Those with power are not necessarily in office. On 27 August, Tony Blair and Jared Kushner entered the West Wing to convince Donald Trump that a peace plan for Gaza was possible. They had been running ideas past Steve Witkoff, the US envoy to the Middle East, and wanted to persuade the president to push for a ceasefire instead of allowing Israel to occupy Gaza City.
Six weeks later, the Gazan ceasefire deal, modelled on the plan Blair and Kushner put forward, was cast in biblical terms. As Israeli politicians lauded Trump in the Knesset, billboards on the streets of Jerusalem heralded him as Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who freed the Jews from Babylon.
The ceasefire deal had indeed revealed a world in which Trump rules like an emperor. It is a world where leaders court the president’s favour to receive his patronage and avoid his wrath. Institutions such as the United Nations are ignored. Diplomacy is personal. Job titles matter less than getting things done. Raw power dominates international law. And protecting capital takes precedence over protecting human rights. It is a world of force, money and connections, and Trump bestrides it all.
But the new politics is bigger than its frontman. Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Kushner, like their liege, are New York multimillionaires. For them, business and politics are inseparable, and politics is run like a business. The same rules apply to the Silicon Valley oligarchs who wield as much foreign policy power as second-tier states but, to do so, must show fealty to their overlord in the White House. This is not merely Trump’s second term, but something more profound: a Trumpian age.
Charting how Trump succeeded in ending the war in Gaza, where Biden and his expert class failed, reveals this new world order in its stark, unforgiving reality. It shouldn’t be forgotten that Trump did not merely end the war, but allowed it to intensify first; facilitated its intensification, in fact. The New Statesman has spoken to diplomats, key Maga figures and members of the intelligence services in Washington, as well as sources close to Keir Starmer, Jonathan Powell and Tony Blair in London.
The picture that emerges is a world in which the postwar ideals underpinning the liberal international system have been hollowed out, and the rule of the dealmakers has begun.
On 29 September, Trump was sitting in the Oval Office beside Benjamin Netanyahu, looking like a disappointed father making his wayward son say sorry to an upset classmate. Trump held the phone console while the Israeli prime minister was on the receiver, murmuring an apology to the prime minister of Qatar, whose capital city he had just bombed. A photograph of this dressing down was – pointedly – shared by the White House. Trump later told Netanyahu to stop being so “fucking negative” about the prospect of a ceasefire.
A few days earlier, Trump publicised his affection for the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a soft Islamist and opponent of Israel, saying he liked him because he was a friend. Israel’s “special relationship” with the US mattered less than America’s links with those who had something to offer Trump. It was the bombing of his friends the Qataris, an affront to his pride, not the destruction of the Gazan people, that spurred Trump to pull Netanyahu into line. The relationship between Israel and the White House was about to change.
As Trump was moving in behind the Gulf states, Keir Starmer had the foresight to tell his national security adviser (NSA), Jonathan Powell, to focus on Gaza because he worried the window for peace was closing. Powell had been key to bringing peace to Northern Ireland in 1998, spending as much as 40 per cent of his first year as Tony Blair’s chief of staff on what became the Good Friday agreement.
Known to some Maga Americans as the “dean of NSAs”, Powell is trusted by the Trump administration in part because of his record, but also – crucially – because of his connection to Blair and, therefore, to Kushner. Powell is seen not as a career diplomat wedded to procedure – nor as a snooty European progressive – but as a political fixer who gets things done with access to the heart of Trump’s administration thanks to his one-time boss in No 10. He fits the mould of the modern diplomat in the Trumpian age. An administration official once told me that, in their eyes, Powell was effectively running British foreign policy. I’ve long heard something similar about Varun Chandra, the little-known No 10 business adviser, with regards to US-UK trade negotiations.
To his critics, Powell is the embodiment of Blairite “sofa government”, helping to run an administration on the basis of informal conversations. It is this sort of influence that has dragged him into the heart of the China spygate scandal gripping Westminster, in which it is alleged he used his influence improperly to collapse the trial into those alleged to have spied for China to maintain relations with Beijing (which the government denies). Yet, in the world of Trump, it is not merely a question of sofa government, but of sofa diplomacy. As one figure who knows Powell well put it to me, he is an “Elizabethan privateer” by inclination, distrusted by Whitehall for his independence – “the Institute for Government’s worst nightmare” – but also unusually effective and circumspect in his dealings.
