The Art of the Peace Deal

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Hi, I'm Patricia Carvellis, the host of the Politics Now podcast, where I'm joined by the best of the best at the ABC to break down the latest in politics, including for the next little while, the wonderful Melissa Clark.

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For the next couple of weeks, I'll be joining you for the party room while Fran Kelly takes a break, and we'll keep on zooming out and taking stock of the week in politics and analyse what it really means for you.

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This podcast is recorded on the lands of the Awabakal, Darug and Eora people.

What do you think Donald Trump's definition of peace is?

I mean I hope I'm going to be

remembered as a peacemaker.

The main thing he says he wants is this.

I'm doing this to save lives more than anything else.

It's about stopping people from being killed.

You know, I like the concept of a ceasefire for one reason, because you'd stop killing people immediately, as opposed to in two weeks or one week or whatever it takes.

To Trump, stopping people from actively killing each other is the same as ending a war.

You know, I've done six wars.

I've ended six wars.

The six wars he's talking about are India versus Pakistan, Israel versus Iran, Cambodia versus Thailand, Egypt versus Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo versus Rwanda, and Armenia versus Azerbaijan.

Now, five of those conflicts are basically just frozen in place.

The fighting may have stopped, but they haven't actually solved their underlying dispute.

They've just kind of paused.

One of them, though, has actually led to a peace agreement.

It's the one between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

It's a long time, 35 years.

They fought and now now they're friends and they're going to be friends for a long time.

At the signing ceremony in early August, the leaders of both countries talked glowingly about President Trump.

I think President Trump deserved to

have a Nobel Peace Prize.

So maybe we agree with Prime Minister Pashinian to send a joint appeal to Nobel Committee.

to award President Trump with a Nobel Peace Prize.

For years now, Trump has been after the Nobel Peace Prize, at least partially because he thinks it's unfair that Barack Obama got one.

Because when Obama got it, nobody knew what he got it for, including him.

The guy he's tasked with winning that prize for him is his great friend, Steve Witkoff.

If not for President Trump and his team, and our great friend, Mr.

Witkoff and his team, probably today Armenia Azerbaijan would have been again in this endless process of negotiations.

So how exactly is Mr.

Witkoff going to bring about world peace?

Well, according to Trump, everyone does like this guy.

He likes Mr.

Witkoff, I can tell you that.

That's true.

Mr.

Witkoff has been talking to Israel, to the Palestinians, to Russia, and to Ukraine.

But what, aside from being a great dude, are his peace negotiating credentials?

What can he actually achieve?

We're going to be taking a look at who Mr.

Witkoff is and the work he's already been doing in Armenia and Azerbaijan.

What does this peace deal tell us about the prospect of more deals like it?

I'm Matt Bevan, and this is if you're listening.

A lot of people have a lot of opinions about Donald Trump.

Many hate him, many love him, but back in the 80s, Steve Witkoff went a step further.

Oh no, I wanted to be him.

By the way, everybody wanted to be him.

He'd come to 101 Park Avenue where I was a lawyer.

He had this swashbuckling style.

I used to see him come in and I used to say, God, I want to be him.

This is Steve Witkoff gushing about Donald Trump in an interview with Tucker Carlson earlier this year.

I don't want to be the lawyer.

I don't want to be the scrivener.

I want to be that man.

Yeah, I can remember saying that.

He was like the Michael Jordan to me, you know, of the real estate business.

The two have been friends for decades, but their friendship started as a professional relationship back in the 80s when Trump was a client of the law firm Witcoff worked at.

I mean, it was a fantastic opportunity, and I was doing a lot of work for Donald, who was really a great client to work for.

Witcoff started getting into real estate in 1985, buying run-down apartment buildings in uptown Manhattan.

He ran the properties himself, and he thought of himself as a good landlord, despite the fact that he collected rent with a pistol strapped to his ankle.

I think we had a very, very good reputation in those neighbourhoods.

We ran our properties responsibly.

We didn't have rent strikes at our properties.

After a few months on the job, he was at a deli when he found Donald Trump standing at the counter.

Trump had no cash on him for his ham and Swiss sandwich, so Witkoff bought it for him.

When they bumped into each other again a few years later, Trump fondly remembered what he called the sandwich incident.

He became my friend as a result, you know, as a result of those experiences back then.

Trump jokes that he was the inspiration for Witkoff's transition from lawyer to property developer.

He saw me do it, and he said, if Trump can do it, I guess I can do it, right?

By the mid-90s, Witkoff was well on the way to becoming a property magnate.

