How Kushner Screwed Iran Negotiations

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening folks. Welcome to another Ask the Editor with myself Prem and the wonderful Media Assan. Hope you guys are doing well today. Let’s start off on the bat with another location check. Whether you’re on Substack, whether you’re on YouTube, wherever you are, please drop in the chat where we’re uh where you’re hearing us from. I see many of you are already doing so. I love that it’s uh almost uh Pavlovian at this point. I love to see it. So yeah, wherever you’re listening from, please drop it in. Today we have a lot to talk about. We have JD Vance’s world tour flopping uh from his negotiations or so-called negotiations in Pakistan uh regarding the Iran war to his visit to Hungary uh to not at all interfere in election at all. Trust me, I’m not even though I am. Uh to much more, including a potential US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. There’s a lot going on.

Firstly, we have a lot of folks coming in already. We have southern Indiana. We got LA, Colia, Finland, Malta, Derby in the UK, Ontario, Sydney, Australia, Lafia, Bulgaria, Sweden, Scotland. Let’s hear it for everyone, folks. I know we’ve talked about this before. We’ve had some North Dotans in the chat. I’m waiting for you guys to chime in as well. We love it. We love it.

Medie, how are you doing?

I’m good. Sorry to be British about it, Prem, but it’s Derby, not Derby.

Derby. Derby. like Derby County football team I know the British we pronounce things weirdly in Britain it should be derby but it’s Derby.

The Thailand India Malaysia Mexico the names just keep flying in. Arizona it’s great to be with our diverse global audience here for Zeteo on YouTube and Substack. It’s been another crazy weekend another weekend where all eyes have been on the Middle East. And you know I’m enjoying the first draft newsletter that our colleague Swin Supang put out this morning pointing out that JD Vance, the vice president, is the loser chief. He is the loser in this administration. He can’t stop losing.

And a team full of winners. I mean, he just sticks out so much as the signature loser.

Well, sticks out is interesting phrase, Prem, because Swind’s reporting suggests that Donald Trump has made him the face of a lot of these defeats on purpose. Just as Kamala Harris got the poison chalice of the border when she was vice president, VPs tend to get stuck with unpopular portfolios that the president palms off to them. And in Vance’s case, he got to go to Islamabad, Pakistan on Saturday, spent 21 hours negotiating with the Iranians and then say we couldn’t do a deal. He obviously went to Hungary the week before last to really really back Victor Orban who lost in a landslide defeat yesterday. So that’s you know two for two in terms of losses. And then the CNN polling at the weekend, CNN had some great analysis of polling showing that Vance is more unpopular than any other vice president in American history at this point in a second term.

I love that while all that was happening, Trump and Rubio were just watching wrestling. Like the actual secretary of state is not in Pakistan. 305 at the side of WWE.

If you, I tweeted this Prem. If you were at the Netflix writer room writing about a presidential show and you said we’ll have the vice president in Pakistan and the president and the secretary of state they’re in Miami watching UFC with Joe Rogan, you would be thrown out the writer room. You said that’s just ridiculous. You can’t write story lines like that.

I feel so bad for Vance. I mean so bad for Vance. I mean that’s very strong but smallest violin in the world playing them.

It’s very comical. But we should talk about obviously the thing he failed at which is of course the Iran negotiations. We saw those breakdown pretty, I mean just cut and dry. Honestly, it seems like they really didn’t come back with much. Medie, what happened?

No, I mean look, context matters here. The JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal that actually resolved the issue of nuclear weapons and the nuclear program in Iran was signed in 2015 after almost a decade of negotiation like two terms of diplomacy. Obama tried and succeeded in getting that deal. It was a very complicated deal. The EU was involved. The Russians were involved. These guys did it for like what 21 hours apparently. With JD Vance, who was not a foreign policy expert, with Steve Wickoff and Jared Kushner, who British government officials have told the Guardian were considered to be Israeli assets by everyone in the Middle East, who are two property developers, in Jared Kushner’s case, a failed property developer. These guys are not diplomatic or nuclear experts. They’re not the right people to be doing this deal. And you can’t rush this deal. The idea that the Iranians were going to give up enrichment. Remember, they came back saying the American proposal began with zero enrichment. The Iranians have made clear that was never an option. It was never an option in the JCPOA. It was never an option in the negotiations earlier this year. And it’s a reminder, as Joe Kent, former head of counterterrorism for Donald Trump, who resigned over Iran, he’s made this point that Trump has moved the goalposts pushed on by Netanyahu and Graham and the neocons. Trump’s position was yes, I will never allow Iran to get nuclear weapons. It was never that I will not allow Iran to have any enrichment even for civilian purposes. That is a much more hardline hawkish position which Trump has now adopted, Vance has now adopted. It’s become their red line and it’s something the Iranians will never agree to. And why should they? It’s their legal right under the NPT to enrich uranium. And they used to enrich it at 3.67% under the JCPOA. When Trump tore that up, they went up to 20%, then 60%, and here we are.

