How Did Trump Pull Off This Middle East Peace Deal Without Experts?

Posted on October 11, 2025 by Luke Ford

I don’t sneer at experts, expertise and the ruling elite. I don’t think this crowd is any more likely to be wrong or bad than any other group. Sometimes the experts are right and sometimes the people are right. Truth and righteousness does not lie with any group. I’m not a populist nor an elitist.

When not listening to experts leads to immediate disaster, we should always listen to experts (engineering, air traffic, etc). When there’s no clear reason to believe that the experts are more likely to be right than non-experts, we should be suspicious of expert claims. For example, the academic discipline of Economics relies on differential equations to make sense of the world, and those parts of reality not reducible to such equations should not be governed by economist claims (such as international trade, invention, operating businesses).

In their 2025 book, Industrial Policy for the United States: Winning the Competition for Good Jobs and High-Value Industries, Ian Fletcher and Marc Fasteau write:

“A major problem with mainstream economics, once one gets past recitations of free-market theology and looks at the actual scholarship, is that it is only good at understanding things that are well suited to mathematical modeling, such as price setting in freely competitive markets.37 It has weak insight into organization, management, corporate strategy, R&D, engineering, workforce development, the origins of technology, product design, policymaking by governments, and the strategies nations use to compete. None of these reduce to equations well, but they are central to how modern firms, governments, and thus economies function. Even some fields that do mathematize well, such as finance and international trade, are prone to oversimplifications that lead to false conclusions.”

Robert Lighthizer writes in his 2023 book, No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America’s Workers:

* All the great economies were built behind a wall of protection and often with government money. The British industrial revolution was aided by a wall of tariffs. Likewise, the late – nineteenth – century explosion of American industry was the product of protectionism and often subsidies. Can anyone imagine the great American railroads being built without the grant of free land per mile? Similarly, the manufacturing countries of Japan, Germany, and now China all benefited during their development from tariffs, other barriers, and subsidies of one kind or another. It is important important to remember that no country became great by consuming. They became great by producing.

* Advocates of free trade frequently argue that enhanced international trade corresponds with greater international peace. This point of view traces back to the post – World War II period. Before World War II, tariffs were high by contemporary standards. From the 1820s until the late 1940s, the weighted average US tariff (which measures duties collected as a percentage of total imports) rarely dipped below 20 percent. President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal Congress ushered in a period of relative tariff liberalization in the 1930s, but even then the tariff rate remained in the mid – to high teens throughout the decade. After the war, however, both Democrats and Republicans came to champion tariff reduction as a means of preventing yet another conflict, arguing that trade fostered interdependence between nations. Trade liberalization came to be seen not just as a tool of economic policy but also as a path to perpetual peace. Indeed, Cordell Hull, the secretary of state from 1933 to 1944 in the Roosevelt administration and lead architect of its trade policy, claimed that his philosophy centered on the idea that “unhampered trade dovetailed with peace; [and] high tariffs, trade barriers, and unfair economic competition, with war.”
The need for the United States to temper the often uncritical post – World War II enthusiasm for interdependence at all costs has never been greater than it is now, in the face of the Chinese threat. We need to remember that, historically speaking, interdependence does not always lead to peace. In the United States, economic ties between the North and the South did not prevent the Civil War. Global trade grew rapidly in the years right before World War I; exports as a percentage of global GDP peaked at nearly 14 percent in 1913, a record that would hold until the 1970s. Likewise, it would be hard to argue that the rise of Germany as a major exporter in the late nineteenth century helped pacify that country in the first half of the twentieth. Japan’s dependence on raw materials from the United States motivated its attack on Pearl Harbor. More recently, as we will discuss in chapter 4, China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 — which was supposed to make the country a model global citizen — was followed by massive investments in its military capabilities and territorial expansion in the South China Sea. And certainly the great trade between Ukraine and Russia did not stop Putin’s invasion in 2022.
On the flip side, conflict over trade is not always destabilizing or a threat to broader foreign policy objectives. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance survived the tariff hikes associated with both the 1960s “chicken war,” when the United States clashed with France and West Germany over poultry duties, and the 1970s “Nixon shock,” when the United States effectively abandoned the Bretton Woods system. The United States and Japan fought about trade in the 1980s, but their bilateral bilateral security alliance stayed strong.
Countries, like people, compartmentalize between separate issues. There may be situations when it is appropriate to make concessions on trade to achieve broader diplomatic aims, but one should keep in mind that such bargains can prove costly in the long run. Letting India join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (the precursor to the WTO) in 1948 with nearly a third of its industrial tariffs unbound, for example, no doubt made sense to Cold Warriors, who thought that it would help bring India into the US camp. Yet the negative repercussions of that decision persist to this day, now that India has become one of the world’s largest economies and, at times, a troublesome trading partner for the United States. Over the years, such concessions have piled up.

