Jared Kushner helped make this mess in Iran while making a mess of money

Mother Jones; Ludovic Marin /AFP/Getty

It was clear, almost from the start, that President Donald Trump’s unilateral decision to launch a war against Iran would be his greatest strategic blunder yet. Nearly four months later, Tehran’s repressive regime remains entrenched and more radical than ever. The mullahs still have their enriched uranium and plenty of drones and missiles, and now they’ve shown the world they have a kill switch for the Strait of Hormuz—and much of the global economy.

If the current peace negotiations stick, they likely will leave us where we were before, only at the cost of more than $100 billion, thousands of Middle Eastern lives—and 13 American ones, plus hundreds injured—and whatever bit of our allies’ goodwill Trump hadn’t squandered already.

Yet Trump isn’t the sole owner of this fiasco. There was Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, who helped cajole him into greenlighting the attacks. And closer to home, there were the two inexperienced US envoys who led the pre-war negotiations with Iran, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, whose bumbling talking points accelerated America’s lurch into armed conflict—and strategic calamity.

Kushner and Witkoff’s starring role has been nearly forgotten in the months since Iran backed the United States into a corner by closing the strait. Kushner in particular brought epic conflicts of interest to the negotiations, not only because of the billions of dollars he was soliciting from Iran’s regional foes for his investment fund, Affinity Partners, but also because of his cozy, decades-long relationship with Netanyahu, who even visited the Kushner family’s home when Jared was a kid. (Here’s a timeline.)

Kushner proselytized Bibi’s claim that Iran was weeks, if not days, away from building a nuclear weapon—a view widely dismissed by nuclear experts—and appeared naive as to how the Iranians negotiate. His antipathy toward Tehran was no secret. According to author Andrea Bernstein, Kushner bonded with the dictator of the United Arab Emirates over their mutual loathing of Iran long before the UAE began bankrolling his firm. But Trump wasn’t troubled by his team’s inexperience, ineptness, or conflicts of interest. Kushner, Netanyahu, and the other Iran hawks got their way, resulting in America’s greatest humiliation on the global stage since the Iraq War.

The widely discussed Memorandum of Understanding has only confirmed this defeat. Among its 14 points are assurances that the United States will begin lifting its punishing sanctions on Iran—which it just did, at least temporarily—and that Tehran will regain access to frozen funds worth at least $24 billion. The MOU also says that US and regional allies will develop a “definitive, mutually agreed plan” for Iranian reconstruction that’s worth at least $300 billion.

This leaves questions aplenty: Who will cover the $300 billion tab? How will that money be dispensed and to whom? What restrictions will be placed on the funds? How much of it will be shouldered by the US public, which has already paid at least $132 billion, per Moody’s Analytics, for Trump’s unnecessary war?

Kushner has kept largely mum about the MOU, even amid suggestions that he could profit personally from the deal. But experts familiar with his role in pre-war negotiations had some thoughts. “I’d describe [the MOU] as a strategic defeat for Kushnerism, if we can talk about Kushnerism,” Jonathan Guyer, program director at Eurasia Group’s Institute for Global Affairs, told me. “The way I’d conceptualize it is sort of this mix of pro-Israel policies and corporate transactionalism…It shows the catastrophe of this war, and the failure of the negotiations that he and Witkoff were pursuing with the Iranians.”

The lead-up to the war helped make Kushner, now a billionaire, even richer, but the outbreak of armed conflict, and its outcome, has dealt a blow to Kushner’s geopolitical worldview. “If you go back to Breaking History, his memoir, one of the core arguments is that Iran is a bad actor that can’t be dealt with, and we have to muster this coalition against them,” Guyer said. “That’s why I think this is really a strategic defeat, because all these ideas that Kushner has been putting across since Trump’s first term have been totally shown to be not workable.”

The memo, notably, does nothing to lessen Iran’s ability to create a nuclear weapon in the future. It “kicks the most difficult nuclear issues down the road,” Kelsey Davenport, director of nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, told me. “The scope of Iran’s nuclear program remains unclear, there is no defined process for eliminating the highly enriched uranium, and there is little detail about US priorities for verification. The United States and Iran still need to overcome significant gaps to reach a deal.”

The US lifted sanctions against Iran temporarily on Monday as high-level talks continued in Switzerland, the New York Times reported. The status of the talks remains unclear; Kushner is present, but has refrained from commenting on negotiations, while Vice President JD Vance and the regime were sending opposing public signals on Iran’s willingness to allow UN inspectors into their nuclear facilities. (“Progress on Nuclear Issues is Muddy,” the headline noted.)

There’s a two-month timeline set for the negotiations, and with Kushner still deeply involved, no telling whether they will succeed. “It is possible to get an effective nuclear deal in the next 60 days, but it will require the Trump administration to rethink its negotiating process,” Davenport said. “Witkoff and Kushner need to engage in direct, sustained negotiations and listen to nuclear experts who understand what is necessary for an effective nonproliferation agreement. In past talks, Witkoff and Kushner’s technical incompetence led the Trump administration to miss critical opportunities to engage Iran and recognize where Tehran was demonstrating flexibility.”

The bungled negotiations, with Kushner at center stage, were but the latest in a litany of failures attached to him. As I wrote in an excerpt of my upcoming book for Mother Jones, Kushner has a knack for failing up. He flopped as a media owner and made a badly timed bet on a New York City office tower that became a financial albatross around his family’s neck for more than a decade.

Indeed, his attempts to bail his family out of that reckless investment helped seed the foreign financial entanglements that have made his role as a US diplomat so problematic. Russia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, and Israel all came to view Kushner as an asset they could cultivate—one who would represent their interests to the president.

Kushner’s sole diplomatic achievement during Trump’s first term was the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states. But the accords sidelined Palestinian interests and thus have been cited, alongside normalization talks with Saudi Arabia, as a primary factor in Hamas’s catastrophic attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which prompted Israel’s destruction of Gaza.

Even Trump’s Board of Peace, with Kushner as an executive board member, has been little more than a pay-to-play racket for foreign regimes to remain in the administration’s good graces.

With the Iran War, Kushner has unleashed yet another costly failure—this time, for all of us. The only shock is that anyone familiar with his story would be surprised by the outcome.