The Trump back channel: how diplomacy works in Washington

Brian Mast, the Republican congressman whose district abuts Donald Trump’s unofficial second White House in south Florida, has a large wooden conference table in his Washington office, which he keeps perpetually set with tiny bottles of water for his visitors.

The guests arrive daily from embassies around Washington and from capitals around the world. The day before it had been Nigeria, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Taiwan and two other places that he cannot recall.

But they all come in prepared to sell America on what they have to offer, says Mast, who chairs the House foreign affairs committee.

“Every last one of them comes in here with, ‘We have the greatest quality of this mineral,’ or ‘The greatest quality of this mineral,’ or ‘The greatest capability to refine this mineral,’” he says in his office on Capitol Hill.

It is like the new trend, he adds, struggling to find the right metaphor — the new “it” dress of the moment? “We’ll call it the new handbag,” he says. “Everybody brings this handbag.”

If transactional is one of the defining themes for Trump’s second term foreign policy — asking not what Washington can do for a foreign country, but what foreign countries can do for Washington — its other key characteristic is the envoy.

“Policy by personality” — as one former defence official puts it — has replaced the processes and institutions that underpinned decades of US foreign policymaking until now. Instead of the state department, there is the real estate developer Steve Witkoff, the president’s longtime friend and business partner-turned-special envoy for “peace negotiations”, who flits between Moscow, Riyadh, Jerusalem and beyond in service of The Deal.

Brian Mast arrives at a Trump rally last year. The Republican chair of the House foreign affairs committee says the administration views the world through what it needs from other countries © Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

At his side is Jared Kushner, Trump’s venture capitalist son-in-law, who does not actually have a government title but who has found time, amid his business dealings with Gulf monarchies, to play a leading role in peace talks in the Middle East and Ukraine on behalf of the US.

Tom Barrack, Trump’s longtime confidant and campaign donor, serves as his ambassador to Turkey and, more prominently, as his freewheeling broker for peace in Syria and Lebanon. Massad Boulos, the Lebanese-American father-in-law to Trump’s daughter, Tiffany, has long presided over a business empire in west Africa. Unsurprisingly, he is also Trump’s Africa envoy. 

Gone are the traditional channels of advice and oversight and the “hierarchy of policy engagements” that once governed this space, says one former US official who has served in several administrations, including this one. Gone, too, are the subject matter experts and the experience of decades of practised diplomacy.

“The circle of people is just so shockingly small,” says the former official.

Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, has lobbied successive US administrations on behalf of Syria, and has been an interlocutor for its new government. The point, he says, is this: “If you’re an old real estate buddy, like Steve Witkoff or Tom Barrack, those are principals. Ivanka and Jared, those are principals,” he says of Trump’s daughter and son-in-law.

“Maybe Don Jr”, the president’s son, he adds. And a notch lower in the order, he says, are Trump’s secretary of state and national security adviser Marco Rubio, and his vice-president, JD Vance. 

Those are the people who matter in the Trump 2.0 approach to the world: they are the back channel. The White House presents this as an intentional shift from a long-standing “bottom-up” approach to “a top-down process driven by the president”.

“A lot of this is directed by [Trump] to a few senior officials who he trusts,” Anna Kelly, the deputy White House press secretary, tells the FT.

“The president has an untraditional background and a lot of his team have untraditional backgrounds. Jared and Steve are business deal guys. But they are trusted.”

Every administration has had its envoys, including those who have wielded seemingly disproportionate power for their roles, or a relative disregard for structure. 

Trump’s envoy Witkoff, left middle, and son-in-law Jared Kushner, top left, were part of the US delegation that met Vladimir Putin for talks in Moscow this month © Alexander Kazakov/Reuters

But even then, veteran public servants note, the agencies functioned. Now, in an environment where, in the words of the American Foreign Service Association, “America’s diplomatic capacity is being decimated from within”, there is no one to keep them in check.

In cutting the state department’s resources and sidelining many of its senior staff, and in deputising a handful of business moguls cum advisers to execute America’s agenda abroad, Trump has fundamentally altered the way of doing foreign policy in Washington, career foreign policy officials, foreign diplomats and lawmakers say.

“The National Security Council doesn’t matter. The state department doesn’t matter ,” Moustafa says. “No one matters except the principals.”

For many traditional allies accustomed to traditional channels of diplomacy, finding out how to gain access to the administration has been quite a challenge. With South Korea, for example, negotiators felt compelled earlier this year to make repeated gruelling 30-hour round trips to Washington — sometimes twice in one week — to plead their case directly to Trump.

