US Diplomatic Incompetence at the Worst Possible Moment

I know, it's slightly provocative, but I couldn't help it, Jarvis Kushner and Steve Witkoff have made me think of Beavis and Butt-Head for a moment now. As we have already observed over the past year, it takes time to 1/observe, 2/ try to understand, 3/ react to decisions or set-ups that could feel absurd or risky, strange in any case, when it comes to the Trump administration. You may say for a while, that the latter tries a new way of conducting its policy, like a business. But results are just not there, they could even be considered catastrophic, unless I've missed something? Can anyone find one single diplomatic success over the past year? Oups, sorry, I forgot Trump has stopped 9, no 10 (and soon 11) wars... :) Sincerely, I find this circus scary, as not only has the world order as we knew it, fallen apart, as well as the Rule of Law, but think of the examples and precedents that the US are offering to the world and all autocrats in place or to come? The new US diplomacy goes hand in hand with corruption, and Jared Kushner doesn't even hide from touring for business and diplomacy at the same time. These two guys are property developers and real estate investors. We now know, that all diplomatic meetings have ended up with suggestions not only to make peace deals but also business ones potentially. As one observer indicated lately, when you make Kushner and Witkoff, New York City real estate deal makers, sit down to negociate with Lavrov and Putin or Iranians, who have in common to count on the longer time to achieve their goals (as they have time...), you forget, that the nature of a NY real estate deal maker is to do a deal as fast as possible or not, in which case, you just move on to another one.

The two pieces below tell more about the absurdity of having these guys in charge of negociating peace in the two major wars going on, and the first piece, that came out today, asks why the chief US diplomat, Marco Rubio, is all of a sudden side-lined? Enjoy!

Where The Hell Is The Secretary of State?

The U.S. is sending a golf buddy, a son-in-law, and a Vice President to negotiate with Iran. The person whose actual job this is? Nowhere near the table.

TOTAL HYPOCRISY

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APR 20, 2026

"This Is Happening Right Now, Today

As you read this, the United States and Iran are not just talking about war. They are in one.

The USS Spruance, a U.S. Navy guided missile destroyer, fired on and disabled an Iranian-flagged cargo ship called the Touska in the Gulf of Oman today, blowing a hole in its engine room after the Iranian crew refused to stop. U.S. Marines then boarded and seized the vessel. Trump announced it on Truth Social like he was describing a touchdown.

Iran has again shut down the Strait of Hormuz, blaming the U.S. for “repeated breaches of trust” during the ongoing ceasefire. Iran fired upon commercial vessels attempting to transit the Strait of Hormuz earlier today. India summoned Iran’s ambassador after Iranian Revolutionary Guard gunboats opened fire on Indian-flagged merchant ships. The ceasefire expires April 22. A second round of peace talks was announced by Trump this morning. Tehran has not agreed to participate, with Iran’s official state media reporting the announced talks date was a pressure tactic.

This is the situation. Ships are being shot at. A Navy destroyer blew a hole in a cargo vessel’s engine room this afternoon. Oil prices are surging. The cost of this war to the U.S. military was estimated at $18 billion by mid-March, with the Pentagon requesting a further $200 billion.

And who is the Trump administration sending to negotiate a way out of this?

A real estate developer. Another real estate developer. And the Vice President.

Now ask yourself: where is Marco Rubio?

The Secretary of State Has Been Benched at the Worst Possible Moment

Rubio is the Secretary of State of the United States. His job, constitutionally and institutionally, is to be the nation’s chief diplomat. He is the person who is supposed to lead negotiations like this. Full stop.

Instead, he has been reduced to a spectator with a podium. When asked about the Iran talks, Rubio said “I’m not sure you can reach a deal with these guys.” That is the Secretary of State publicly undercutting diplomacy his own administration is pursuing. It is either sabotage or irrelevance. Pick one.

The White House has offered cover with a sanitized non-answer. A White House official told TIME that Vance, Rubio, Witkoff, and Kushner “have been working together on these discussions and will continue to do so.” Sure. And your whole family helped you move, even if only one person carried anything.