We have Sebastian Simon on Substack saying, “I guess Vance wasn’t hungry for success.” Love it, Sebastian. But Tamil Hadri on Substack, they say that he seems to be distancing himself from Trump from some of their crazy decision-making. I’m curious about this, Maddie, because on one hand, it just feels kind of offensive that Trump and Rubio were just chilling at the UFC fight while they sent JD Vance, to be clear, doesn’t have that much like reputable foreign policy experience. There’s not anything to point to to suggest that like—

Venture capital guy.

Yeah. Like he first of all, he says he’s anti-war. There’s not actually like substantive proof to back that up beyond rhetoric. Secondly, there’s not any substantive proof to show that he could have handled this in the first place. Alongside, by the way, as you say, Witkoff and specifically Jared Kushner, who, you know, we know he’s a member of the Trump family, but specifically is completely unelected. No one, no taxpayer said, “Yeah, like I want that guy to potentially stop or start nuclear World War II.” So, I’m curious like what you think of JD Vance’s positionality when it comes to all this.

Yeah, I’m not sure because he did make lots of anti-war noises during the campaign when he was in the Senate. Even after coming to office, right? We know for a fact to be fair to him that in that signal group chat that leaked out from Mike Waltz at the time national security advisor it was Vance who was saying let’s not bomb the Houthis in Yemen in this way. So that much I’ll give him. Clearly he’s not a raging neocon hawk we can concede that. But this idea that he was against this war and the New York Times had a headline at the weekend which was clearly briefed to them by Vance people—Vance tried and failed to stop the war he opposed—well we don’t know how much he tried and we don’t know how much he opposed it because I have a longer memory than most of the goldfish who cover politics in DC. And I remember when the war began on February 28th, there was reporting that suggested that Vance had said, “Look, I’m not keen on this war, but if you’re going to do it, you got to go big. Go big or go home.” That was the reporting at the time. So this now that’s coming out that he was always opposed privately. Let’s see.

I think he knows that he’s tied to Trump as Swin points out in the first draft newsletter this morning. And if you haven’t subscribed to the First Draft Newsletter, what are you all doing? Go subscribe now so you get it in your inbox every morning. As Swin points out, he’s always going to be linked to Trump. If he wants to be president in 28, he’s going to have to own some of this stuff. So, if Iran is the disaster it seems to be, he’s not going to be able to distance himself saying, “Oh, well, privately I was opposed to it.”

And look, he doesn’t have any foreign policy experience. This is a government filled with inept, incompetent people. Jared Kushner, at least in the first time, he was an actual member of the administration, a senior adviser to the president. In this administration, he has no job, no role. He’s had no security clearance. He’s not been vetted. He’s not been confirmed by the Senate. He’s just the son-in-law to the president. It’s a very kind of autocratic banana republic thing to do to send your son-in-law. By the way, the son-in-law who is at the same time trying to raise $5 billion for his investment firm from Gulf countries. So, completely compromised, complete conflicts of interest. He’s taken in the past $2 billion from the Saudis. He’s absolutely the wrong person to be in these negotiations. He’s Benjamin Netanyahu’s best pal. As we all know now by now, and if you don’t know, when he was a kid, he gave up his bed for Netanyahu to sleep in in his house. Netanyahu was so close to his father, Charles Kushner, he would come and stay in the Kushner family home. And I always add, you know, Jared wasn’t in the bed at the same time. He slept in the basement. Netanyahu took the bed.

And of course, not just Kushner, by the way, Prem, you see the reporting that Vance, actually, not reporting. I think Netanyahu tweeted it this morning that Vance called him to give him an update. The vice president of the United States made sure to brief the prime minister of Israel on what happened. That’s what happens. The prime minister gets the VP to come and tell him what’s going on.

