Two million hostages, and a peace process that paid both sides to fail

On Saturday, October 7, 2023, at 6:30 a.m. Israel time, Hamas fired thousands of rockets into southern Israel. Behind that barrage, Lex Fridman recites, more than a thousand militants crossed the barrier around 7:40 a.m., went door to door in border towns, killed civilians, and dragged captives — including women and children — back into Gaza. By the morning of Monday, October 9, when he and Jared Kushner sat down again, the death toll was already over 1,200 people, with more than 130 hostages taken. Benjamin Netanyahu had declared war; Israeli ministers had ordered a complete siege, cutting electricity, food, water, and fuel from Israel into Gaza.

They had already recorded a long conversation on Thursday, October 5, about war, peace, and power in the Middle East. In that earlier session Kushner was still talking about the Abraham Accords, about rebuilding Gaza, about an economic corridor from Haifa to Muscat. Two days later the tape had to be opened again. Lex walks through the geography for listeners who do not have it: Gaza is a strip about 25 miles long and six miles wide, home to roughly 2.3 million people, blockaded by Israel and Egypt since Hamas seized power in 2007. Hamas, founded in 1988 and in control of Gaza since 2006, is sworn in its charter to Israel’s destruction and designated a terrorist group by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Israel.

Kushner’s first word for the pictures is heartbreak. He describes militants with machine guns going house to house, beheaded Israeli soldiers, people in their twenties shot at a rave held to celebrate peace, children taken, an 80-year-old grandmother and Holocaust survivor carried off. These are images, he says, the world has not seen at this scale since September 11. A friend had messaged that he was going in to free hostages in a kibbutz; the next morning he was dead, one of the first through the door. Kushner says the whole world should stand behind Israel, that Hamas has shown who it is, and that there cannot be peace while an Iran-funded terror group is allowed to plan the killing of civilians.

He then puts the attack against the map he says the Trump administration left behind. In 2016, ISIS held a caliphate the size of Ohio, controlled some eight million people, and was beheading journalists; Iran, in his telling, had been given $150 billion and a glide path to a nuclear weapon, which it used to fund Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis; Syria’s civil war had killed 500,000. The administration rebuilt ties with old allies, collapsed the territorial caliphate, and squeezed Iran’s wallet with sanctions. They left, he says, six peace deals and a region that was no longer on fire. Watching October 7, he calls the whole thing “completely avoidable.”

Hamas, Kushner adds, came out of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. The occupation charge, he argues, sits badly next to the timeline: Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, handed governance to Palestinians, and then watched living standards fall rather than rise. “The people who have suffered the most are the Palestinian people,” he says. During his years in government he heard endless calls for Palestinians to live better lives, and he agrees with those calls. His diagnosis is the line that organizes the rest of the hour: the Palestinian people in Gaza are essentially hostages — about two million of them, held by roughly 30,000 Hamas terrorists.

That arithmetic, he says, is why ordinary life never improved. Every time construction materials were allowed in, they became tunnels rather than homes. Pipe equipment became bombs. Keep the border tight and the international community calls it inhumane; loosen it and the same trucks become a military plant. From 2007 on, Hamas ran one plan over and over. Anger, he tells viewers, should go to the people killing civilians, not be spread as a fog over an entire population. The people holding Palestinians back from a better life, in this account, are the people running Gaza.

The end-state he wanted for Gaza was almost boring. There is no territorial dispute left on that strip, and Jerusalem is not the file. Israel wants no rockets and no staging ground; in exchange the place can be rebuilt. Hamas, after sixteen years, has shown neither the desire nor the competence to take that bargain, and there is not enough trust to let it try. Under the current circumstances, he says, if you want peace there, Hamas’s military capability has to be eliminated or severely degraded. The more violence it commits, the more it holds power — which is the opposite of an economic plan.

Hamas named the operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Kushner’s answer is immediate: in actuality, none of it is about the mosque. Reports had Iran behind the attack; Hamas had thanked Tehran for its support. He is careful to separate the country from the regime. At an Iranian soccer match, organizers tried to rally the crowd for the assault; large parts of the stands instead chanted against the government. Persians, he says, are generally peace-loving. The regime’s method is the point. Iran almost never fights directly. It fights through proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis — and it did not want Israelis and Saudis signing a peace that would lock it out of the region.