Here is the clearest analogy I can offer: imagine your house is on fire. You have a licensed firefighter standing in your driveway. Instead of sending him in, you send your son-in-law and your golf buddy, neither of whom has ever fought a fire, both of whom own stock in the company that built the house. That is exactly what is happening right now, in real time, with a war in the Middle East.

They Built an Entire Cabinet Post for This. Then Handed It to a Golf Buddy.

Let’s be specific, because vague outrage does not cut it. Witkoff and Kushner are not diplomats. They are, as one senator put it bluntly, “two real estate developers” being sent “to negotiate a peace with another region.” They are better positioned to manage business mergers than complex questions of nuclear proliferation, war, and peace.

The consequences of sending amateurs to do a professional’s job have been catastrophic. Iranian officials were reportedly confused when the White House again sent Kushner and Witkoff, neither of whom has a background in nuclear policy. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi explained the stages of nuclear fuel production and the difference between an enrichment facility and a reactor to Witkoff on several occasions during negotiations in Muscat.

Read that again. The U.S. team had to be briefed on nuclear basics by the Iranian foreign minister they were supposed to be negotiating against.

Witkoff appeared to believe Iran had been engaged in nuclear weaponization efforts since 2003, a position directly contradicted by the IAEA Director General, who said the agency does not see a “structured program to manufacture nuclear weapons.” He was not just wrong. He was confidently, catastrophically wrong at the most consequential possible moment, and that wrongness fed directly into Trump’s decision to go to war.

The Omani mediator was so alarmed that he made the unusual move of urgently flying to Washington to tell both the White House and the American public that, contrary to Witkoff and Kushner’s assessment, Iran had made concessions that went well beyond Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal. The mediator had to fly to Washington to correct the U.S. negotiators’ version of their own talks. And still, nobody replaced them.

Now Ask Why Kushner Is There at All

Here is where this stops being about incompetence and starts being about something far more troubling.

Jared Kushner holds no government position. He was not confirmed by the Senate. He is a private citizen. And yet he is sitting at the table in peace negotiations that will determine whether this war ends or swallows the region whole.

Why?

Consider what Kushner has built since leaving the White House. His investment firm Affinity Partners received $2 billion from the Saudi government's sovereign wealth fund six months after Kushner left the White House. Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman personally overruled his own officials who objected to the investment. Kushner's firm also acquired a $128.5 million stake in Phoenix Holdings, one of Israel's largest insurance and financial services companies, with Israeli regulators approving a doubling of that stake just days before Trump returned to the White House.

Kushner himself said his investment in the Israeli firm was “rooted in my belief in Israel’s resiliency.” He has also stated openly that he hopes to open an “investment corridor between Saudi Arabia and Israel.”

So let’s be precise about what we are looking at. A private citizen with no official role is sitting at the negotiating table representing the United States in peace talks with Iran. That same private citizen is financially backed by Saudi Arabia to the tune of $2 billion, holds a 10% stake in Israel’s largest financial firm, and has explicitly staked his business empire on a Middle East realigned around Saudi-Israeli dominance, which is, not coincidentally, exactly the regional order that requires Iran to be weakened or destroyed.

Senate investigators have raised the question of whether the Saudi government’s desire to prolong the war imposes direct financial pressure on Kushner, risking further harm to American service members and draining tens of billions from American taxpayers.

A former U.S. Ambassador to Israel put it plainly: “There are reasonable questions about the ethical and conflict of interest concerns that would be associated with people doing business with governments that they are also doing diplomacy with.”

Kushner’s response? “What people call conflicts of interest, Steve and I call experience and trusted relationships.”

That is not an answer. That is a smirk with a net worth attached to it.

The Report Card From People Who Actually Know

Aaron David Miller, a former State Department Middle East negotiator who served six secretaries of state, delivered the verdict plainly: “Iran and the U.S. under Kushner and Witkoff? Failure. They get an F in diplomacy.”

A president who changes his position daily, a lack of strategy, strong biases, amateur and over-extended negotiators, and a heavy dose of self-dealing add up to failure, and account for why Witkoff and Kushner have been so unsuccessful across all three negotiations.