“In the early stages, there were the think-tanks and the lobby groups all saying they had close links or an inside line to the White House in the same way they did with Trump 1.0,” recalls one Japanese diplomat. It soon became apparent that “those links were all broken or non-existent”.

Everything is conditional [with Trump]. Nothing is granted if you are not putting skin in the game

What is more, the pool of people who are both inside Trump’s circle and have the confidence to speak about it, is extremely small. “There are thousands of people claiming to be Trump-whisperers these days,” says a European official.

Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, has built links with Trump’s inner circle through annual pilgrimages to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a kind of Maga Woodstock. He danced with Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, at his own incarnation of CPAC in Buenos Aires.

But their shared political worldview was complemented by personal ties, including between Milei’s vice-minister of economy, José Luis Daza, and US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent.

Bessent, who befriended Daza when they both worked on Wall Street, has proved to be a useful ally. The Treasury secretary visited Buenos Aires in April and spearheaded a support package from the administration, even as US assistance to other parts of the world was rapidly drying up.

Those who share Trump’s appreciation for autocrats and a disdain for process have found it easiest to operate in his Washington. “The people who understood how to adapt the most quickly were the Gulf states who could sort of mirror image” the Trump administration with its “blending of personal, political, economic”, says the US diplomat who served in several administrations. 

“We are so happy,” the diplomat recalls hearing from a Gulf counterpart after Trump returned to office. The new arrangement was so much easier to navigate than the Biden administration’s structure, the Gulf official remarked with relief, telling the US official that outreach to “our friends” among Trump’s envoys means issues are resolved quickly, and no longer “have to go through the burdensome processes”.

“Everyone has had to adjust. There are few channels to the throne,” says a south-east Asian official, whose government is accustomed to working with states where back channels and flattery are essential to secure access. “But having to deal with a state where personal linkages matter more than anything is not unfamiliar to many in our region.”

Trump has denied any mingling of his personal business interests with his role as leader of the free world, though it can be unclear from his own rhetoric where America’s interests end and the personal begins.

Tom Barrack, US ambassador to Turkey, meets Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani in Baghdad. Barrack is a longtime Trump confidant and campaign donor © Iraqi Prime Ministers Press Office/AFP/Getty Images

“It’s the most powerful place in the world,” he said recently of the Oval Office, before turning to the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman seated beside him to remark that he would have asked the prince “for a cheque” to fund his new ballroom construction, were it not for a “restriction on foreigners” making donations.

In Switzerland, reports of executives giving a Rolex clock and a personally engraved gold bar for Trump’s presidential library provoked distress at home. But the gesture appeared to reduce threatened 39 per cent levies to 15 per cent. 

In this new era of American diplomacy, the timely offer is essential. When several African presidents gained a collective audience with Trump at the White House in July, each seized on the chance to sell him on their country’s lucrative mineral reserves.

Pakistan has been especially successful at this game. A group of US and Gulf-based businesspeople of Pakistani descent are leveraging ties to Trump’s family and to Witkoff — whose son met Pakistan’s strongman, Field Marshal Asim Munir in Islamabad this year — to offer deals on critical minerals and crypto. This is according to one investor in Dubai who styles himself as Pakistan’s “ambassador for economic diplomacy” and says he has back channels into the US president’s inner circle.

“It’s a more natural way of doing business for us Pakistanis,” he says. “Trump and Witkoff understand the value of relationships.”

Asked what he has learnt in the first year of Trump’s second term, a European foreign minister says: “Everything is conditional. Nothing is granted if you are not putting skin in the game.”

The administration argues Trump’s transactional nature benefits the American people. The US needs to alleviate its debt, it says, and secure access to the critical minerals that power its military, infrastructure and data. 

Under Joe Biden, says Kelly, the deputy White House press secretary, “some low-level official will have a meeting, and then some mid-level official will have a meeting, and then some high-level official will have a meeting, and then”, and only then, “maybe, it gets to a bilat” — a formal policy meeting between senior representatives of two countries.

“Of course [Trump] has a foreign policy apparatus that he leverages,” Kelly adds. But the administration sees cutting out the middle man as a good thing.

Trump’s critics counter that he has removed much of the process in order to merge more seamlessly his business interests with foreign policy.

“I have client work in which I’m encountering this in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Syria and Libya, among other places,” says Jonathan Winer, a senior state department official during the Obama administration.

“The business model is for [foreign officials] to do deals with people close to the administration, and generally create personal benefit to people very close to Trump,” he says.