The Al-Aqsa story, though, is old machinery. In his first year on a peace plan, “experts” kept talking about sovereignty over a mosque built on the Haram al-Sharif, the Jewish Holy of Holies. Kushner commissioned focus groups in Oman, Cairo, Dubai, and Ramallah and asked ordinary Muslims what the conflict was about. The most popular answer, again and again, was that Israel would not let Muslims pray at the mosque. The operational fact, he says, is almost the opposite. Since the 1967 defensive war, when Israel took back the Old City after being attacked from the south and the east, it passed a Protection of Holy Places Law, restored Christian, Muslim, and Jewish sites, and treats Jordan’s King Abdullah as custodian. Any Muslim who can get a visa can book a flight through Dubai and go pray.

So why does the propaganda still work? “Israel’s good at a lot of things. They’re not very good traditionally with public relations.” The lie is not new, and it did not need smartphones. In the 1920s, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, close to Hitler and Mussolini, ran the same routine: the mosque is under attack, the Zionists will destroy it. He raised money in Indonesia and Pakistan, then used the threat to recruit young Muslim men to kill. Kushner calls that a perversion of Islam, not its core. After the Abraham Accords, the bet was that flights, business, and phones would let people post the rebuttal themselves. The old sermon just got a faster pipe.

Money is the other half of the Iran file. Under Trump, Kushner says, Iranian oil sales were crushed from about 2.6 million barrels a day to roughly 100,000, and foreign-currency reserves were drained. He cites oil revenue of four to five billion dollars in the Trump years against something like $45 billion the previous year under looser enforcement. Three weeks before they spoke, the Biden administration had, in his phrasing, given Iran $6 billion in a hostage exchange. An Israel-Saudi economic-security belt from Haifa to Muscat would, he argues, strand Tehran. That is why the proxies exist: not to win a mosque argument, but to smash a corridor before it hardens.

A political deal, Kushner learned, is not a business closing. In business you finish and you have cash or a company. In politics the signature is the start of a new paradigm, so you have to ask what happens the morning after. Trump’s four years, in this telling, were spent slaughtering sacred cows: Jerusalem recognized as Israel’s capital, the embassy moved, the Golan Heights recognized, the Iran deal exited, Israelis seated with Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari businesspeople in Bahrain. Each move had been sold as the end of the world. Each time the sun rose. The point was to prove that most people in the region, Jewish, Muslim, or Christian, mainly wanted a better life, and to starve Iran so it could not police that desire.

The Accords themselves came in a rush at the end of the term: the United Arab Emirates, then Bahrain, Kosovo, Sudan, Morocco, then a GCC reconciliation that cooled the Qatar-Saudi-UAE-Egypt-Bahrain fight and opened a path to Israeli-Saudi normalization. The old rule had been that no Arab state would recognize Israel until the Palestinian file was closed. Kushner’s move was to stop waiting. Later in the conversation he will say the riddle had lashed two different problems together — Muslim access to Al-Aqsa, and a territorial-security map — and that the first is actually easy if you let people pray and keep the King of Jordan as custodian. The second can be talked slowly. Unbundled, the Arab states that wanted growth no longer had to carry someone else’s history.

The image that stuck was almost an afterthought. After the first phone call among Trump, Netanyahu, and Mohamed bin Zayed, Kushner’s aide Avi Berkowitz asked why, if they were flying Israel to the UAE, they should not do it on an El Al jet and make it the first official commercial flight. Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba said yes. They filled the plane, in Covid, with a health delegation, finance ministry people to open wiring, lawyers, and national security staff. It landed, doors opened, Emiratis in thawbs came forward, and the Israeli flag on the fuselage did what hundreds of hours of drafting had not: it made people believe the thing was real. Kushner’s line from the private sector is that they were in the results business. The picture was the result.