Which by the way, in that tweet, Netanyahu says, “As the administration does daily updated me on the—”

Daily update, and you saw SNL at the weekend where at the news update, they had a gag about the person who’s really in charge of the US military is Benjamin Netanyahu. And immediately pro-Israel voices accuse SNL of anti-semitism. It’s not anti-semitism when Netanyahu brags about his influence and control over US politics.

It’s ridiculous. By the way, it should be clear. I mean, I’m glad you brought it up. We sometimes forget Jared Kushner does not have a security clearance and is representing supposedly American security interests at this place. And I wanted to bring about the place. So the place this took place in Islamabad. I don’t know if you saw this, but there were pictures from the event from the hotel where the press were being held where there was these huge lettering that said #IslamabadTalks and there was like these people playing music. There was like coffee pastries and it just—I made this joke that it was like why did the people who were trying to stop World War II make the negotiation setting look like a crypto convention. Which prompted a lot of Pakistani nationalists to be like no no no you don’t understand Pakistan’s motion but it was funny that in respects with Jared Kushner there it ultimately is like a real estate crypto financial conference more than anything else like he was there to make deals this was not like a diplomatic negotiation as much as a financial one.

But that does bring me to a question about whether the US can actually blockade Iran or the Strait of Hormuz.

We will see I think is the question. Trump has now come up with this new harebrained idea to try and strangle Iran and its economy. A lot of the neocons online are bigging this up. If it was such a good idea by the way why don’t they do it on day one? I wonder. I think we all know it’s not the greatest of ideas. They haven’t thought it through. Yes, it could deprive Iran of a lot of revenue. First of all, why are they getting a lot of revenue? Because Trump enabled them to get lots of revenue. Donald Trump, and I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again. He’s the master of coming up with solutions to the problems he created. So, it’s like, oh wow, Iran’s selling lots of oil because you let them. Iran’s making lots of money from tolls because you created a situation for them to do that. So, let’s now blockade them. You can’t just blockade Iran. Good luck with that. China, of course, is someone that gets a lot of oil and gas from that part of the world. I don’t understand what happens when a Chinese ship goes through. Does the American Navy interdict a Chinese ship? What if there’s a Chinese warship accompanying that Chinese tanker? I don’t understand where this ends up. This feels like a classic ill-thought-out escalation from Donald Trump.

Robert Pape, the University of Chicago, who’s been a kind of a must-read pundit during this conflict, an expert on warfare, he’s been talking about the escalation trap—that when you get into wars without any kind of planning, without any exit strategy, all that you do is escalate to the next level because you don’t know what else to do. And I feel like that’s what this is.

And by the way, I remember when the ceasefire was happening, of course there was a lot of sighs of relief given what Trump had been saying just hours before about eliminating entire civilization and so forth. But there was this sense that we were rightfully skeptical about whether it would or would not hold. Even while the ceasefire was happening, it wasn’t happening. Of course, Lebanon was still being brutally bombed by Israel. But when the ceasefire happened, there was the involvement of nations like China, for instance. And I’m wondering now that it’s broken down and negotiations failed, what is the sort of reaction and impulse of these other nations that are starting to get involved in a more meaningful way? What do they take away from this and what happens in the next few weeks?

It’s a great question. I think that a lot of these countries are as frustrated as we are in America. A lot of foreign countries have never taken Trump seriously. They think it’s a bit of a joke. They think there are these hidden guardrails. They think people like you and me when we sound the alarm over this manchild in charge—they don’t quite realize how irrational, how narcissistic, how insecure, how impetuous, how impulsive, how erratic, how reckless this man is. And I think they assume that the US government couldn’t really be run by a completely crazy person. There must be adults in the room. There must be guardrails. And I think a lot of these foreign governments in this second term at least have really woken up to it. The Europeans woken up to it with Greenland. You and I have talked before about how the Danes actually had a military plan to fight off American invaders which is insane. And I think people in the global south, China, and even some of the India, Pakistan are seeing up close and personal what happens when the president starts a war like this which has global repercussions. It has global repercussions in a way that even Iraq didn’t have in the short term. Not in the first few weeks did it have such global implications where people across the global south are unable to go to work, unable to drive their cars, they’re running out of fuel. It’s a scary time and I think the rest of the world really needs to wake up to the fact that the United States for the next three years will continue to be governed by this manchild who doesn’t follow any kind of norms at home or abroad and is willing to risk global peace, the global economy, willing to talk about nuclear armageddon simply because his feelings were hurt.

