Why Did Trump’s Ukraine Envoy Address an Iranian Cult?

Last weekend, the president-elect Donald Trump’s incoming envoy on Ukraine, Gen. Keith Kellogg, spoke in Paris at an event of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), also known as MEK (Mujahedeen-e Khalk), a Iranian exile group that seeks to overthrow the Islamic government in the country. 

Kellogg advocated for a reinstatement of the “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran that was the hallmark of Trump’s first administration. It saw Trump abandon the nuclear agreement between Iran and the world powers, known as JCPOA, and assassinate the influential commander of the Iranian elite Al-Quds force, Qassem Soleimani. The latter act brought Washington and Tehran to the brink of war in early 2020. Kellogg emphasized that the “regime’s weakness” meant that the “the time is moving towards a free and different Iran”. 

The whole focus of the event in Paris was to capitalize on Iran’s geopolitical setbacks following Israel’s battering of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the downfall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, as well as the country’s mounting internal problems, such as the energy crisis. MEK, implacably hostile to the Islamic Republic, seeks to position itself at the forefront of the efforts to promote regime change in Iran.

Yet the organization is anything but a legitimate, democratic opposition to the current rulers in Tehran. It has radical Marxist-Islamist roots and a history of killing Americans (which earned it a place on the U.S. terrorist list). Its human rights abuses and totalitarian internal practices with cultic characteristics are well documented, including by serious research organizations, such as Human Rights Watch and RAND Corporation. The MEK’s service to the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during the bloody Iran–Iraq War in 1980s ensured that the group is overwhelmingly despised by the Iranians, including those who harbor no sympathy whatsoever for the Islamic Republic.

What, then, explains the attraction this group exercises over so many Western politicians and officials? There might be true believers, but another possible explanation could be the fact that MEK is a deep-pocketed organization known to expend lavish sums on the speakers at its events. These well-funded lobbying efforts succeeded in taking it off the U.S. terrorist list in 2012. 

Kellogg is not the only member of the incoming administration who has engaged the MEK. So did the incoming secretary of state Marco Rubio. That raises inevitable questions about the extent to which the NCRI/MEK will have an ear in Washington come January 20. And how would MEK’s influence be compatible with the position of Trump himself, who explicitly ruled out the regime change in Iran as a U.S. foreign policy goal in his second term? Kellogg’s actions raise an uncomfortable specter of the precedents in the first Trump administration, with some of its officials proudly boasting about undermining the president’s agenda.

Yet the more intriguing question is why Kellogg, the envoy on Ukraine, showed up in Paris to talk about Iran in the first place. In fact, he was expected to travel to Ukraine in early January to test the ground with President Volodymyr Zelensky for ending the war. His visit was postponed, which the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry explained as a quirk of American legislation allegedly prohibiting such contacts before the official inauguration of the new president. 

That is not a convincing explanation. Trump’s incoming special representative on the Middle East, Stephen Witkoff, did visit Israel and Qatar and reportedly pressured Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept concessions needed to secure the release of hostages held by the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas before Trump’s inauguration. No legislation apparently stood in the way of this visit. 

It is more likely that Kellogg’s visit was postponed because Zelensky’s ideas on how to end the war are at odds with what Trump has been propounding. In his interview with Lex Fridman, a popular American podcaster, Zelensky doubled down on his line that the end of the war is impossible without an invitation for Ukraine to join NATO or similarly strong security guarantees from the U.S. Zelensky also insisted that he wanted to discuss those guarantees with Washington and the European allies, and only then sit down at the table with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.

There is no evidence, however, that these ideas are in sync with Trump’s thinking. Recently, in a major departure from the default U.S. narrative of the war in Ukraine as a battle between democracy and autocracy, the president-elect expressed his “understanding” of the Russian security concerns related to Ukraine’s perceived drift to NATO. Trump is also not keen on having European allies join the future negotiations. Those, in return, fearful that they’ll be cut off from a potential diplomatic settlement, are encouraging Zelensky to dig in his heels till he can negotiate “from the position of strength”. 

It seems that the views on Ukraine are not entirely settled in the incoming Trump team itself. His prospective national security adviser, Mike Walz, echoed a similar push from the outgoing Biden administration and stated that Ukraine should go “all-in for democracy” and lower the conscription age to 18 years. This would throw more young Ukrainians into the meatgrinder in an elusive search of that “position of strength”. 

All of these complexities underscore the magnitude of the task of bringing the war to an end. Getting to the negotiation table requires a razor-sharp focus on diplomacy and discipline in Trump’s team. Kellogg’s ill-advised trip to Paris to address an Iranian cult with a history of anti-American terrorism is nothing but a harmful distraction from his main brief.