The disastrous diplomacy of Jared Kushner

In a speech to the Israeli Knesset on October 13, 2025, President Trump spoke at length on how he would deploy his son-in-law Jared Kushner to secure peace deals in Gaza, Iran, and Ukraine. “We always bring Jared when we wanna get that deal closed,” Trump said.

Prior to his work with the Trump White House, Kushner’s main professional experience was as a real estate developer. He almost bankrupted his family’s development company by purchasing an aging New York City skyscraper for $1.8 billion.

After assuming a broad foreign policy portfolio during Trump’s first term, Kushner leveraged his connections with autocrats in the Middle East to raise billions for a new private equity company, Affinity Partners, in 2021. Kushner then pledged not to be involved in a second Trump White House. “I’m an investor now,” Kushner said in February 2024. “I served in government, and I think my track record is pretty impeccable. Now I’m a private investor.”

Without explanation, Kushner broke that pledge and has been involved in nearly every consequential foreign policy negotiation since Trump returned to the White House in early 2025. But he has been pursuing these high-level negotiations as a side hustle, and continuing his role as an investor.

It has not been going well.

Since Trump’s October 2025 speech, the hotspots in Kushner’s portfolio have all deteriorated. Kushner has guided the United States into a substantially worse strategic position. In all cases, the prospects for a lasting peace are further away.

None of this seems to be bothering Kushner.

The Strait of Hormuz is closed, the fighting in Ukraine has intensified, and Israel is rejecting American leadership in Gaza. Meanwhile, Kushner is taking a family vacation in Iceland.

(instagram.com/ivankatrump)

Gaza peace deal crumbles

On Sunday, after months of negotiations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected a peace plan for Gaza touted by Trump. The plan would have involved Hamas “hand[ing] over its weapons in stages to a new Palestinian administration in Gaza” in exchange for Israel withdrawing its forces from Gaza.

The plan was negotiated by Trump’s “Board of Peace.” In January, Trump appointed Kushner to the Board of Peace’s Executive Board, as part of his “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict.”

Trump celebrated the peace deal at the end of July, writing on Truth Social, “Today, the Board of Peace reached a HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza. This is a monumental step toward lasting PEACE and SECURITY.”

But now, the deal has hit a roadblock. “Israel rejects the 15-point document,” Netanyahu reportedly said in a cabinet meeting, stating that the military “will not make any withdrawal until Hamas is truly disarmed and will continue to thwart threats against our forces and citizens.”

At the beginning of August, an exiled Palestinian official alleged that Kushner was involved in the peace deal, writing on social media that “Kushner confirmed to us that he had agreed with the Israeli side to halt the attacks on Gaza beginning tomorrow morning,” the Jerusalem Post reported. (He later edited the post to state instead that “Kushner has informed us that he is working with the Israeli side to stop the attacks on Gaza.”)

Kushner has been involved in negotiations surrounding Gaza for months. Last fall, Trump called on Kushner to help negotiate a ceasefire agreement in Gaza. “We called in Jared,” Trump said in October 2025. “We need that brain on occasion. We gotta get Jared in here.”

Kushner has also been heavily involved in plans to reconstruct Gaza. In January, Kushner presented a plan to develop Gaza at the World Economic Forum at Davos. The plan involved building Gaza into a luxury urban development. Kushner described it as a “destination.” But in the months since, that plan has “shrunk dramatically from an ambitious blueprint for the reconstruction of the whole territory to a small pilot project in the south of the strip,” according to the Guardian.

A diplomatic catastrophe in Iran

Kushner has been one of the Trump administration’s key negotiators in the war with Iran, traveling to the Middle East several times for talks with leaders from the region. Since the beginning of the war, Trump has repeatedly claimed that these negotiations were on the brink of success and the war was nearly won.

Yet months later, the war is ongoing and negotiations are at a standstill. Last week, Trump threatened Iran with “decapitation” if they did not agree to a deal soon. But on Sunday, he told Axios that his administration was “low-keying it” and “only semi-negotiating” while waiting for Iran to cave to economic pressures. Meanwhile, Iran has said it will keep the Strait of Hormuz closed until the U.S. meets a sweeping set of demands. Kushner’s performance in negotiations with Iran has drawn sharp criticism, with one former Middle East negotiator for the U.S. giving Kushner “an F in diplomacy.”

While Kushner has been negotiating on issues that could significantly impact Middle Eastern countries, Affinity Partners has collected tens of millions of dollars in fees from these same governments, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.

Intensifying fighting in Ukraine

Kushner has also been involved in months of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, with little success. The war between the countries has continued for over four years. In December, Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff reportedly met with Russian President Vladimir Putin “for around five hours.” In February, Kushner and Witkoff were also involved in hours of negotiations between the two countries in Geneva.

But after the U.S. began the war with Iran, Kushner and Witkoff’s mediating between Russia and Ukraine stalled. Officials from both countries were reportedly frustrated by the delay. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told CBS News that he understood “that there are challenges in the Middle East,” but that Ukraine needed “more, more than words.” Russian officials were reportedly “desperately waiting for the return of Witkoff and Kushner,” according to the New York Times.

Now, fighting between the two countries is intensifying. Kushner and Witkoff are rumored to be visiting Kyiv and Moscow in the coming weeks to pick negotiations back up.

Mass protests in Albania

While Kushner flails as a negotiator, one of his major real estate developments is also in jeopardy.

In 2024, Kushner unveiled plans to develop Sazan Island and a nearby peninsula on the coast of Albania into a luxury resort with 10,000 hotel rooms. The development, backed by Kushner and a group of other investors, has been the subject of ongoing protests, known as the Flamingo Revolution, and an investigation by Albania’s corruption watchdog.

Most recently, questions have emerged about how Kushner and the development group acquired the land for the luxury resort. In September 2024, a group of residents of the peninsula sent a letter to Kushner, warning him that the residents were the rightful owners of the land, but a man named Artur Shehu had stolen it from them. The development group bought the land from Shehu anyway. In June, Albanian prosecutors accused Shehu of leading an international drug-smuggling operation, which included laundering money through stolen property. According to the prosecutors, Shehu used forged ownership documents to acquire land on the peninsula, which he then sold to Kushner’s development group for $120 million.