JEFFREY GOLDBERG: This week, The Atlantic published a profile of Steve Witkoff, the Trump friend and special envoy, who is, in many ways, more important than the secretary of state, Marco Rubio.

Witkoff told staff writer Isaac Stanley Becker the following, quote, we're going to have success in Syria.

You're going to hear about it very quickly.

We're going to have success in Libya.

You're going to hear it quickly.

We're going to have success in Azerbaijan and Armenia, a place that was godforsaken almost, and you'll hear about it immediately.

And, ultimately, we will get to an Iranian solution and a Russian-Ukraine solution.

Trump and Witkoff are a promising world peace, of course, and not only world peace, but prosperity for everyone, including, by the way, the Trump family.

Tonight we'll examine the President's trip to the Middle East and what it tells us about America's place in the world.

Joining me at the table, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times, Steven Hayes is the editor of the Dispatch, David Ignatius is a columnist at the Washington Post, and Andrea Mitchell is the chief Washington and foreign affairs correspondent for NBC News.

Welcome, everyone.

Andrea, nice to have you back at Washington Week.

ANDREA MITCHELL, Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, NBC News: Thank you.

Great to be here.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Peter, let me start with you.

What do we know about Trump's foreign policy at the end of this week that we didn't know last week?

PETER BAKER, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Well, it's malleable, it's flexible.

It's not necessarily predictable.

We probably knew that a week ago too.

But it has been a remarkable week to watch, right.

You saw the president of the United States go to the Middle East without going to Israel, even though he's supposedly a great friend of Bibi Netanyahu.

He went to the Middle East to collect a $400 million plane.

Obviously, he hasn't yet brought it home.

He went to the release though to, you know, re-alter the dynamics by recognizing Syria's new government, announcing they're going to lift sanctions and effectively moving closer toward a deal with Iran.

That sounds an awful like the deal that he throughout in his first term.

So, you know, this is a different dynamic than we saw even just a week ago, I think.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And so it was the opposite of an Obama dynamic.

Obama couldn't really stand the Gulf States in a kind of way.

PETER BAKER: Yes.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I want to play something that Trump said while he was on the ground in the Middle East.

Let's just listen to Trump for one second.

DONALD TRUMP: The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the nation builders, neo-cons, or liberal nonprofits, like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop, Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities.

Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: David, frame that statement historically, if you could.

DAVID IGNATIUS, Columnist, The Washington Post: So, I mean, no one would call Donald Trump a nation builder, but we've been through arguably a generation Republicans and Democrats who did go to the Middle East and spoke about democracy, human rights, tried to build up countries whose governance was weak, tried to develop security partnerships, often doing that because it seemed to be good for Israel, in many ways, our closest ally, certainly in the region.

And Trump really reshuffled that deck this week in that speech but in every stop on the trip, created I thought a kind of personal diplomacy road show.

It did have a lot of energy.

It had surprises.

I thought, you know, these could have exclamatory comments about MBS in Saudi Arabia, you know, my guy the -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince.

DAVID IGNATIUS: Yes, the Crown Prince.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Who, four years ago -- DAVID IGNATIUS: was an outcast, I mean, properly.

So my colleague, Jamal Khashoggi, was murdered with his knowledge about the operation.

And he was rightly shunned for that.

That's over.

Donald Trump's embrace is the signal of that.

But it was a week that I think told us that Trump's kind of ad hoc, improvised diplomacy is attempting - - it's ambitious.

And with Iran, it may achieve a success that I think most of us, certainly me would applaud.

But it's just a much more intense personal involvement than we've seen for a long time.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Andrea, if you are Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, what do you think after watching him be feted in the Gulf and also after hearing him signal that he wants a deal with the Iranians?

ANDREA MITCHELL: Well, this has been the most remarkable shift because we all had expected because of his praise and his support for expanding the war in Gaza, his, you know, unconditional support of Netanyahu up until a couple of weeks ago.

And then he shocked Netanyahu by talking about opening direct talks with Iran while Netanyahu was sitting next to him in the Oval Office on a trip that had been scheduled, according to Netanyahu's, people to get approval, U.S. approval to support a military strike against Iran because of its new vulnerability because of what Israel had done against Hamas, Hezbollah, and the removal of Assad and all of that, plus removing many of the air defenses in a retaliatory strike.

This is a moment that Iran was weakened economically, but also militarily and vulnerable.

And instead of getting support for a military strike, he heard the president suggest direct talks, not the indirect talks, but direct talks with Iran and really reshaping diplomacy and proceeding with the Gulf and with Saudi Arabia, with security agreements and, you know, of course, the financial rewards without Israel, so not the normalization.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Are we heading to a moment when Donald Trump sends love letters to the ayatollah?

If you recall his relationship with the North Koreans, it was a big love letter phase.

Is that what we're looking at now?

ANDREA MITCHELL: Possibly, because Iran needs a deal.