Three negotiations. Ukraine, Gaza, Iran. All stalled or worse. All run by the same two guys. You would fire an employee with that track record. These two keep getting the call.

There is a widespread perception from both commentators and participants in the talks that the pair helped undermine a peaceful resolution because of either incompetence or, worse, deliberate sabotage.

Incompetence or deliberate sabotage. At a moment when the U.S. Navy is blowing holes in Iranian cargo ships in the Gulf of Oman. Those are your two options. Neither is acceptable. Both demand a reckoning.

What This Is Really About

Marco Rubio has not been benched because he is incompetent. He is sharp, hawkish, and knows the Iran file. He has been benched because in Trump’s world, real power flows through family and personal loyalty, not institutions. The State Department is a prop. Its secretary is a spokesperson. The actual foreign policy is made by whoever Trump trusts most, and right now that is the men who share his golf cart and his dinner table, men who also happen to have billions of dollars riding on how this region gets restructured.

That is not governance. That is a court. And courts do not do diplomacy. They do favors.

Today the USS Spruance blew a hole in a cargo ship’s engine room in the Gulf of Oman. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Iran is vowing retaliation. The ceasefire is expiring. The talks may not happen at all. Trump has threatened to “knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran” if they do not accept his terms.

And the man whose job it is to prevent all of this from spiraling is standing in his driveway, watching.

Someone tell us how this is fine."

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If you want to go a little further, the following piece was published in the Time, on April 16. It is certainly a reference of the piece above, as it goes further in details into Aaron David Miller's analysis, and focuses more on the lack of nuclear expertise of Kushner and Witkoff, when it is the one subject at the centre of the negociations with Iran.

'It's Not Working': Diplomats Fear Trump's Iran Envoys Are Making Things Worse

by

Philip Wang, for The Time

APR 16, 2026 3:00 PM CET

As the Trump administration weighs a second round of U.S.-Iran talks, the failure of negotiations in Pakistan is fueling concern about whether its envoys can deliver a deal.

Former diplomats tell TIME that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, who led the Iran negotiations with Vice President JD Vance, lack the expertise and diplomatic experience needed to secure an agreement. That, they warn, risks prolonging the war and further destabilizing the global economy. 

“Iran and the U.S. under Kushner and Witkoff? Failure. They get an F in diplomacy,” said Aaron David Miller, a former US State Department Middle East negotiator who served six secretaries of state.

Miller pointed to Kushner and Witkoff’s track record, citing failed negotiations between Russia and Ukraine and stalled negotiations between Israel and Hamas as Israel continued its strikes in Gaza. He argued that while even the most experienced negotiators would face steep challenges in such conflicts, Kushner and Witkoff failed to convey to either side the sense of urgency that a desirable deal was within reach—an essential condition for pushing negotiations forward. 

“You accept the notion that a successful negotiation, if you have urgency, is based on finding some balance of interest between the parties. If you want out of this, I think they're going to have to come up with something that allows the Iranians to say they won something,” Miller said, while suggesting that one possible concession could be giving Iran a pathway to resume uranium enrichment at a much later date.

Doubts over Kushner and Witkoff's diplomatic experience

Asked about Kushner and Witkoff’s future roles in the Iran discussion, a White House official told TIME that Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Witkoff and Kushner “have been working together on these discussions and will continue to do so.”

If talks resume, veteran diplomats say the U.S. delegation must recognize the importance of “doing their homework” and setting clearly defined goals.

David Satterfield, a former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and a career diplomat for four decades, warned that if the administration cannot clearly articulate a set of strategic goals—both internally and publicly—the chance of reaching a deal with Iran will diminish. 

“Not only does the U.S. need to make clear what its goals were, and to know internally where it was prepared to concede, and where it was not prepared to concede, where the line would be held, the red lines, but to have a realistic sense of what the other side was bringing with it,” Satterfield said.

Before joining the Trump administration, both Kushner and Witkoff were real estate businessmen with no government experience. Kushner, who serves the White House as a Special Envoy for Peace, has touted his diplomatic approach centered on finding shared interests.

