FEBRUARY 2026 | GEOPOLITICS & TRADE
As Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff shuttle between Geneva hotel rooms to manage the Ukraine war, Iran’s nuclear brinkmanship, and Gaza’s fragile ceasefire simultaneously, Singapore watches with acute strategic interest. The risks of personalised, unsupervised diplomacy ripple far beyond the Bosphorus.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF IMPROVISATION
Capacity Versus Complexity: A Structural Mismatch
On February 26, 2026, two men checked out of the Intercontinental Hotel in Geneva, crossed the city to the Four Seasons, and then doubled back to the Omani ambassador’s private residence — all within the span of a single afternoon. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff were not attending a conference or conducting courtesy calls. They were simultaneously attempting to negotiate an end to the bloodiest land war in Europe since 1945, forestall a potential military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and consolidate a fragile ceasefire between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip.
The image captures, with almost cinematic compression, the central wager of Donald Trump’s second-term foreign policy: that informal networks of trust, personal access to the president, and deal-making instincts honed in real estate and private equity can substitute for — or at least outperform — the vast, layered machinery of professional diplomacy.
It is a wager with enormous consequences for the world. And for Singapore, it is a wager whose outcome shapes the very architecture of global stability upon which the city-state’s prosperity depends.
“You could invite the best negotiator in the history of the world and these would still be a heavy lift.” — Aaron David Miller, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who spent decades as a State Department negotiator across both Republican and Democratic administrations, has described the arrangement as straining “credulity to the breaking point.” His concern is not primarily a personal one about Kushner or Witkoff. It is structural. Each of the three negotiations — Ukraine, Iran, Gaza — constitutes, in Miller’s phrase, “a universe of detail.” Each intersects with the others in ways that require simultaneous fluency across multiple geopolitical registers: international humanitarian law, nuclear non-proliferation architecture, energy markets, European security guarantees, regional Arab politics, and decades of failed precedents.
Compressing that complexity into two envoys, however well-connected, introduces what might be called a diplomatic bandwidth problem. The risk is not that deals will fail to be made — it is that deals will be made badly, with consequences that unfold slowly and at enormous cost to third parties who had no seat at the table.
Singapore is one such third party, and it has more to lose than most.
SINGAPORE’S EXPOSURE
Energy, Trade Routes, and the Premium on Predictability
Singapore’s economic model has always been premised on a particular version of world order: one in which shipping lanes remain open, financial rules are applied consistently, geopolitical tensions are managed through multilateral institutions, and major-power rivalries do not degenerate into open conflict that disrupts supply chains. The city-state has no natural hinterland, no commodity wealth, and no strategic depth. What it has is location, institutional credibility, and an extraordinary sensitivity to systemic disruption.
The three crises being juggled in Geneva each carry distinct but interlocking risks for Singapore.
SINGAPORE’S EXPOSURE AT A GLANCE
Ukraine War: Energy price volatility, food commodity inflation, disruption to European trade partners, and pressure on MAS reserve management.
Iran Nuclear Crisis: Strait of Hormuz closure risk — roughly 30% of global seaborne oil transits this chokepoint. Singapore’s refining sector and aviation hub would face severe stress.
Gaza & Regional Stability: Gulf sovereign wealth fund relationships, Muslim-majority domestic politics, and Singapore’s role as a neutral financial hub all depend on Middle East stability.
Crypto & Conflict Finance: Witkoff’s stake in World Liberty Financial and deals with Abu Dhabi-linked funds raise regulatory optics questions for Singapore’s MAS-supervised digital asset sector.
The Iran dimension is perhaps the most acute near-term risk. The Strait of Hormuz — through which approximately 21 million barrels of oil per day transit — represents the jugular of global energy flows. Any military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, or Iranian retaliation closing the strait, would send energy prices into shock. Singapore’s refining capacity at Jurong Island, one of the world’s largest petrochemical hubs, would face immediate feedstock disruption. Aviation fuel costs at Changi Airport would spike. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) would confront inflationary pressure at the same time as financial market volatility demanded reserve management discipline.