He also walked the region with a 181-page economic plan, *Peace to Prosperity*, built like a business plan rather than a communiqué. He studied postwar rebuilds: South Korea’s industrial planning, Japan, Singapore, Poland, and Ukraine’s failure on governance and corruption, which he thought resembled the Palestinian case — no property rights, no rule of law. For about five million people in the West Bank and Gaza he costed roughly $27 billion in projects. At a Bahrain conference, the head of AT&T, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, and leading Arab builders said Gaza itself might take $7 to $8 billion, could cut poverty in half, and could create more than a million jobs. What held them back, every one of them said, was not Israel. It was Hamas, and the knowledge that you cannot invest under that government.

Kushner says he told the incoming Biden team they were inheriting momentum, including a Qatar-Saudi fix completed in the lame-duck window without which Israeli-Saudi peace would have been impossible. Their answer, as he recalls it, was the three Cs: Covid, climate, and China. What followed, in his indictment, was a reversal: insults to Saudi Arabia and Russia, a clamp on American oil and pipelines, a stop on enforcing Iran sanctions, a rush back toward Tehran, and an immediate restart of Palestinian funding with no conditions. He had recommended that if they were going to fund, they at least demand property rights and real investment. They did not. The UAE, after Houthi rockets, waited seventeen days for a call about restocking American-made kit. Quiet work had built the Accords; the successor talks, he says, were run in public, which is how spoilers find their cue.

If Trump were still in office, Kushner says with “absolute certainty,” October 7 would not have happened. Playing the ball where it now lies, he wants strength first: Biden’s words were right, carriers in the region are right, because a military’s main job is to prevent the next war. Iran has to see a cost; Hezbollah’s rockets from Lebanon have to meet a consequence. Israeli-Saudi normalization, which he still calls a game-changer and one of Iran’s nightmares, should wait. Israel’s first jobs are to restore security and degrade Hamas. The industrial logic of the deal, he says, held yesterday and will hold tomorrow. During USMCA fights he would tell his Mexican counterpart, after a blown-up day, that America was not moving and Mexico was not moving, so they should stop and pick it up in the morning.

Asked for an end-state, he goes back to first principles and ignores the chorus of why it cannot happen. Israel needs to feel unthreatened from Gaza. Gazans need a life with a future. The international community, he says, should stop funding into a framework that cannot work, stand behind Israel’s effort to remove the threat, and only then put money into a long-term reconstruction. A ground invasion of the kind Lex sketches — 100,000 Israeli soldiers — worries him the way 9/11 still does: America was hit, then spent twenty years, trillions of dollars, and something like a million lives. Strength is necessary; walking into the next trap is not. He is glad the early Israeli response looked measured. Keep the moral high ground, he says, and keep saying what the fight is for.

Netanyahu, in a crisis, is “the leader you want” in that chair: historic, fluent in the security apparatus, ambitious about legacy, unlikely to accept leaving Israel more vulnerable. Israel’s pre-war political brawl, Kushner adds, is also a sign of a real democracy — free press, gay pride parades — set against Gaza, where he says a gay person can be thrown off a building. Division still made the country less ready, and he draws a straight line to America’s own splits and its southern border. Online solidarity with Palestinians, he thinks, is usually a wish that they live better, aimed at the wrong address. Direct the anger at Hamas. On 2024 he hopes Trump wins, because “when you have a weak American leadership, the world becomes a less safe place.”

What defeats hate? Kushner tells a prison-reform story. A Texas reverend brokered the first truce between the Bloods and the Crips inside a prison. The method was almost insultingly small: get everyone in a room, bring a lot of barbecue, no drinking, and let them sit until someone says, you know what, you are just like me. He has now met people across states, parties, ages, and classes, and the drive underneath is the same: people want a better life. They do not start out hungry for a fight. They fight when they feel wronged. Each person, he says, can stop the cycle, not by yelling on Twitter, but by finding the person they disagree with and asking questions. Most people are good. Some are evil. A great many are in a bad place that society can either shove further down or pull back with a second chance.