There are, of course, good reasons for British institutional opposition to the breakdown of the rules-based order. If the UK’s influence depends on the personal connections of figures like Powell or Blair, what role is there for the state and elected governments? For those like Philippe Sands – the eminent human rights lawyer close to both Starmer and the Attorney General, Richard Hermer – the organising goal of this Labour government’s foreign policy should be to champion international law and its associated bodies. Yet, British power today is being exercised in a world where that is atrophying before our very eyes.
The role Powell played in the Gaza peace process has yet to be fully revealed. Over the summer, he, supported by the Foreign Office, began synthesising three rival peace plans proposed internationally. First, there was the Franco-Saudi plan, formally unveiled in September, setting out a path towards a Palestinian state, beginning with a ceasefire and the disarmament of Hamas. A separate Arab proposal aimed for a similar conclusion. Finally, the Kushner-Blair plan, presented to Trump in August, suggested the establishment of a technocratic “Board of Peace” to administer Gaza after the war.
Britain’s influence – such as it was – came largely through personal relationships: Powell with Witkoff and, before the reshuffle, David Lammy with Gulf foreign ministers. Powell worked closely with Witkoff to clarify the final agreement, bringing the three plans together in what one senior British official described as a “Venn diagram”. It was this work, behind the scenes, that explains Witkoff’s public thanks to Powell on 13 October as Trump landed in Israel. “This is sofa diplomacy,” one trusted British diplomatic adviser put it to me. “Powell can operate in this world. If it wasn’t for him, we’d be irrelevant.”
With a plan that combined the best of what had been drawn up by others, Trump headed to the UN General Assembly in September. Not that he thought the UN was relevant to the peace process: Trump is the apotheosis of the American right’s decades-long disdain for the UN. Trump has usurped it as the forum for diplomacy. The UN building beside the East River in Manhattan merely served as a drab venue for him to convince Arab and Turkish leaders to support his peace plan.
Throughout the negotiations, buy-in from the Gulf states was essential. The Qataris were the key middlemen. They have long hosted groups such as Hamas and the Taliban. Doha has become the Geneva of the Middle East – a continental service station where ex-jihadis and Harvard Kennedy School alumni can park up and strike deals. Powerful individuals and dynastic families negotiate with each other now, not institutions. Trump appears to see himself in the Gulf monarchies. It’s not just the golden decor and contempt for liberal democracy. These are governments of ruling families, where clan comes first and those with the wrong surname are distrusted.
Consider Kushner, the reed-like husband of Trump’s daughter, Ivanka. Unlike Trump, Kushner does not scrawl abuse to journalists; he is the laundered version of the president. Both are New York scions who leveraged their father’s property holdings. Both see politics and business as two sides of the same coin. Both used to donate to the Democrats and switched to the Republicans when that was what the pursuit of power required. And both think their unique talent at deal-making supersedes expertise.
Kushner once observed that the people who had previously tried to negotiate peace in the Middle East were “history professors… or diplomats”. He was something else, he noted. “It’s just different being ‘deal guys’,” as he put it. “[It’s] just a different sport.”
Yet, it was Kushner who, playing this different sport during Trump’s first term, negotiated the Abraham Accords, normalising relations between Israel and some of the most important Arab states. To many career diplomats, Kushner’s informal power-broking is hard to take, whatever the results. “The Foreign Office cannot abide by something arranged by businessmen on Park Avenue or Doha,” one influential UK adviser told me. “The best ambassadors in our system now have to go around the [Foreign Office].
The British system’s favoured place is the ‘exquisite irrelevance’ of procedure followed perfectly without any impact.” Rather than relying on official channels, Kushner likes to send his missives to Gulf leaders like the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, through WhatsApp. He flies in his own plane to the region. The Trumpians have redefined the phrase “the personal is political”.
It should not be a surprise that Kushner has managed to slide with such alacrity from the Davos-Democratic nexus into the Trumpian age. He has been joined by his friend and confidante, Blair. Kushner is in many ways Blair’s American alter ego, comfortable in a world of high finance, politics and power.
I was at a balmy rooftop party in Washington DC the night Blair was mooted as Trump’s Palestinian viceroy – the night it was announced Blair would sit on the “Board of Peace”, the proposed technocratic government to run Gaza after the war. Washington’s foreign diplomats cocked their eyebrows, noting his record in the region as prime minister – Iraq, their one-word charge sheet. One intelligence source told me that the “Board of Peace” is unlikely ever to come to pass. They’re convinced the Israel Defence Forces will swoop back in once a still-armed Hamas inevitably fires on the International Stabilisation Forces.