* Some cite efficiency as a rationale for free trade. For adherents of this faith, the sole objective of trade policy is market efficiency. Lower tariffs and nontariff barriers reduce the costs of producing and distributing goods and services; that, in turn, makes society as a whole better off — or so the argument goes. Of course, there are advantages to lower prices when considering Americans as consumers. The problem is that adherents of this view seldom consider how this single – minded pursuit of efficiency affects the men and women who actually do the producing.
According to the definitions preferred by these efficiency – minded free traders, the downside of trade for American producers is not evidence against their approach but rather is an unfortunate but necessary side effect. That’s because free trade is always taken as a given, not as an approach to be questioned. Rather than envisioning the type of society desired and then, in light of that conception of the common good, fashioning a trade policy to fit that vision, economists tend to do the opposite: they start from the proposition that free trade should reign and then argue that society should adapt. Most acknowledge that lowering trade barriers causes economic disruption, but very few suggest that the rules of trade should be calibrated to help society better manage those effects. On the right, libertarians deny that these bad effects are a problem, because the benefits of cheap consumer goods for the masses supposedly outweigh the costs, and factory workers, in their view, can be retrained to write computer programs. On the left, progressives promote trade adjustment assistance and other wealth – transfer schemes as a means of smoothing globalization’s rough edges.

If this Trump Middle East peace plan works out, it will undercut the expertise claims of the foreign policy elite. Ross Douthat writes in the NYT: “The fact that figures like Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have seemingly done better — or at the very least no worse — than credentialed diplomatic professionals has striking implications for how we think about expertise in foreign policy.”

ChatGPT says: If real-estate developers or business elites (like Witkoff, Kushner) appear to do “no worse” than career diplomats or national security professionals, that suggests several things:

Erosion of the prestige of technocratic expertise

It signals that credentialed expertise is less politically privileged. If nonexperts can replicate or outshine experts, the boundary between lay leadership and professional specialization weakens.

Delegitimizing expert authority

The success (or apparent success) of nonexperts challenges the moral standing of experts, fueling populist narratives that experts are overpaid, disconnected, or elitist.

Risk of overconfidence / hubris

Nonexperts may underestimate complexity. The illusion that one can manage foreign policy through transactional instincts or deals is tempting — but fragile in crises.

Power re-distribution

If policy is less constrained by bureaucratic or institutional norms, political actors (or their inner circle) gain latitude. That amplifies the role of personality, loyalty, and improvisation.

Democratic and institutional stress

Democratic legitimacy often depends on a mix of representative, technocratic, and institutional checks. When nonexperts encroach on domains traditionally reserved for specialists, institutional norms and accountability may erode.

Selective “success stories” bias

The claim assumes we don’t see the many failures. Survivorship bias: we remember the deals that worked, not the ones that blew up. If nonexperts occasionally get lucky, that isn’t evidence of parity overall.

Shifting criteria of legitimacy

The yardstick of “effectiveness” may shift from deep, sustained stability to headline deals, spectacle, or symbolic wins. That favors actors adept at optics more than substance.

So Douthat is warning that the lines distinguishing expertise, merit, and authority in foreign policy may be dissolving — with unpredictable consequences for governance, institutional memory, crisis handling, and norms.

LF: Over the past nine months, I’ve read many articles in elite publications decrying the Trump administration’s lack of foreign policy expertise.

Foreign Affairs

Foreign Policy

Washington Post (Opinion)

Financial Times

The Atlantic

The New Yorker

Policy Institutes

Stephen Turner–Style Analysis: “The Politics of Expertise in Trump’s Foreign Policy”

1. The collapse of boundary maintenance

In Turner’s framework, modern states depend on institutional “boundary work” separating expert domains (science, diplomacy, law) from lay or political judgment. Trump’s foreign-policy model, by privileging personal trust, business intuition, and loyalty over credentialed specialization, represents the deliberate erosion of those boundaries.
He would see this as not just an administrative change but a reorganization of knowledge and authority — shifting decision power from knowledge-holders to political patrons.

2. Patronage replaces epistemic authority

Turner begins The Politics of Expertise with the observation that governments fund, rely on, and thus patronize experts whose knowledge they can’t easily evaluate. In Trump’s case, the traditional patronage circuit (State Dept. → diplomatic corps → think-tank ecosystem) was bypassed. Patronage shifted to personal networks — Kushner, Witkoff, Barrack, etc.
To Turner, this is a reversion to pre-bureaucratic forms of knowledge trust: legitimacy through personal loyalty rather than institutional vetting. It doesn’t abolish expertise; it privatizes it.