In Washington he and Ivanka kept putting Democrats and Republicans at the same table. One night it was Senator Dianne Feinstein and her husband, who knew Iranians and thought them peace-loving, across from Mark Meadows, then of the Freedom Caucus, harder-line than Kushner, who had to bite his tongue. They concluded nothing and still, he thinks, the sitting mattered. Another dinner put Dick Durbin, the Senate’s number-two Democrat, with Lindsey Graham and Stephen Miller on immigration; they left saying they had never really talked to the other side and agreed on about 85 percent. The rule he wants is the opposite of cancellation: do not define a person by the worst sentence of their life. After his father’s prison term, the family started hiring people coming out of Rikers.

When the October 5 conversation begins, Lex asks for the key to ugly geopolitical deals. Kushner’s first word is trust: make the other side believe you will not use what they tell you against them. Then take a first-principles view of the outcome, sit on the same side of the table, and work backwards. Assume a leader’s primary job, in his or her own mind, is to stay in power, and weight every ask against that. Map the escape routes a politician will use to say no, close them, and build a golden bridge it is in their interest to walk. He ran that loop on the First Step Act with Democrats such as Hakeem Jeffries and Dick Durbin and Republicans such as Mike Lee, Lindsey Graham, Tim Scott, Chuck Grassley, and Doug Collins, and on USMCA, $1.3 trillion a year in trade, in record time. Both landed as bipartisan wins in a divided administration.

Barbara Tuchman’s *The Guns of August* had already taught him to pick up the phone. World War I, in that telling, killed 16 million people after alliances written for smaller purposes dragged everyone in. When Obama left office, with the Middle East on fire, his single biggest fear was still North Korea. Trump’s generals then said the United States had burned so much ammunition in the Middle East that it did not have enough for a war there. A former business contact who had worked in North Korea called; through him and the CIA they opened a back channel that led to the Trump-Kim meetings and a de-escalation. Friends had been asking whether Hawaii was safe. If the press had known a real-estate guy was using an old commercial contact to pry at a nuclear file, Kushner says, they would have laughed it off the table. Operating below the radar was the only way to try.

Politics, unlike business, punishes people for touching hard problems. Fail, and you may lose the chance to serve; so the rational move is to play small. Trump brought in business people who thought in outcomes and timelines, and the resistance, Kushner says, was partly existential: if someone with no diplomatic pedigree could deliver, the pedigree itself looked less scarce. His one-liner is the one Lex laughs at: in New York they stab you in the eye; in DC they stab you in the back. It does not have to be that way, he insists. You need a leader willing to take the hit. The founders’ model, as he reads it, was farmers who left the farm, served, and went home — not a permanent political class.

What the bureaucracy actually lacked, on his tour, was not talent. It was direction and cover. Customs and Border Protection, the Army Corps, the military, and DHS, given a project plan, built about 470 miles of border barrier in roughly two years. Niall Ferguson’s *The Great Degeneration* had already argued that regulation is usually written for the last crisis. In Obama’s last year, Kushner says, the private sector spent six million man-hours complying with new federal rules. The Trump term posted four straight years of a net drop in regulatory cost, with a pledge of two off for every one on, and eight off for one in the first year. Bank “reform” after 2008, in this telling, shrank the number of banks, made the big ones bigger, and widened the wealth gap — the opposite of the poster.

The Russia-collusion years were the low point. After 2016, he says, a press that had given Trump no chance refused to say it had been wrong and decided the Russians must have helped. Kushner had run campaign finance, digital media, and the schedule; some days they could barely coordinate with themselves. He sat for more than twenty hours of testimony and spent millions of his own money on lawyers, because Washington’s game was to catch a misstatement and turn it into a crime. His mother called from the Upper East Side: friends had talked to Chuck Schumer, who said Jared was going to jail. CNN ran panels on whether he had committed treason for asking an ambassador for a view on Syria while a civil war and ISIS were underway. He told his lawyer the good news was a “good fact problem”: easier to represent an innocent client.

