There is a specific flavor of nihilism required to appreciate the current trajectory of American diplomacy. It is not the dreary, bureaucratic hopelessness of the State Department careerists—those gray-faced functionaries who view global conflict as a never-ending thesis defense—but rather the bright, shiny, plastic nihilism of the boardroom. We have reached the stage of late-imperial decline where we no longer send diplomats, scholars, or even seasoned spies to negotiate the fate of nations. We send the guys who negotiate zoning variances for luxury condos. The news that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are en route to Moscow to sit across the long table from Vladimir Putin is not merely a diplomatic development; it is a cosmic joke delivered with a straight face, a testament to the idea that there is no problem in human history—no blood feud, no territorial dispute, no ideological abyss—that cannot be solved by a couple of guys who know how to leverage a distressed asset.

Let us pause to admire the sheer audacity of the casting. First, we have Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s special envoy. Witkoff is a real estate tycoon. In the world of the current administration, this is the highest possible qualification for statecraft. If you can bully a contractor into lowering the price of drywall, surely you can convince a former KGB colonel with a nuclear arsenal to withdraw from the Donbas. Witkoff has expressed “optimism” about a plan to end the war. Of course he has. Real estate developers are pathologically optimistic because they exist in a reality where value is imaginary until the check clears. To men like Witkoff, the war in Ukraine isn’t a grinding slaughter of conscripts in freezing mud; it’s a stalled construction project. The permit process is dragging on, the neighbors are complaining about the noise, and it’s time to bring in the fixers to smooth things over so we can get to the ribbon-cutting ceremony. The moral vacuum here is breathtaking. To view the annexation of sovereign territory through the lens of a property dispute is the ultimate triumph of transactionalism over humanity.

And then, inevitably, there is Jared Kushner. The Dauphin of Silence. The man who solved the Middle East by simply ignoring the people who lived there. Kushner returns to the stage like a recurring character in a sitcom that should have been cancelled five seasons ago. He is the avatar of unearned confidence, a man whose resume consists entirely of being married to the right woman and possessing the skeletal structure of a wax figure left too near a radiator. That he is being dispatched to Moscow is a reminder that in the American oligarchy, competence is irrelevant. Access is the only currency. Kushner is there not because he understands Slavic history, NATO expansionism, or the intricacies of modern artillery warfare, but because he is the family proxy. He is the empty vessel into which the administration pours its chaotic will.

Picture the scene: Vladimir Putin, a man whose worldview is shaped by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the paranoia of the intelligence services, and a quasi-mystical belief in Russian destiny, sitting across from two guys who probably measure success by price-per-square-foot in Manhattan. The asymmetry is so profound it borders on the surreal. The Left, in their impotent rage, will scream about collusion and betrayal, clutching their pearls as if they haven’t spent the last few years funding a stalemate that bleeds Ukraine dry while defense contractors buy second yachts. They feign shock that Trump would treat war as a business deal, ignoring the reality that they treated it as a photo op for democracy while the front lines barely moved. The Right, conversely, will hail this mission as a stroke of genius, the triumphant return of the "dealmakers," pretending that sending a landlord to negotiate peace is 4D chess rather than a desperate attempt to liquidate a geopolitical liability.

What makes this spectacle truly nauseating is the underlying assumption driving the mission: that everything is for sale. The Witkoff-Kushner doctrine, if we can dignity it with such a name, posits that national identity, sovereignty, and security are just commodities to be bartered. They likely believe they can offer Putin a concession here, a lifting of sanctions there, perhaps a tacit acknowledgment of seized territory, and call it a win. It is the gentrification of war. They want to evict the conflict, renovate the region with American capital, and flip it for a profit. They do not understand that some things—hatred, history, blood—cannot be bought out. They are walking into a burning building with a lease agreement, convinced that the fire will stop if the terms are favorable enough.

Ultimately, this trip to Moscow is a perfect microcosm of our era. We have discarded the pretense of values. We have abandoned the illusion of expertise. We are left with the naked, grinning face of commerce staring into the abyss of war. Whether they succeed or fail is almost beside the point. If they fail, the grinder continues. If they succeed, it will likely be because they sold something that wasn't theirs to sell, turning Ukraine into just another distressed property in the Trump portfolio. The American empire isn’t ending with a bang or a whimper; it’s ending with a meeting between a dictator and a couple of guys who think the problem with the Battle of Stalingrad was that the zoning board was too strict.