The Iran talks expose the collapse of US diplomacy | Opinions

The purpose of a professional diplomatic corps is to ensure that a nation has negotiators acting on its behalf whose only stake in the outcome of their work is the welfare of their nation. As the United States continues what may be the most critical negotiations of the second Trump administration – those with Iran – its negotiating team is led by the vice president of the US, and by two real estate investors with a side hustle in cryptocurrency.

Jared Kushner and Steven Witkoff are not the natural fit for a high-stakes matter of international diplomacy. The former’s association with foreign policy came only as a function of his familial association with Donald Trump through marriage to his daughter Ivanka. It is an association that has expanded in consequence for his family, with Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, going from a felony conviction in 2005 to a presidential pardon in 2020 to appointment as US ambassador to France in 2025. Witkoff’s involvement in international affairs is even more recent, with his greatest achievement in Trump’s statement announcing his 2025 appointment as US Middle East envoy being his leadership in “financing, repositioning, and construction of over 70 properties”.

Although Trump has argued that experience in business negotiations is transferable to diplomacy, inexperience is not the only qualification deficit for Kushner and Witkoff. In 2021, Kushner founded Affinity Partners, an investment firm that has, according to 2025 reporting, more than $5bn in assets under management, the majority of it from the Saudi government’s sovereign wealth fund, with further significant holdings by funds under the direction of the governments of the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. As recently as March 2026, at the height of the US-Iran war, The New York Times reported that Kushner was seeking to raise further investments from governments in the Gulf.

Meanwhile, Witkoff, whose real estate holdings had long received investment from the Middle East, invested seed money in 2024 in a cryptocurrency venture launched by members of the Trump family and his sons Alex and Zach. That venture, World Liberty Financial, went on to sell a 49 percent stake in itself to Aryam Investment, an Emirati company linked to UAE National Security Adviser Tahnoon bin Zayed. The deal closed on January 16, 2025. Four days later, Donald Trump was sworn in as president.

The “emoluments” clause of the US Constitution is clear that “no Person holding any [US government] Office … shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” “Emolument” is an archaic term for money or any other form of payment. It does not take a constitutional scholar to identify the clear conflict in Kushner and Witkoff’s roles, particularly, but not only, in the negotiations with Iran. The Iran conflict threw the Middle East into chaos, and both highlighted and eroded the US claim to be the reliable security partner of the region as missiles rained down on military and economic targets across the Gulf states. In their current role as peace negotiators, Kushner and Witkoff have the difficult task of not only delivering on American demands, but also of ensuring the confidence of the Gulf states that their security, and regional stability, are being advanced. What that security looks like, of course, differs from state to state. So for the US negotiators not only to be shaking these countries down for investments, but also to be financially beholden to them, creates clear avenues for corruption of their diplomatic mission as representatives only of the US and its interests.

But wait, as American infomercials beseech, there’s more!

While both men have longstanding relationships with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Kushner’s ties to Israel are particularly acute, with his family having donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to settler organisations and “Friends of the IDF” – a US charity that raises funds for the Israeli military. On the business side, with the Saudi funding it received, Kushner’s Affinity Partners has invested in Israel’s technology sector, while in his diplomatic role as a negotiator in the Gaza context, Kushner stood before a crowd in Tel Aviv and praised the “amazing soldiers of the IDF” for their “heroism and brilliance and bravery”.

Gaza appears to be, for Kushner and Witkoff, where the fusion of real estate investment and international diplomacy finds its ultimate realisation. Kushner started speaking of Gaza as an investment opportunity in 2024, and has since launched “Project Sunrise” – a particularly Orwellian name choice given that in Gaza the sun sets over the Mediterranean but rises from Israel, which has been translated by the Board of Peace, on whose executive board Kushner and Witkoff sit, into a “Master Plan for Gaza”. That plan appears to be inspired by a cross between company towns and workcamps, with clearly delineated zones for industry and housing, between which Palestinians would be forced to commute, unable to move from one such segment of Gaza to another. Meanwhile, the coastline would be transformed into luxury hotels. Or, as the Times of Israel put it, within 10 years, “70 percent of Gaza’s coastline should be monetized.”

There are, to be sure, overlaps for any country between business interests and foreign policy. But they are not the same, and particularly cannot be unified in one person, or, in this case, two. Kushner and Witkoff’s financial exposure makes them targets of both scepticism and bribery. As a precedent, they represent the decline of American diplomacy writ large.

American diplomats, of course, have made plenty of their own mistakes. But they have done so in good faith, acting in what they believed to be their nation’s interests. The very mention of Kushner and Witkoff’s names in the Washington diplomatic community inevitably leads to eye-rolling. But in the regions of the Middle East more directly affected, it is inconceivable that their counterparts are approaching negotiations not as a question of what they can offer to America, but rather what they can offer to Affinity Partners and World Liberty Financial.

Add to this the immense and very public desire of their nominal boss, President Donald Trump, to reach a deal, or ideally multiple deals, and you have a recipe for turmoil. Not because deals are harder. Indeed, given the negotiators’ conflicts of interest and their lack of familiarity with the region or the world, the ease of achieving an initial deal is perhaps higher than it would be with a more hard-nosed and sophisticated diplomat – one of Obama’s key negotiators for the previous Iran deal was a nuclear physicist, and it took years to reach agreement. Instead, the deals that result may serve the negotiators, but fail to take account of the full range of interests and equities of all parties involved, not least those of the US itself, meaning that many such bargains will be transient and prone to – sometimes catastrophic – collapse. The Abraham Accords themselves are perhaps the most vivid example of this, but the Gaza, Lebanon and Iran “deals” could each prove equally flawed in their consequences.

But does it matter? The primary value both Kushner and Witkoff bring is in their access to a president who is notoriously uninterested in the dissenting views of a professional bureaucracy. Since agreements cannot be sealed without Trump’s approval, the most pressing quality of any agreement might not be what it offers to the other side, but what it offers to the White House. The result, for as long as such a situation continues, will be a series of deals that placate and are profitable, but cannot persist.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.