What makes the current diplomatic arrangement particularly concerning from Singapore’s perspective is not that the US is engaged — it is how it is engaged. Personalised, unconfirmed, unsupervised envoys working outside formal State Department channels reduce the predictability of outcomes. When Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican and no natural critic of Trump, feels moved to note publicly that Kushner and Witkoff are “not subject to Senate confirmation and not subject to oversight,” the governance deficit is significant enough to have crossed partisan lines.
Singapore’s vulnerability is not to any single outcome, but to the collapse of the rule-based architecture within which small states have historically thrived.
The ASEAN Dimension: When Great Powers Improvise
Singapore has long operated on a doctrine of constructive engagement with all major powers, maintaining close security ties with the United States while cultivating deep economic relationships with China, and threading the needle with extraordinary diplomatic dexterity. That balancing act depends on a relatively stable and rule-governed international system — one in which agreements mean something, institutions have standing, and the United States is perceived as a reliable, if occasionally overweening, anchor.
Personalised diplomacy of the Kushner-Witkoff variety introduces a different dynamic. Agreements reached through informal back-channels, without Senate ratification or interagency buy-in, are inherently fragile. The Abraham Accords — Kushner’s signature achievement in the first Trump administration — demonstrated both the potential and the limits of this approach. Normalisation agreements between Israel and Gulf states were real achievements. But they did not resolve the Palestinian question and, arguably, created conditions of complacency that contributed to the failure to anticipate October 7, 2023.
For ASEAN, and for Singapore specifically, the danger of the current arrangement is that it may produce deals which create the appearance of resolution without the structural substance. A Ukraine ceasefire that lacks European security guarantees, or an Iran deal that lacks verification architecture, could unravel rapidly and destructively — and the economic contagion from such an unravelling would not respect the careful hedging strategies of small, open economies.
THE CONFLICT OF INTEREST PROBLEM
Business and Diplomacy: Where the Lines Blur
The business entanglements of both envoys deserve more scrutiny than they have received. Kushner’s Affinity Partners manages substantial assets, including capital from Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. Witkoff has a stake in World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency venture engaged in deals with Abu Dhabi-linked funds. Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev — Russia’s negotiating representative and head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund — have reportedly discussed post-war economic arrangements covering energy, rare earths, and data centres.
These are not peripheral footnotes. They create structural incentive problems of the first order. A negotiator whose firm holds Qatari capital is, at minimum, in a complex position when brokering arrangements that affect Qatar’s regional interests. A negotiator with crypto-sector exposure to Abu Dhabi-linked funds operates under similar constraints when managing Middle East diplomatic traffic. And a negotiator who is simultaneously discussing post-war investment opportunities with Russia’s sovereign wealth fund representative is not, in any conventional sense, a disinterested party.
For Singapore, this matters in a specific and practical way. Singapore’s reputation as a neutral financial centre — a jurisdiction where capital from conflicting geopolitical blocs can coexist, where rule of law provides transactional certainty, and where sovereign wealth funds from the Gulf, China, and the West can all operate without fear of politically motivated interference — depends on a broader perception that finance and geopolitics are governed by distinct, principled rules.
When American envoys blur those lines at the highest levels of global diplomacy, the reputational collateral is not merely American. It affects the credibility of the entire architecture of international economic governance within which Singapore has flourished. The MAS, Temasek, and GIC have built their global standing on the premise that Singapore adheres to norms that the major powers themselves sometimes ignore. If those norms erode at the centre, the periphery cannot hold them indefinitely.
THE PRINCIPAL-AGENT PARADOX
Why Direct Access Is Both the Strength and the Weakness
It would be intellectually dishonest to dismiss the Kushner-Witkoff arrangement entirely. Ukrainian ambassador to the US Olga Stefanishyna acknowledged this directly when she noted that three months ago, Kyiv faced “disrupted chains of communications at different levels” and “mixed signals from both sides.” Having envoys with a direct, unmediated line to the president of the United States is not a trivial advantage when that president is as mercurial and personally driven as Donald Trump. The ability to commit with credibility — to say, without qualification, that this is what the president will do — has genuine diplomatic value.
