliffe’s visit may not diverge from these narratives. However, reading it alongside the Witkoff-Kushner visit in early September might slightly sharpen the picture of the Trump administration’s approach to Russia. The meeting received wide media coverage, leaving considerably less room for speculation about what happened behind closed doors. Sitting at a round wooden table that reflected the crimson walls of the Red Drawing Room, the American representatives looked content, even slightly elated, to be speaking with Putin. Witkoff started by thanking Putin for the return of Robert Gilman—an American military veteran detained in Russia—a release Putin sycophantically credited to Trump. Having travelled to Germany earlier, Kushner compared relations between the U.S. and Russia to those of the U.S. and Germany, spanning from the Nazi era to the present day, suggesting that historical animosity is not everlasting and there was potential for cooperation between Washington and Moscow. Cooperation requires trust, which, based on the fact that Witkoff and Kushner relied on the Kremlin for translation, seems to be abundant. In fact, Washington’s good faith in the Kremlin might be overflowing, as signalled by the multiple offers that Witkoff has turned down from the CIA for intelligence briefings on Russia. 

Ratcliffe’s secrecy and the diplomatic missteps of Witkoff and Kushner reveal the distorted reality Trump has built for himself and his administration, where foes become allies and allies become suspects. In this reality, everything must radiate grandeur and gestures are chosen to be seen, not explained. Perhaps this is precisely the dimension in which Washington meets Moscow: a clumsy waltz where each side tries to lead the other, neither noticing how unnatural the partnership looks from the outside. What matters is not so much what Ratcliffe, or Kushner and Witkoff, discussed with Russian officials, but what everything left unspoken, but visible nonetheless, communicated instead.

In Russian media, the U.S. peace envoy visit was received with a degree of amusement, if not outright contempt. For instance, Moskovsky Komsomolets, a Moscow-based newspaper, referred to the visit as the “diplomacy of the doomed.” According to it, Trump’s push for peace negotiations is a result of the mounting pressure that the American president feels in the face of the midterm elections scheduled for early November. Similarly, in an opinion piece for Rossiyskaya Gazeta, a newspaper published by the Government of Russia, Fyodor Lukyanov, a political scientist, writes that “Trump’s peace efforts go round in circles and each round ends in disillusionment” largely because the White House continues to view it as a business deal. 

Similarly, in a recent article, The New Yorker writes about Kushner’s so-called ‘Dollar Diplomacy,’ citing Trump’s son-in-law’s striking comment that “peace deals are like real-estate deals” as “both involve hard bargaining and, at times, bluffing.” If that is the case, the White House might benefit from skimming Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. In Tsarist Russia, landowners paid tax on serfs still listed as living on outdated census rolls, even after they'd died. Chichikov schemes to buy up these "dead souls" cheaply, framing it as relief from a tax burden, then mortgages them to the state bank as if they were real, productive serfs, thus pocketing the loan. He poses as a legitimate businessman until the fraud unravels and he's forced to flee.  But his plan is gradually uncovered, being forced to flee the town. Consequently, there is a parallel between Chichikov and the ‘dollar diplomacy’ of the Trump administration in the sense that both operate on a rhetorical logic, masked as entrepreneurial, claiming to help while following their own interests. And regardless of whether they succeed in amassing wealth or not, the dead souls have already piled up. 

The day after Witkoff and Kushner left Kyiv, Russia resumed its bombing of Ukraine almost immediately, ending the pause granted for the safety of the U.S. delegation. I sat at a table by the half-rounded window of my university’s canteen where my colleague from Ukraine joined me minutes later. He had just returned from Kyiv, where he worked. Morning sun filtered through leaves yellowing at the edges and spilt into the room. I asked him about the U.S. envoy’s visit. He told me that was the only time in a very long while he’d slept properly.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/kremlin.ru

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