He was about to start buying up extremely high-profile buildings in the financial district of Manhattan.

So he had 10 Hanover.

you then bored one Broadway.

Then you had Exchange Place.

We had 20 Exchange Place, yes.

Another building on Maiden Lane?

80, 90 Maiden, 33 Maiden, and 95 Maiden.

Witcoff's property empire was growing rapidly.

He and Trump became Manhattan's dominant property barons and also close friends.

The two split their time between New York and Palm Beach, Florida.

He's become a very wealthy, successful man, and he's my pal.

And it's nice that you're here, Steve.

Thank you very much.

Witcoff says Trump was an important person in his life.

There for the good times, which were mainly just playing golf, but he was also there through the tough times, including in 2011, when Trump was there for him through the worst moment of Witcoff's life.

When I lost my boy Andrew, to an opioid overdose, the pain was unbearable.

But as usual, Donald Trump showed up.

Witkoff spoke about Andrew's death on stage at the Republican National Convention last year.

It's understandably an incredibly traumatic event for him.

After Andrew passed away, I found myself clinging to my son's memory, even his things.

His college ID is in my pocket right now.

I wear his ring since he died.

Witkoff remembers Andrew as a sensitive young man who cared deeply for people.

He tells a story about how his son looked after a group of homeless people who lived next to their apartment building in New York.

My son got to know them all.

He fed them every evening.

He became their friend.

When he passed away, all 12 came to his funeral.

He wanted to do something to honour his son's memory and his kindness to those who weren't so fortunate, which inspired him to ask Donald Trump for a favor.

The two played their regular round of golf, and then over lunch, Witkoff asked Trump a normal question that every dude asks their best bro at some point in their life.

If you're elected president again, can I be the envoy to the Middle East?

Whatever you want to do, Steve, Trump replied.

So despite having literally no qualifications as a diplomat or a you know, international affairs negotiator, Witkoff wants to bring about world peace in the name of his son.

It's an admirable endeavor.

And from what I can see, I really don't think that he has any other ulterior motive.

So I think that this

sense of sensitivity or empathy that I have, I can relate to them.

When it comes to peace brokering, what Witkoff lacks in experience, he makes up for in clichés.

I'm always trying to put myself in the shoes of the other person because a good deal has to work for everybody.

Now, this interview he did with Tucker Carlson is an hour and a half long and I listened to all of it because I wanted to hear some examples of him putting himself in the shoes of others.

It's important for me to know or to have a feeling of where the Israelis want to get to.

What about the Qataris?

They're the mediators at the table.

What do they want to accomplish here?

What about Hamas?

Where are they?

So he's got the feel for Israeli and Qatari shoes, but how exactly did he get access to Hamas's shoes?

I've never been

in the same room as them, which is a little bit weird, wouldn't you say?

Yeah, it is.

So he definitely hasn't tried on their shoes.

The Qatari government just kind of describes them for him.

We trust the Qataris.

If I didn't trust the Qataris, then that would be really problematic, not meeting with Hamas.

Okay, so what do the Qataris say Hamas's shoes look like?

I think they want to stay there till the end of time and they want to rule Gaza.

And that's unacceptable.

So we have to know that.

We had to know what they wanted.

What they want is unacceptable.

Right.

So you heard both sides and you decided that what one side wanted was unacceptable.

A good deal has to work for

everybody.

Witkoff's dream deal involves Hamas no longer existing and them being okay with that.

Now obviously this is what most people around the world want, but how do you actually achieve it?

Well, that's the problem that peace negotiators have been dealing with forever.

Witkov's approach appears to be: it doesn't need to be that complicated.

What if you just pick a winner?

Figure out whose shoes feel more comfortable and just go with them.

They get to keep the land that they have claimed, and the other guys can keep their shoes, maybe.

Just stop fighting, and we can all stay alive and make some money.

Bam!

World peace, out of the deal.

Bam.

But can it work in practice?

Well, it seems to be how this peace deal between Azerbaijan and Armenia has worked out.

So let's take a closer look at that and see if there's any clues for how the other conflicts might turn out.

In April 1988, people watching the nightly TV news in the Soviet Union were shown something they had never been shown before.

These are the first pictures Soviet citizens have seen of the rioting in the city of Sumgate.

But it's also believed to be the first program documenting internal dissent ever shown on Soviet television.

Never before had Soviet citizens been able to see evidence of protests or ethnic violence occurring inside the Soviet Union itself.

And yet here it was on national TV.