Cory Booker, a senior Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, has been “flabbergasted” by the shift he has seen in foreign officials he has known for years; people who are now deeply “conscious” of reflecting the president’s business interests in conversations with administration officials.

“It is stunning . . . that a part of their foreign policy strategy is their engagement with the president’s private business interests.”

As the administration signed deals with Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo earlier this month to give US companies access to their mineral resources, Trump himself boasted: “We have over $18tn, this is just in 10 months, pledged or being invested, or pledged to be invested” in America.

“It’s sort of an inversion of how it would work in other administrations where the foreign minister meets with the other foreign minister, and would be like, ‘Oh we should do a Chamber of Commerce meeting and try and find some business deals,’” says one former US official. 

Trump and Alexander Stubb at Mar-a-Lago in March. A round of golf with the US leader took Finland’s president to the top table of European statecraft © Finnish Presidential Office/Instagram/Reuters

Under the new way of doing things, the banks and businesspeople go out and “find the business deals” and then the governments use them as a way into Trump’s favour, the official says.

Even some of Washington’s adversaries cannot help but admire what they see as the courtier culture of Trump’s Washington.

The leader of the Iranian-backed Iraqi militia was impressed by how Trump received a visit from European leaders to the Oval Office in August to discuss Ukraine, and compelled them “to sit at his desk like school children”. “Trump is a strong man,” he remembers thinking. “We admire it even if we disagree with his policies.”

While many of Washington’s European allies say they find the business of sycophancy mortifying — most have leaned in, recognising it as a critical strategy in an unconventional era. 

Trump wants Modi to call him and tell him, ‘You are the greatest; give me a deal.’ That won’t happen

Nato’s secretary-general, Mark Rutte, startled many in June when — at a time when Europe was desperate to keep Trump invested in defending Ukraine — he referred to him at a joint press conference as “daddy”. 

And then there is golf. Japan’s late prime minister, Shinzo Abe, raised eyebrows when he flew to the US ahead of every other world leader before Trump took his first oath of office in 2017, and gave the incoming golf-loving president a gold-plated putter — and played a round with him.

Abe was merely ahead of the curve. Before a meeting this spring between Trump and the UK’s prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, British officials discussed who in the UK government had the best golf swing.

Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb, a former national team golfer, has said his father often told him his golf would be handy in later life. He did not believe it at the time, but a round with Trump in March took him to the top table of European statecraft. He wanted Trump to hear him out on Ukraine, so he offered what he knew Trump wanted: icebreaker ships for the Arctic.

Those who have offered too little or balked at offering encomia have faced unwelcome consequences. The refusal of Brazil’s authorities to drop federal coup charges against the ex-president Jair Bolsonaro led Trump to impose 50 per cent tariffs. 

Brazil has since negotiated the removal of some tariffs, in part by enlisting lobbying help from US businesses. 

Despite a widely chronicled friendship with Trump in his first term, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has been penalised seemingly in part for not offering appropriate praise. Modi was incensed by Trump’s claiming credit for a ceasefire with India’s old adversary Pakistan after their four-day conflict in May — in sharp contrast to the response of Pakistan, which showered the US president with praise.

Elon Musk with Argentina’s Javier Milei in February. Milei built links with Trump’s inner circle through pilgrimages to the Conservative Political Action Conference © Nathan Howard/Reuters

Modi’s government has hired Jason Miller, the DC uber-lobbyist and former Trump campaign aide, but a long-awaited US-India trade deal is on hold. “Trump wants Modi to call him and tell him, ‘You are the greatest; give me a deal,’” says C Raja Mohan, a professor at the National University of Singapore. “That won’t happen.”

Trump’s backers are unapologetic if not jubilant about this hardline approach to old partners. “Trump likes ‘win wins’, but he won’t be trifled with,” says Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator. So foreign officials in search of a better relationship may consider what options they might present “that maybe weren’t on the table before”.

Or as Mast, the congressman puts it, the guiding question as the Trump administration looks at the world is: “What do we need from a country or a region?” Then comes the question of: “What does the country or region want from us?

“And then, the most important part: if we give them what they’re looking for, do we get what we need? Or don’t we? Because if we don’t . . . we have got to sit down at the table again.”

Additional reporting by Leo Lewis in Tokyo, Raya Jalabi in Baghdad, Andres Schipani in New Delhi, Michael Stott in Rio de Janeiro, Ciara Nugent in Buenos Aires, Humza Jilani in Islamabad and Richard Milne in Oslo