He did not, he says, have a choice to become cynical. Every White House day was sand in a four-year hourglass; defense is how the opposition wins. Ivanka kept her elegance while Twitter went after her. A friend flew in from Arizona just to have dinner and tell him to pick his head up. “You don’t learn as much from your successes,” Kushner says. “You learn the most about who you wanna be and how the world works from your lowest moments.” He still thinks a more open information market, including what was happening at X, might eventually surface true claims and retire false ones. The years of Trump, in this reading, were the system trying to stop an outsider from rearranging the furniture after thirty years of Clinton and Bush dynasties.

Charles Kushner, a New Jersey developer, fell into a fight with two siblings. They took company documents to the U.S. attorney and turned a civil dispute into a criminal case. The father, Jared says, did something wrong, admitted it, “took his medicine,” and served a year. Overnight the family was on the front page. Jared was at NYU for law and business, working at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, captain of teams, a Harvard graduate who had run a marathon with his father. He could have aimed his anger at the prosecutor, the uncle, the lawyers, or the father. He decided anger would change nothing. He went into “battle mode”: be a son, a stand-in father for two sisters and a younger brother, a support for his mother, and a pair of hands for the company. He kept the degrees, barely attending class, and spent weekends at an Alabama prison, talking with other inmates’ children about how to get through it.

After the arraignment his father said almost nothing in the car. Later, walking around the family pool in an ankle monitor, he told Jared the line that stuck: sometimes you get so powerful you believe you are the dealer, “but we’re not the dealer. God’s the dealer.” The son heard a confession that success had whispered that some rules no longer applied. Ten years later he was sitting in an office next to the President of the United States, a plot he says only God could write. The lows kept him on the ground when the highs got cartoonish. On money and power he quotes Michael Harris, a Death Row Records founder, on Suge Knight: “Money just makes you more of what you already are.” He watched that law run through the White House on a loop.

Prison reform became the place those years turned into a statute. The First Step Act, which he calls the largest criminal-justice reform in thirty to fifty years, did two main things. It let a class of federal prisoners earn earlier release by completing job training and addiction programs, modeled on Texas and Georgia. And it made retroactive the cut from a 100-to-1 crack-versus-powder cocaine ratio, a disparity he says tracked race, down toward 18-to-1, so people still inside could ask a judge for relief. Recidivism in the ordinary federal population, he cites, was 47 percent; among people who went through the programs, 12 percent. Safer streets, and a second chance. Trump, a law-and-order politician, made him build a coalition that included police unions and the ACLU, which was otherwise suing the administration constantly.

John Kelly, the new chief of staff, had sidelined him, which accidentally gave him three full-time files: prisons, the Mexico trade deal, and the Middle East. The bill had almost no Republican-caucus support at the start. He became “the chief executive, the middle executive, the low executive, the intern,” calling three times a day, walking halls, hosting dinners, trading votes, and pulling lines that would collapse a coalition. It passed the Senate 87-0 in his telling of the count. He rejects the lament that Congress is broken. The founders’ machine still works if you work it: everyone knows the price of their vote, some give it, some trade it, some sit on it because they are angry about something else. Van Jones and Jessica Jackson helped from the left. When a concrete goal yokes people together, daily hostility can wait in the hall.

Mohammed bin Salman, in Kushner’s portrait, is high-energy, “tremendous candle power,” very smart, and extremely well read: as a boy his father gave him a book a week and made him report on it. He is not Western-educated. He is a Saudi nationalist who loves the history and the tribal map. His father, as governor of Riyadh, was famous for being first to call a hospital and first to a funeral; people told Kushner he would have won a real election in a landslide. MBS thinks like a businessman. Building NEOM in an empty stretch of the Red Sea looked, to critics, like vanity. Kushner asked why he would not do what most politicians do — set a low bar and beat it. The answer came without a pause: in five years, five goals hit is five things done; a hundred goals with fifty failures is still fifty things done.