“Make deals and not lecture the world,” Kushner explained in a joint interview with Witkoff in 2025. “Focus on interests over values sometimes, and figure out where we have joint interests with other countries and pursue those joint interests.” 

He has also been accused of downplaying the importance of historical context in negotiations. During the Israel-Hamas war in 2023, Kushner said in an interview with Lex Fridman that he had told previous envoys in the Middle East, “I don't need a headache, and I don't need a history lesson.” 

“I want a very simple thing…what's the outcome that you would accept?” Kushner said.

At a summit hosted by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund two weeks ago, Kushner said that “peace is not that different from business,” and that he had been able to leverage business relationships in diplomacy.

That view is now drawing skepticism. “How could he say that?” Miller said. “He's comparing leasing an apartment building on Fifth Avenue to negotiating a historic conflict driven by security, pain, and trauma.”

“I'm not saying you need to be a diplomat to be a good negotiator. Henry Kissinger was not a diplomat. My former boss, James Baker, was not a diplomat. But you need to have some sense of history, and you need to know geography,” he added. 

Lack of nuclear expertise complicates negotiations

Robert Einhorn, former senior State Department official who participated in the Iran nuclear negotiations from 2009 to 2013, said that unlike business deals—where negotiators may have authority to close an agreement on the spot—diplomatic negotiations on issues like denuclearization are constrained by domestic politics on both sides. 

“The negotiator at the table has to think about how the domestic audiences will affect the outcome,” Einhorn said. “And I think the negotiator on a nuclear issue is more constrained by his or her government bureaucracy and by public opinion.”

Einhorn also noted that earlier Iran nuclear talks were a “methodical, deliberative interagency process that operated at all levels” of government, and that expert input is critical to achieving goals such as “no enrichment of uranium,” as President Trump demanded in a Truth Social post.

“What does it mean, zero enrichment?” Einhorn asked. “Does it mean no infrastructure supporting enrichment? Does it mean that already existing enriched uranium, including the 440 kilos of highly enriched uranium, would have to be exported or diluted? You have to have experts that understand the various dimensions of the problem.” 

Key sticking points unresolved

The question of how to verifiably limit Iran's nuclear capabilities is understood to have become the main obstacle in the peace negotiations. During talks over the weekend, the U.S. pushed for Iran to remove all highly enriched uranium from the country. Iranian officials would only agree to a “monitored process of downblending,” Axios reported. 

The duration of the moratorium on Iran’s uranium enrichment was another sticking point. The U.S. proposed a 20-year moratorium on Iran’s uranium enrichment, while Iranian officials countered with a shorter “single digit” period.

That disconnect echoes earlier rounds of indirect talks in Muscat and Geneva in February, according to several news reports. Iranian officials were understood to be confused when the White House again sent Kushner and Witkoff, neither of whom has a background in nuclear policy. According to UK-based outlet Amwaj, citing unnamed Iranian sources, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi explained the stages of nuclear fuel production and the difference between an enrichment facility and a reactor to Witkoff on several occasions during the negotiation in Muscat. 

More importantly, Miller added, the advisors must be willing to confront the president on the potential consequences of his decisions—something current administration officials have not done since the Iran War began on Feb. 28, according to Bloomberg. 

“There is a discussion in which the president's advisors talk truth to power and basically say to him…‘You've got the ultimate control. But if you're going to do this, this is exactly what is likely to happen. And in my judgment…if you do this, you might fail,’” Miller said. 

Such frank internal debate, he argued, depends on advisers willing to risk the consequences.

“Trump had four secretaries of defense in his first term. He had six national security advisors [during his two terms]. They know what happens if they embarrass the president or they become a problem.”

Responding to the criticism from former diplomats, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement to TIME: "These ‘diplomats’ did nothing to curb the grave threat posed by a nuclear Iran... only President Trump and his national security team have done anything to address [it.]"

"Experienced dealmakers Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have successfully ended the war between Israel and Hamas, established the Board of Peace, brought home Americans detained abroad, and more. Their results speak for themselves," the statement continued.

To be followed...