Jared Kushner Helped Make This Mess in Iran While Making a Mess of Money
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.
“I’d describe [the MOU] as a strategic defeat for Kushnerism…It shows the catastrophe of this war.”
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........