The relationship began in the transition, against Trump’s campaign attacks on Saudi free-riding. A senior Saudi, named in the Chinese write-up as Fahad Toonsi, listened to Kushner’s talking points — women’s driving, Israel, Wahhabism — and asked whether he actually knew the country. Kushner said no, only what he had been told. The minister offered to come back with a proposal on every joint file. That paper became the basis of Trump’s first foreign trip: more military spending, counter-terror finance, later curbs on the religious police. In the Situation Room, Rex Tillerson — Exxon’s former CEO — told him the Saudis never come through and that he was wasting his time. Kushner’s reply was that they were offering to try, and that yesterday’s no is not a law of nature. Planning meetings emptied out because everyone expected a disaster. He talked to MBS almost daily and had Dr. Musaad Al Aiban sit in Washington for three weeks until the promises were on paper. King Salman, on the first call, told Trump to deal with his son; Trump told the King to deal with Jared.

Vision 2030, derided when it appeared, reads to Kushner like a country actually naming KPIs. His first reaction was to wonder why America does not have one. He quotes the Cheshire Cat: if you do not know where you are going, it does not matter which path you take. MBS’s explanation was generational. The father’s cohort built a state from Bedouin poverty and, looking back fifty years, did something remarkable. The sons are grateful and impatient. They see unused opportunity. That, Kushner says, is why Saudi has been moving so fast: not one man’s appetite, a generation’s anxiety. The regional architecture he wanted next was the same corridor he keeps drawing: security and commerce from Haifa to Muscat, so the Middle East stops being a sinkhole for American treasure and American dead.

Lex asks about Jamal Khashoggi. Kushner says MBS told him what he later said on *60 Minutes*: as someone helping lead the country, he bears responsibility, will bring those involved to justice, and will put in reforms so it does not happen again. Kushner does not dress the killing up. It was horrible, it created massive tension, and it overshadowed a lot of work that was going right. His frame is the one he uses on October 7 as well: you cannot change yesterday; you can learn, then change how you handle tomorrow. Leaders, he hopes, spend their time on two jobs — safety, and a chance at a better life. Accountability matters. So does not rolling back every gain in the region in the name of that accountability, which would leave more people worse off. Lex’s lament, that one tragedy can burn so many bridges, sits on the table unanswered except by agreement.

Why is Israeli-Palestinian peace so hard? Kushner’s short answer is structure. At the UN Security Council he put up a slide from Oslo to the day he arrived: a dove for each talk, a tank for each war, and two lines running off the top of the page. One was Israeli settlements. The other was money to the Palestinians. Every collapse let Israel take more land and let Palestinian leaders take more aid, much of which, he says, never reached people. The leadership was in the sixteenth year of a four-year term. No rule of law, no property rights, no serious hope. Envoys kept repeating the same dance and then calling themselves experts. He wrote down eleven issues, three that mattered, and asked negotiators what compromise they could live with *today*, in 2017. They started lecturing 1972, 1982, 2001. “I don’t need a history lesson.” The process, he concluded, was designed so that nobody had to talk about an actual result.

The image that would not leave him was Sultan Qaboos of Oman saying he felt badly for the Palestinians, “that they carry with them the burden of the Muslim world.” Who, Kushner wondered later, elected them to represent Islam at Al-Aqsa? That is how he split the file. Israel versus the Muslim world is mostly access to the mosque. Israel versus the Palestinians is a territorial dispute of a kind history knows how to close: draw a map, build a security system Israel can live with, and stop fighting over the word sovereignty when the operational answer is that anyone peaceful can worship. He spent months on a map. West Bank GDP per capita, on 2019 numbers, matched Jordan and beat Egypt; Palestinian debt-to-GDP sat around 30 to 40 percent against Egypt’s 130, Jordan’s 110, and Lebanon’s 200. The gap between the West Bank and Gaza, in this telling, is a governance gap, not an Israeli switch.

Aid without conditions is, he says, Novocaine. Nobody has ever done a real accounting of some $20 billion to ask how many jobs it created. UNRWA is the only permanent refugee agency ever stood up; his own grandparents were postwar refugees, and every other class was resettled. The institution, in his charge, exists to let some Arab leaders dodge problems at home. The United States put $10 billion into Gaza over time; a poll he ran found 7 percent approval for America there, 70 percent for USAID, which still felt to him like a waste. Abbas, running what Kushner calls a refugee organization on billions in aid, flew in a $60 million Boeing BBJ. Netanyahu, running a first-rank economy and a regional military power, flew commercial El Al to Washington. “The whole thing was just very corrupt and off.” The real divide he saw in the Muslim world was not Sunni versus Shia. It was leaders who wanted to give their people a better life versus leaders who used religion and fear to keep power. On that cut, Palestinian and Iranian leadership sat together; the other Arab states did not.