They've got to get out from under the sanctions.

They want to get out from under the sanctions.

And as complex as it is, and I covered the negotiations for the previous agreement in 2015, negotiated by, you know, a nuclear physicist, Ernest Moniz, who is the energy secretary, all these experts, this could actually get done.

And it's Steve Witkoff probably who is the negotiator.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

Steve, let's talk about royal courts.

There's a symbiotic kind of thing going on here with Donald Trump and the way he runs his operation and the way many of these Gulf potentates run their operations.

He seems very at home in the Gulf.

Talk about that.

STEPHEN HAYES, Editor, The Dispatch: He does.

I mean, he clearly loves that.

I think he would like to run the U.S. government much the way that some of the people that he was celebrating this week run their own countries.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And to be clear, those countries are not democracies by any stretch of the imagination.

STEPHEN HAYES: Right, exactly.

And, look, I mean, some of this is -- it's fascinating to watch the change from, you know, certainly from the Bush era.

If you think back to George W. Bush's second inaugural and the triumph of democracy that he was proposing and caring about things, like human rights, women's rights, and where we are now, this, it seems to be, skips past realism, which is something that I think Trump -- the people who want to intellectualize what Trump is doing have talked about in this context to a real embrace of autocracies.

He clearly admires them.

I mean, the vow this week to protect Qatar, to protect the Saudis, these people with long histories of supporting anti-American terror.

There's quite a moment when you think about the rhetoric from Donald Trump this week.

Think about if Barack Obama had said the things about the new leader of Syria praising him as strong, yes, a fighter, this is somebody who's a longtime terrorist, there would've been outcry, literal -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Literally a member of Al-Qaeda.

STEPHEN HAYES: Correct, literally.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

It is hard to imagine a Democratic president getting away -- STEPHEN HAYES: Think about what Republicans on Capitol Hill would've said and what I, people like me, would've said if Barack Obama had said those things.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: David?

DAVID IGNATIUS: There is this element of Nixon to China.

Trump can get away with this in a weird way because he has the reputation of being a strong leader, a tough guy.

And so he's doing things that would be attacked as concessionary, you know, you're embracing the former Al-Qaeda affiliate.

You're really going to make a deal with the ayatollahs.

I think Trump has this sense of his own agency, the difference that he makes by getting involved in these things.

You talked about him meeting with the ayatollah.

Love letters, no, but the idea of a kind of culminating summit.

You know, Sadat went to Jerusalem.

I don't think it's crazy to think of Donald Trump flying to Tehran.

He'd love that.

What a moment on the stage.

PETER BAKER: Donald Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize.

It's really that simple.

He had talked about it and talked about it, and talked about it in his first term.

He actually even convinced Shinzo Abe, then the prime minister of Japan, quietly over dinner, he says, well, you'll nominate me for that, won't you?

And Shinzo Abe obliged and nominated him for Nobel Peace Prize.

He has it in his mind that he can be this world history figure, right?

And look at the quote that you put up there on the board, not just Russia and Ukraine, not just Iran, but Azerbaijan and Armenia, for heaven's sake.

We're talking about, you know, intractable disputes that have been there for decades that people have basically forgotten about because we can't possibly ever solve them.

This is a very ambitious is one word, messianic might be another word, you know, agenda that he has set out for himself.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Andrea, stay on that point.

because it's very interesting when you have two secretaries of state at the same time, or three, because Donald Trump will act like a secretary of State whenever he wants to.

Steve Witkoff, key man in all of this, by his side through all of these negotiations, no experience in any of this.

Have you -- you've been covering American diplomacy for a little while.

Have you ever seen anything like this?

ANDREA MITCHELL: No.

Not like this, but he has some unique skills, and the most important is that he knows the president.

And when secretaries of state or national security advisers really understand their presidents, they have unique abilities that often, you know, you know, work to the disadvantage of whether it's the national security adviser or the secretary of state who is shut out.

We've seen that in the recent past with George W. Bush, for instance, and Colin Powell most, you know, really tragically.

Look, Steve Witkoff has a skill set.

And he has a good team that he's now surrounding himself with.

He's getting better depth.

And he dug in on some things that I'm aware of in Gaza, helping get children with, you know, cancer out of Gaza.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Out to Jordan.

ANDREA MITCHELL: To Jordan and elsewhere, and doing it very quietly with unlikely partners going into Gaza.

He's the first American official to go into Gaza since October 7th and starting early in the transition.

So, I wouldn't underestimate him, but I think that he does need support to do an Iranian deal.

And as Peter alluded to earlier, this deal that is shaping up is not that different than the deal that was derided by its critics in the Senate, the Republican Party, and certainly by Donald Trump when he pulled out of it, because it does not include missiles, delivery systems or proxies.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

ANDREA MITCHELL: The terror proxies, of course, who have been largely eliminated or defanged, other than the Houthis, by Israel.