3. Output legitimacy versus process legitimacy

Turner distinguishes between output legitimacy (results justify trust) and process legitimacy (procedures justify trust).
Trump’s model rests entirely on output legitimacy — deals, headlines, perceived “wins.” Traditional diplomacy depends on process legitimacy — norms of consultation, interagency review, alliances.
When the process basis collapses, “expertise” becomes indistinguishable from success theater. That creates volatility: the moment output fails, legitimacy disappears.

4. Knowledge aggregation and its breakdown

Turner’s central insight is that politics requires the aggregation of distributed knowledge — the organization of many partial knowings into coherent decisions. Bureaucracies, advisory councils, and interagency committees exist for that purpose.
Trump’s style (intuition + small trusted circle) short-circuits aggregation. Fewer voices means fewer knowledge inputs; policy becomes dependent on individual heuristics rather than structured synthesis. Turner would call this a “failure of aggregation”—a normal accident of expertise.

5. The democratization (or populist redefinition) of expertise

Turner doesn’t romanticize experts; he sees expertise as a socially contingent form of authority. In that sense, Trump’s populist dismissal of the “blob” reflects a democratic impulse to reclaim decision power from unaccountable elites.
But Turner would say that this legitimacy-by-disruption only works if new forms of expertise or trust mechanisms replace the old. In Trump’s case, those substitutes were thin — charisma, family ties, business analogies. Without institutional scaffolding, expertise doesn’t vanish; it metastasizes into ideology or loyalty.

6. The long-term consequence: institutional amnesia

Turner often warns that when expertise is delegitimized, states lose epistemic memory — the accumulated knowledge stored in procedures, archives, and norms. Replacing the diplomatic corps with deal-makers risks precisely that: the destruction of knowledge infrastructures that can’t be rebuilt quickly.
He would likely see this as part of a broader Western trend: populist regimes consuming the epistemic capital built by prior technocracies faster than they can regenerate it.

7. Synthesis

In Turner’s terms, Trump’s foreign-policy style is not “anti-expert” but post-expert — rule by uncredentialed networks that claim direct access to truth or “common sense,” bypassing institutional mediation.
That shift doesn’t eliminate expertise; it redistributes it from professional systems to personal hierarchies, undermining both democratic accountability and expert autonomy. It’s a reversion to what Turner calls “patron-client epistemology”: trust in the ruler replaces trust in the process.

Here’s how “William and the Musician” maps onto our expertise thread (Douthat + Turner):

“William and the Musician” is one of Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories, a farce about class, pretension, and luck.

William, day-dreaming on a hill, meets a down-on-his-luck Punch-and-Judy man, Señor Manelli, who mistakes William’s childish boasting for truth and believes the boy owns the grand estate nearby. William, improvising, “hires” him to perform at an upcoming garden party supposedly hosted by “Lord Faversham.” In reality the house belongs to Mrs Bot, a social-climbing hostess desperate to impress the local gentry with a recital by the modern violin virtuoso Zier.

Manelli takes the promise seriously, practices, and turns up at the Bots’ party with his dog and puppet stage. Zier, meanwhile, quarrels with himself, misses his transport, and ends up playing privately for William in a hayfield, imagining he has discovered a prodigy. At the hall, chaos turns to triumph: the bored guests, expecting an avant-garde violinist, roar with laughter at Manelli’s Punch-and-Judy show. Lord Faversham declares it the best entertainment in years and books Manelli for another engagement. Mrs Bot, stunned, assumes her husband arranged it; her social status soars.

Later, the newspapers report that Punch and Judy are fashionable again and that Zier has published memoirs romanticizing his “musical child” encounter—clearly William. William listens, grins, and says nothing.

In short:

Themes: illusion, class anxiety, the accidental triumph of the uncredentialed over the credentialed.

Moral: expertise and pretension can be outflanked by luck, charisma, and timing.

Tone: comic inversion—Crompton’s satire of the social and cultural hierarchies of early-20th-century Britain.

Status-seeking patronage

Mrs. Bot is the archetypal patron. She buys legitimacy (the hospital donation, Lord Faversham, the “famous, terribly modern” violinist). Turner: expertise rides on patronage networks; legitimacy is socially produced, not just earned.

Boundary work gets scrambled

The “proper” expert is Zier (credentialed high culture). The “improper” entertainer is Señor Manelli (Punch & Judy, a dog). The boundary between high/low, expert/lay collapses when Manelli steals the show. Douthat’s observation: non-credentialed operatives (Witkoff, Kushner) sometimes “do no worse” than the pros.