After government he raised a fund that took $2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, including a 1.25 percent fee, $25 million a year. Critics called it a cash-out of political access. He answers in three layers. The *New York Times* had already published his finances: about $50 million a year in the private sector before he volunteered for a White House salary of zero and paid his own health insurance. The firm’s thesis is to mix geopolitical judgment with private equity, including Gulf money into Israel, because denser economic ties make war less likely. And the industry has a scoreboard. Judge him on returns in three to five years. He says he broke no law and no ethics rule, and that the Office of Government Ethics certified his filings every year. Lex lets the defense stand as a defense. Kushner’s deeper point, earned in the collusion years, is that in Washington the work and the story about the work are rarely the same object.

Trump’s greatest strength as a leader, Kushner says, is unpredictability. He drinks in huge amounts of information, hates having it filtered, calls around himself, and is not, in this portrait, especially ideological. He wants results, will counterpunch, and will also take a meeting. Kim Kardashian walked in on Alice Johnson, a grandmother who had served 22 years on a drug-ring sentence and spent prison putting on plays and mentoring younger women; Trump granted clemency. On foreign policy the same trait kept counterparts on their back foot. Kushner was never the principal. Everyone knew he would take their no back to a man whose reaction they could not script. During USMCA, Mexico conceded because it correctly believed Trump would tariff cars — and because Kushner and Steven Mnuchin were using every ounce of strength to stop him, so it was not a bluff. Justin Trudeau protested steel tariffs on a NATO ally; Trump asked whether Canada had not burned the White House in 1812. Trudeau said that was the French. Trump said it was the Canadians.

Would the Ukraine war have happened on Trump’s watch? “A hundred percent” no, not 99. Under Bush, Russia took Georgia; under Obama, Crimea; under Trump, nothing; under Biden, the invasion. He is explicit that this is not an excuse. The invasion was terrible and should not have occurred. The first two Trump years were tangled in the collusion inquiry; the second two, he says, tried to find files where Washington and Moscow could work. If he were in a room with Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, the first requirement would be trust: a private off-ramp that will not leak. He has deep respect for Zelensky staying in Kyiv when Afghanistan’s Ashraf Ghani took the cash and ran. The problem now is a public promise to win that the battlefield does not match. Neither man will jump until the pool is filled. Someone has to sketch a forward map that is not just a worse ceasefire. American posture, he thinks, makes it hard for Moscow to trust Washington as that broker. He once guessed Putin might drag Xi Jinping in as a way of telling America who was in charge; that has not happened yet.

On Putin the human being, Kushner offers geography before psychology. Russia, he says, was hit by the Poles in the 1600s, the Swedes in the 1700s, Napoleon in the 1800s, Germany twice in the 1900s, and the Mongols in its early life. The modern state is built as a defensive landmass, twice America’s size, spanning eleven time zones. Putin’s core fear is a security paradigm on his western border that creeps. Cynics say he wants the USSR back; sympathizers say NATO promised not to move east and then did. Kushner does not pretend to referee the old memoranda. He does say Ukrainian NATO membership was always a red line, which is why the Trump team never offered it: arm Kyiv, tell everyone to calm down, and work the bigger files. During Covid, Russia was the second country to send a plane of ventilators and masks to a strained New York. He does not think countries have permanent enemies. He also spent Passover on the phone with Kirill Dmitriev and MBS stitching the largest oil cut in history after demand collapsed, then had to peel Mexico out because Mexico was hedged at $55 and had not said so.

The book he keeps handing people for this is Tim Marshall’s *Prisoners of Geography*. He found it on Amazon and loved every page, including the chapter on how the United States acquired its own advantages. Rivers, mountains, ports, and buffer space still shape what leaders will risk, even in a century that pretends otherwise. Understanding that DNA, he argues, is how you find the one place a map can still be redrawn without turning it into fate. Zelensky needs a private exit. Putin needs a western settlement he can call safety. The person in the middle has to be someone both will let carry the unsayable sentence.