But Blair does possess the gravitas, contacts and clout to operate in this new empire. The Republican pollster and Blair confidante Frank Luntz described him to me as a “diplomat’s diplomat – [able to] see the green shoots of potential amid all the death and destruction”.
It’s more than that: Blair has an irrepressible belief in his ability to inaugurate a new age. He also knows where power lies and has devoted his life since leaving office to remain close to it. His visit to the White House with Kushner this summer was the result of these efforts.
In order to realise his post-No 10 influence, Blair has spent the past decade building himself a shadow foreign office more influential than the one he once controlled as prime minister: the Tony Blair Institute (TBI), which is partly funded by the American tech billionaire Larry Ellison. In the Middle East, the TBI has bases in places like Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, with staff criss-crossing the region. Blair is more connected than any recent British foreign secretary, sharing close working relationships with all the major players in the region, from Netanyahu to Mohammed bin Salman. He is a latter-day Henry Kissinger, wielding influence and power long after he has left office, but now independently of the British state. The only foreign secretary arguably to have come even close was David Cameron, who broke away from Foreign Office orthodoxy to petition Trump at his Mar-a-Lago redoubt months before his re-election last year.
Whatever private disputes Blair has with world leaders, no criticism will escape his lips. Amid the recent controversies over his proposed role in Gaza, and his close relationship with Ellison, Blair recently gathered his team in London and said that the TBI could either be “commentators or we can be actors”. His conclusion was simple: “We should be actors.”
The scale of the TBI’s reach in the Middle East is startling. In May, it conducted its own polling in Gaza which found less than 4 per cent of the Strip’s inhabitants wanted Hamas to run the territory. One source said this survey was a key piece of evidence for Blair to convince Trump in his meeting at the White House that the Gazans did not have to be ethnically cleansed in order for Hamas to be removed.
Trump trusts individuals he can read, not ineffective institutions with rules he cannot bend. The influence that Powell and Blair have in the White House speaks to the impotence of traditional bodies such as the Foreign Office and the State Department, never mind the UN.
In the past, the State Department would speak to the Foreign Office. Meetings would be scheduled. Minutes taken. Procedure followed. Summits convened. Today, Trump gets annoyed at a Fox News segment and picks up the phone, or Kushner sends a WhatsApp to Blair, who in turn speaks to Witkoff or Powell. No one I spoke to for this piece mentioned Britain’s actual Prime Minister, Keir Starmer.
Neither Blair nor Kushner has a formal role in any official administration. And yet, together, they have the ear of the emperor. This is privatised foreign policy.
There’s another reason Blair slots so well into the Trumpian world. The 20-point peace plan resembles a private finance initiative for the age of empire. The plan calls for Gaza to be redeveloped by a “panel of experts who have helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East”. Blair long sought to blend private capital with the public realm; now he is doing so in the world of Trump.
The broader picture here is that the old rules-based order has been muscled aside by those with power, influence – and money. We live in a world in which Elon Musk not only controls the most important news site on the planet, but also provides vital Starlink satellites for Ukraine’s defence. Meanwhile, the Bill Gates Foundation rivals the World Health Organisation in influence over global health policy. Nor is it just an American phenomenon: the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin ran a shadow Russian military before Vladimir Putin fatally reined him in. The battle to shape the new order involves interlinked forces with dynastic and financial connections to each other.
At the same time, Gulf states need stability in order to realise their long-sought diversification away from oil and gas. Genocide, Islamist terrorism and domestic protests over Palestine makes it awkward to host the World Cup, on which Qatar spent $220bn, or build a new city such as Neom in Saudi Arabia. “Everything about this deal is about money – the ability to make it, the ability to use it, and the ability to protect it,” the Maga guru Steve Bannon told me. The neoliberal system was the precursor to the Trumpian age.
The Israelis intended the comparison to Cyrus the Great as a compliment to Trump. But Herodotus tells us that the old Persian king was hubristic and fickle. After conquering Babylon, he met his death when he blundered into battle with the Massagetans.
This ceasefire has left Israel with its enemies subdued, the Gulf states primed to continue their economic expansion, the Palestinians spared further slaughter. And an American president perched on top of an empire governed by his own whims, musing where to go next.
[Further reading: Trump’s hostage deal was the easy part]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Emperor