Trump’s gap-year peace negotiator damaging two countries at once

  the billionaire investor, property developer and son-in-law of President Donald Trump – does not work for the US government. He has no official role in Trump’s administration, and as far as formalities go is simply a private citizen concerned with his own businesses.

Trump, though, has rarely been a man who is overly concerned with formalities. And in his second term, the President seems to have dealt with his mistrust of the State Department’s career diplomats by simply bypassing them entirely – putting his billionaire buddy Steve Witkoff and Kushner in charge of the serious overseas negotiations which the US government is involved in.

The results so far have been mixed, to say the least.

Kushner’s peace deals often resemble what you’d expect a self-interested real estate guy to pull together. The US’s extended efforts to secure a long-term peace deal for Gaza resulted in wildly controversial plans for a “Gaza Riviera” luxury resort – the building of which would require billions of dollars and the relocation of most of the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip.

Still, while Trump’s Board of Peace seems all but forgotten, and progress towards any kind of meaningful long-term deal for Gaza is non-existent, a shaky ceasefire is still largely holding, allowing vastly more aid to reach Gaza than was possible beforehand.

That makes the Gaza deal a triumph compared with the initial Iran ceasefire agreement Kushner helped to broker, ahead of a more thorough deal. On first viewing, the 60-day agreement looks so bad for the US that even Trump-friendly media like Fox News have struggled to spin it as anything other than a disaster for the President and an admission of defeat for the US.

The deal benefits Iran in myriad ways, unfreezing billions of dollars of its assets, relaxing its sanctions and acknowledging its de facto control of the Strait of Hormuz. It also obliges the US to prevent Israel from launching further strikes on Lebanon – which is already proving an uphill challenge, given Israel is not a party to the deal.

But like its Gaza counterpart, the Iran deal contains plenty of opportunities for international investors like Kushner – including floating the possibility of a $300bn international reconstruction fund for Iran (with the money coming from Gulf states and private businesses). That’s exactly the kind of deal that Kushner likes to strike.

While America’s democratic allies in Europe and across the world struggle to get a handle on how to deal with Trump, countries in the Middle East find it a much simpler proposition. They know how to deal with men like Kushner. His lack of a government role in many ways makes things simpler – you can’t break the rules governing the conduct of federal officials when you just skip being an official in the first place.

Leaders in other parts of the world also find Kushner straightforward to deal with. In former Soviet republics that have descended into autocracy, doing deals with the son-in-law or other relatives of the president is simply how business gets done.

Still, there are signs that Kushner is stretched beyond his abilities. Earlier this month, Kushner’s wife Ivanka Trump revealed in a soft-soap podcast interview that she and her husband were developing an ultra-luxury resort on an uninhabited private island in Albania, telling the host a tale about how the two of them had discovered it while yachting in the region, and had walked it barefoot.

Ivanka had probably intended the interview as the start of an influencer marketing push for her husband’s new project – but it prompted widespread public fury in Albania, which has spilled over into mass protests on the streets of Tirana, its capital.

Albania has almost no history of public protest, but the backlash against Kushner’s project is now so strong that it has birthed a political movement that might topple the government if not handled soon. That leaves Kushner with yet another crisis on his hands.

Trump’s son-in-law appears to be trying to be one of the US’s chief diplomats in his gap year, negotiating an end to conflicts in Gaza and Iran and occasionally trying to sort out a third in Ukraine. He also wants to maximise his global business prospects, his actual day job, while Trump is still in power and able to open doors for him.

Instead, he’s turning two separate deals into calamities – his luxury resort in Albania might bring down the government there, and his catastrophic negotiations in the Middle East might destabilise the entire region.

It’s obviously not supposed to work this way. Business and diplomacy are supposed to be separate. The US public is supposed to be confident that its politicians and officials are negotiating the best deal for America, not for themselves. The US is also supposed to be represented officially, not by whichever of the President’s friends or family are currently in favour. It’s clear that neither Trump nor Kushner cares much for such niceties.

Trump does, though, care about looking good – and he will throw out anyone who makes him look foolish. Kushner is now the architect of two Middle Eastern peace deals that could rapidly fall apart at the seams, and is at the centre of a political uprising in a third, unexpected nation.

If Kushner isn’t careful that could start to look an awful lot like losing, and Trump doesn’t tolerate losers for long – even if they’re in his family.