The first Trump-Xi encounter almost died in the transition, when Trump took a call from Taiwan’s leader and Beijing treated it as an insult. Kushner already thought the world was entering a G2, with middle countries playing Washington and Beijing against each other along Belt and Road. They scripted the opening call: Trump would acknowledge a One China policy, which he did not see as a deep concession, and Xi would come to Mar-a-Lago, where Trump is most himself as a host. A planned fifteen-minute sit became an hour and a half. Trump’s ground rule, as Kushner tells it, was simple: do not put Taiwan on the table, or both sides will have to perform and the next four years will be wasted. Taiwan, in that term, stayed a non-issue. Kushner’s daughter Arabella sang Chinese songs to Xi and Peng Liyuan. At lunch Xi delivered an hour of Chinese history, dwelling on the unequal treaties and a hundred years of humiliation, then Mao to the present rise. You could feel, Kushner says, a man who had learned from that story and intended to keep going.

The trade fight he calls the biggest hand of poker ever played. Trump put on tariffs; China hit back in politically tender spots; Trump took tariff revenue, made farmers whole, and doubled down. For a year and a half Kushner was a back channel for Mnuchin and Robert Lighthizer, trying to keep the thing from catching fire while it still had a landing. Michael Pillsbury’s *The Hundred-Year Marathon*, fringe in 2016, became the administration’s China frame: from 1949 to 2049, a project to reclaim global leadership. In the late 1700s, in this telling, a Chinese emperor waved off Britain’s industrial offering; the world pulled ahead, the Opium Wars followed, and from about 1840 to 1940 China lived under treaties as a second-class state. Pillsbury argues Nixon did not open China so much as China opened Nixon, then harvested American universities, IP, and factories while ignoring the trade rulebook. Kushner would rather live in an American-led order than a Chinese-led one. Graham Allison’s Thucydides trap, more than half the historical cases ending in war, is a warning, not a prophecy. Solar panels are the parable: two decades of Chinese subsidy, American firms gone, more than 90 percent of the world’s panels, and much of the rare-earth refining, sitting in China.

An SNL sketch had Jimmy Fallon as Kushner in shades and a vest, walking into the Oval to EMF’s “Unbelievable,” while Trump joked that he had toured the earth and never been heard. The vest was real. Three months in, General Joseph Dunford invited him to Iraq. Two days before departure the White House doctor asked for his blood type because he was going to a war zone. They flew a Black Hawk with the sides off, a machine gun locked in, over Baghdad, past Saddam’s palace with a hole punched through it. He put a sport coat under a vest that said KUSHNER, taped over the last letters so it read KUSH, and only later realized people were photographing him. Staying quiet, he says, gave him room. People talked because they knew he would not dump it into the paper. Washington already had communicators. He did not think he was one. On learning, the method is talk first — who did this, who is smart, what they read, why it failed — then read everything. In Washington, asking a person can put you in the *Post* the next morning as an idiot, so books became the safer teacher. Ivanka, “an incredible researcher,” fed him the stack.

On his first Middle East trip he spent two hours asking Mohamed bin Zayed questions. At the end MBZ said he thought Kushner would make peace. The usual American, MBZ said, is one of three: asleep in the meeting, reading notes he cannot discuss, or there to sell something against Emirati interests. “You’re the first person who’s ever come here and has just asked questions.” Kushner’s reason was simple: you live here, I will leave, you will own whatever I do. If you were me, what would you do? That posture — ignorance used as a tool — is the through-line he wants young people to steal: work hard, say yes too often, leave early enough that traffic is not an excuse, and if the door closes try the window, then the chimney, then a tunnel. What gives him hope is that anything is possible. A person with no diplomatic experience, the faith of one leader, and the nerve to try took on files people called hopeless and sometimes won. The old fights are tribal, as old as the species. If energy gets cheaper and medicine keeps moving, he thinks a different dawn is available — even a multi-planetary one — provided the energy goes there instead of into the next hundred-year grudge.