Those Soviet viewers, and there must be millions and millions of them, who have had to rely almost exclusively on Soviet coverage of these events, this will come as a surprise and it will give them a lot of information and it will be quite an eye-opener.

So what's going on here?

Well, we're in the South Caucasus region, which at the time was all part of the Soviet Union.

It's a mountainous region which connects Russia and Iran between the Caspian and Black Seas.

So we're talking about Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan.

For centuries, the Caucasus mountains have kept the ethnic groups there apart, leading them to develop distinct individual cultures.

It helps to look at this area on a topographic map because it makes the different regions way clearer.

So the highland areas of the mountains are dominated by ethnic Armenians.

They are generally Catholic and they speak Armenian, which is a European language.

The flatland area between the mountains and the Caspian Sea is dominated by ethnic Azerbaijanis.

They are generally Muslim and speak Azerbaijani, which is a Turkic language.

So despite living right next to each other, Azerbaijanis and Armenians have totally different cultures, religions and languages.

If there was a clear border that separated these two different populations and everyone stayed on their turf, there probably wouldn't have been a problem.

But that's not how things work in the real world.

Nagorno-Karabakh is occupied mostly by Armenians, Christians who've squatted there for generations.

But the land has traditionally belonged to Muslim Azerbaijanis.

So here's where things get really complicated.

There's a tiny bit of Azerbaijan close to the border called Nagorno-Karabakh, which is mainly populated by Armenians.

The Armenians want control of Nagorno-Karabakh, formally handed over to them.

Things simmered below the surface, but then in February 1988, they started to boil over.

The Armenians were supporting co-nationals in Nagorno-Karabakh, the enclave in neighboring Azerbaijan, where Armenians formed the majority and seek formal attachment to the Armenian Republic.

The region's parliament voted to unite with Armenia, a move that the Azerbaijanis were not happy with.

Where for three days at the end of February, gangs of Azerbaijanis ran amok, preying upon the city's Armenian minority.

Horrendous reports have leaked out of Armenians butchered in their dwellings or hurled from windows.

Over the following three years, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the two newly independent nations of Azerbaijan and Armenia went to war over the tiny region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

This is the story of the 20th century basically.

Large empires drew arbitrary borders through the middle of various ethnic groups.

They dropped a smoke bomb and left them to sort out their differences.

It's unlikely there can be peace here.

The hatred is too deep.

In Nagorno-Karabakh, the problem remained unresolved, with Azerbaijan and Armenia technically in a state of war for decades and both sides committing terrible atrocities.

In the 1990s, 30,000 people died in the fighting and over a million were displaced.

Eventually, Armenia developed into a messy but functioning democracy, but Azerbaijan slid into an oppressive dictatorship.

The Azerbaijani president, Ilham Aliyev, is widely accused of multiple human rights abuses.

When it comes to his leadership style, Ilham Aliyev is a lot like fellow tyrannical dictator Vladimir Putin, although he's about three feet taller than Putin, he has a mustache, and he doesn't really take his shirt off for photos.

But he is an authoritarian who rigs the democratic system to make sure that he wins every election in a landslide.

Just like Putin, he removed term limits so that he can stay on as president indefinitely.

He's also made his wife the vice president.

Putin's partner has to settle for being the chair of a state media outlet.

Sad.

Azerbaijan's government is closing down for international scrutiny and this is very sad, especially when there is upcoming parliamentary elections in Azerbaijan.

In 2012 Aliyev was named Corrupt Person of the Year by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

Putin won that award in 2014.

Means that Azerbaijan's government has a lot to hide, namely the appalling human rights situation that is in the country.

Also, like Putin, Aliyev has spent years making inflammatory statements saying that a neighboring country doesn't really exist.

For Putin, that neighboring country is Ukraine.

For Aliyev, it's Armenia, or as he calls it, Western Azerbaijan.

Putin calls Ukrainians Nazis and Aliyev calls Armenians fascists who cannot be trusted.

But if Armenian fascism raises its head once again, we will smash it with an iron fist.

In Aliyev's Azerbaijan, anti-Armenian sentiment is basically a state policy.

In 2009, Azerbaijani authorities interrogated more than 40 people who voted for Armenia in the Eurovision Song contest.

questioning their national loyalty.

I've listened to the Armenian entry from that year, by the way, and look, it's fine, but but I'm not sure that I risk the gulag for it.

Despite all of the similarities between Putin and Aliyev, ironically, they aren't allies.

Putin's Russia has actually supported Armenia through the conflict against Azerbaijan.