Output vs. process legitimacy

Process legitimacy = curated tent, front-row gothic chair, the whole ritual of expert performance. Output legitimacy = did the guests actually value it? Manelli delivers joy; Zier flakes. Turner: when process fails, audiences re-anchor legitimacy in outputs.

The optics economy

Mrs. Bot wants prestige optics (modern violinist before a bored lord). The audience wants relief. The “win” is what lands with the crowd and the top patron (Lord Faversham laughing). Douthat’s point: leaders who optimize for optics sometimes appear to beat technocrats measured on longer-term metrics.

Survivorship narratives

Zier no-shows, then rewrites the day in his memoirs as a sublime encounter with a “musical child.” That’s expert self-exoneration through storytelling. In politics, post-hoc rationalizations make impulsive calls look like genius. Turner: experts and institutions bond reputation through narratives as much as results.

Personal networks over institutions

William’s offhand, fantastical “booking” of Manelli overrides the whole institutional booking of Zier. Trumpworld parallel: personal channels, back-doors, and informal envoys displacing formal interagency process.

Populist revaluation of knowledge

Punch & Judy = “out of date” to the taste-policing class, yet it’s what the mixed public actually values. Populism reframes which knowledge counts. Turner: expertise’s authority depends on audience trust; if the audience prefers different forms, the crown slips.

Institutional amnesia risk

If every Mrs. Bot learns “skip the experts, hire the clown,” institutions forget how to source, vet, and stage complex performances. Works today; hollows capacity tomorrow. Turner warns about consuming epistemic capital faster than you rebuild it.

Luck and contingency masquerading as theory

A bus breaks down; a boy stalls a prima donna; a crowd laughs; a lord applauds. Then everyone invents reasons. In politics, contingent “wins” can be mistaken for a doctrine (“see, nonexperts beat experts”). Turner: beware mistaking fortunate draws for a new epistemic model.

Elite endorsement flips the field

The crowd follows Lord Faversham’s laughter. Once an elite gatekeeper blesses the “low” act, it becomes the right act. That’s how boundary work is renegotiated: not by truth alone but by who laughs (or nods) first.

Bottom line

Crompton stages Turner’s core claim: expertise is a political-social arrangement—patronage, rituals, stories, and audiences—not just skill. Douthat’s implication lands here: when institutions falter and patrons chase optics, non-experts can appear to match or beat experts. Sometimes that’s genuine re-discovery of undervalued know-how; often it’s contingency + charisma + a friendly gatekeeper. The long game still hinges on aggregation, memory, and accountable process—the stuff that keeps you from betting your state dinner (or your state) on a lucky Punch and Judy.

LF: Trump reminds me of William.

ChatGPT says: Here’s the clean mapping:

• Fantasy → mandate
William rules the world in his head; Trump governs as if personal will can substitute for process. Grandiosity stands in for institution-building.

• Personal channels over institutions
William “books” Manelli on a whim; Trump elevates loyalists/back-channels (Kushner, Witkoff) over the professional corps.

• Optics > process
Mrs. Bot wants prestige; the crowd wants fun. Trump optimizes for headline wins and spectacle; process legitimacy gets sidelined.

• Non-experts who land the moment
Manelli delights; Zier no-shows. Trump’s non-credentialed envoys sometimes deliver visible “wins,” reinforcing skepticism of experts.

• Gatekeeper blessing flips the script
Lord Faversham laughs → everyone laughs. Elite endorsement reframes “low” as “right.” In politics, one televised nod can reset the field.

• Post-hoc mythmaking
Zier writes a heroic memoir about a “musical child.” Trumpworld turns contingencies into doctrine (“Only I can fix it”), recoding luck as strategy.

• Crowd-pleasing short term, capacity risk long term
Punch & Judy saves the day—but if every patron bets on clowns, institutions forget how to do complex things. Turner’s warning: you burn epistemic capital.

• Aggregation failure masked by charisma
William’s improvisation bypasses the system that aggregates knowledge; Trump’s style does the same. It works—until you hit problems that won’t yield to vibes.

• Populist revaluation of “what counts”
Punch & Judy was “out of date” until the audience voted with laughter. Trump channels that revaluation against the foreign-policy guild.

• Moral: when “William-style” works vs. breaks
Works: symbolic politics, discrete bargains, media cycles, adversaries susceptible to theater.
Breaks: crises needing deep bench/alliances, sustained implementation, coalition management, unglamorous maintenance.

About Luke Ford

I teach Alexander Technique in Beverly Hills (Alexander90210.com).
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