Kurt Volker, who served as Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine in the first term, captured the paradox precisely: “On the positive side, they can speak with authority on what Trump wants and communicate directly with him. On the negative side, they don’t have a deep understanding of the issues and the sensitivities.”
This is the principal-agent problem expressed in diplomatic form. The agents — Kushner and Witkoff — have exceptional access to the principal but limited domain expertise. The risk is that they optimise for what the principal values (the appearance of deal-making, personal loyalty, headline outcomes) rather than what the situation demands (durable, technically sound, institutionally anchored agreements).
In business negotiations, a suboptimal deal can be renegotiated or litigated. In geopolitical negotiations involving nuclear programmes, territorial sovereignty, and fragile ceasefires, the costs of error are measured in lives, in decades, and in the collapse of trust that makes subsequent negotiation exponentially harder.
The costs of diplomatic error are not measured in deal fees. They are measured in the erosion of the international order that small states depend upon for their survival.
WHAT SINGAPORE CAN AND CANNOT DO
Strategic Patience in an Age of Improvisation
Singapore’s options in this environment are constrained but not negligible. The city-state cannot influence the internal architecture of American diplomacy. It cannot compel the Trump administration to route its negotiations through the State Department or to require Senate confirmation for its envoys. What it can do is exercise the quiet influence that comes from being a trusted interlocutor — a jurisdiction that major powers consult precisely because it is not perceived as a client of any of them.
Singapore’s distinctive value in global affairs has always rested on its credibility as an honest broker — a place where conversations can happen off the record, where financial transactions can be structured with legal certainty, and where diplomatic back-channels find a neutral venue. The Institute of Policy Studies, the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, and Singapore’s diplomatic corps have cultivated this reputation over decades. It is, in a sense, Singapore’s most durable strategic asset.
That asset becomes more valuable, not less, in an era of personalised great-power diplomacy. If formal multilateral institutions are bypassed and bilateral back-channels proliferate, neutral venues — both physical and institutional — become more important. Singapore should be positioning itself as the preferred location for the kind of quiet, technical, expert-mediated follow-on work that informal deal-making inevitably requires but rarely provides.
In the near term, Singapore’s economic policy apparatus — MAS, the Ministry of Trade and Industry, the Economic Development Board — should be stress-testing scenarios around Hormuz closure, European energy disruption, and dollar-denominated sanctions escalation. These are not exotic tail risks in the current environment. They are live possibilities whose probability is elevated precisely because the diplomatic mechanisms that would normally contain them are operating at reduced institutional capacity.
Singapore’s government has managed uncertainty before — it has done so with characteristic competence, building reserves, diversifying relationships, and institutionalising the kind of long-horizon thinking that is conspicuously absent from the Geneva hotel-room diplomacy currently shaping the world’s most consequential conflicts.
The question is whether the institutional depth that Singapore has painstakingly accumulated can provide adequate insulation from the consequences of great-power improvisation. The honest answer is: partially. Singapore can hedge. It cannot opt out.
CONCLUSION
The Stakes of Getting It Wrong
Two men shuttling between Geneva hotel rooms, each carrying the fate of conflicts that have already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, is either a testament to the extraordinary concentrating power of personal presidential authority — or a cautionary tale about the hubris of substituting deal-making instinct for institutional depth. History will adjudicate.
What is clear already is that the architecture of improvisation carries systemic risks that extend far beyond the immediate parties to each conflict. For Singapore — a city-state whose entire national project is premised on the reliability of the rules-based international order — the stakes could not be higher.
The capacity-versus-complexity mismatch that Miller identified is not merely a concern about two men’s workloads. It is a concern about whether the outcomes produced by this diplomatic style will possess the institutional durability, the technical soundness, and the multilateral legitimacy that lasting peace requires. Deals that look good in a hotel room can unravel catastrophically in the field. And when they do, it is rarely the deal-makers who bear the consequences.
It is everyone else.