But things heated up in 2023, when President Aliyev saw an opportunity to settle the territorial conflict once and for all.

As Putin became bogged down fighting in Ukraine, Aliyev Eliyev banked on Russia being too busy to help Armenia too.

It began with a blockade preventing food from getting into Nagorno-Karabakh.

The Red Cross says it hasn't been able to deliver aid across the Lachin corridor linking Armenia to the region since July.

Azerbaijan says it set up a checkpoint there for security reasons.

And then the hungry citizens of Nagorno-Karabakh were suddenly under attack.

Last week, their lives changed forever after a lightning military operation from Azerbaijan forces seized the region in just 24 hours.

The entire Armenian population of the region was forced to leave.

Armenians who say they're being forced out because ethnic cleansing is underway.

Many have nothing left and fear for their lives.

Why did the world look away?

This woman asks.

No one wants to stay there.

Everywhere is covered in blood.

Azerbaijani forces invaded and occupied parts of Armenia.

Russia did not come to help.

Within a few days, Nagono-Karabakh was entirely under Azerbaijani control.

President Aliyev said if they fought back, they would be crushed.

So, you've got a pretty clear-cut case of one country with an allegedly corrupt dictatorial leader ordering an ethnic cleansing and invasion of a smaller, weaker, democratic neighbor.

That sentence really could have been about Azerbaijan or Russia.

Western allies condemned the invasion by Alev and called for a ceasefire between the two nations, but peace negotiations had stalled until Donald Trump and his peace envoy Steve Witkoff enter the chat.

For more than 35 years, Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought a bitter conflict that resulted in tremendous suffering for both nations.

Trump, of course, made sure that he made the subsequent peace deal all about himself.

Many tried to find a resolution including the European Union.

The Russians worked very hard on it.

Never happened.

Sleepy Joe Biden tried, but you know what happened there?

He tried for probably 12 minutes and didn't work out.

As far as he was concerned, he had solved all the problems in this decades-long conflict in a matter of weeks and also caused Aliyev and the Prime Minister of Armenia, Nikol Pashinian, to overcome their historical civilizational animosity and become best bros.

I think you two are going to have a great, a great relationship, I have no doubt.

And if you don't, call me and I'll straighten it out, okay?

The deal was finalized by Trump's best bro, Steve Witkoff, who visited Azerbaijan in March.

As far as I can tell, he didn't actually visit Armenia, which is interesting because When you look at what was signed away in this peace deal, all of the actual compromise was done by Armenia.

They've given up any claim to Nagorno-Karabakh.

They aren't even asking for the right of return for the people who live there.

They've also surrendered territory for an American road to be built between two regions of Azerbaijan.

It's going to be called the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, or TRIP.

Understandably, this has led to protests against Prime Minister Pashinian and a lot of opinion pieces accusing him of capitulating to Azerbaijan.

But is there any upside of this deal for the Armenians?

We anticipate significant infrastructure development by American companies.

They're very anxious to go in to these two countries, and they're going to spend a lot of money, a lot of money, which will economically benefit all three of our nations.

There you go, part of the deal.

What is the point of dying over historical feuds or cultural connections to land or defending human rights?

There's money to be made.

That's how the world really works, according to Witkoff.

A good deal has to work for everybody.

He says anyone who thinks otherwise, who thinks that we can't allow a precedent to be set where one country can use force to intimidate another country, is naive.

I think it's a combination of a posture and a pose

and a combination of also being simplistic.

What does this mean for the other conflicts Trump and Witkoff are working on solving?

Well, they've already made up their mind mind about Israel and Hamas.

Our policy is that Hamas cannot continue to exist here.

That's the president's policy.

It's clear that Israel has the power to invade all of Gaza and cause Hamas not to exist anymore, but is that a good deal for the Palestinians who live in the way?

Meanwhile, Russia has invaded a neighboring country and claimed territory by force.

Azerbaijan has faced basically no ramifications for attacking Armenia in a similar fashion, so should Russia be afforded the same courtesy?

Well, Witkoff still hasn't quite made up his mind about that.

I don't regard Putin as a bad guy.

That is a complicated situation, that war.

You don't say.

If you're listening is written by me, Matt Bevan.

Supervising producer is Kara Jensen-McKinnon.

Audio production is by Tegan Nichols.

Next week, Steve Witkoff is set to try Vladimir Zelensky's shoes on for size in a meeting in New York.

But what is he trying to get Zelensky to agree to in order to end the war with Russia?

That's next.

On if you're listening.