On that note, a viewer on Substack says, “So Orban spent 15 years dismantling Hungarian democracy, captured the courts, strangled the press, and gerrymandered everything in sight, then just admitted he lost. Trump would never. Genuinely, who’s the worst authoritarian here? The one who conceded or the one who still thinks he won in 2020 and the election was stolen?”

100%. It’s a very important point. We can laugh about it, but it’s a very serious point. I know everyone wants to move on from January 6th. I’m one of the people who refuses to move on from January the 6th. I come from a school of thought that says every interview with Donald Trump, every press conference should mention January the 6th, should mention the pardons. He keeps talking about the stolen election. He was on with Maria Bartiromo at the weekend on Fox and he brought up again, oh, that election was rigged and stolen. He can’t move on from 2020. So, I’m not sure why the press or the Democrats have moved on from 2020. We should also talk about the fact that that was the most egregious thing he did as a president at home. He launched an insurrection, an armed insurrection against the capital. He refused to accept defeat. He came up with a fake elector’s plan. He tried to get his DOJ to be complicit in this illegal unconstitutional coup. And we shouldn’t move on from that.

And I think what happens abroad is a reminder of how unique and uniquely dangerous that was. How Trump is sui generis. Victor Orban, an authoritarian who’s been in power for much longer than Donald Trump, much smarter and savvier guy than Donald Trump, accepted defeat. He called his opponent and conceded. He said, “We’re going to now operate from opposition.” Donald Trump couldn’t do that because Donald Trump is not a rational figure. Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist who has never accepted defeat. I always remind people when he lost the Iowa caucuses to Ted Cruz, he accused Ted Cruz of stealing it. This wasn’t some new thing he came up with for Joe Biden in 2020. This is who he’s always been.

You look at Bolsonaro who was ejected from office and then the Brazilian courts did their thing. You look at South Korea where the president tried to steal power and the courts did their thing. You look at Hungary where he conceded. And you look across the world and you see that Donald J. Trump is unique in terms of democracy.

Given what happened in Hungary, what are your thoughts on how the US can implement similar tactics to get rid of our fascist regime? I think the big lesson we should learn from Hungary is mobilization. You can steal seats on a Supreme Court. You can take over the media with your rich friends. You can crack down on universities. All things that Orban’s done and Trump has copied. But what you can’t do is defeat overwhelming people power. You put people in the streets. You energize turnout. You get young people, the most idealistic members of our society, to stand up. In Hungary, they had massive youth turnout, massive under 30 turnout, almost universally loathing Orban, fed up with what had happened to their country and their economy and their life chances. The US, I would say the lesson to learn is put up candidates who mobilize young people. Look at Zohran Mamdani in New York. How did he beat Andrew Cuomo? He did it by energizing young voters in record numbers. In the next election, the Democrats have to have a candidate who inspires people to take to the streets, who stands for something, not just against something, who can connect with young people.

Professor Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at University of Toronto, formerly at Yale, Zeteo contributor, author of two books on fascism, wrote a great piece for us last night on the lessons from Hungary for US liberals fighting Trump.

On electoral politics: “How do we avoid getting catfished by a Democrat who uses pro-Palestine and affordability language publicly but has no real belief in those ideas?”

I think you’ve got to be careful. Nora Ericat, the Palestinian-American academic in New York, made a very good point. You may have heard the phrase PEP—progressive except Palestine—people who are really liberal except on Palestine, then they’re pro-Israel. But Norah said something I had not come across. She talked about POPs—Progressive Only on Palestine. That’s your issue that you care about, but you don’t care about other issues that are related. For example, you’re opposed to the detention of Palestinians by Israel, but you don’t speak out against mass incarceration at home. You don’t take progressive stances on issues that are very similar to the issues you care about in Gaza and the West Bank.

Even if you agree that a Tucker Carlson is good quote unquote on Palestine—and I think Ta-Nehisi Coates made a good point: are people like Tucker and MTG pro-Palestine or they just anti-Israel? Two different things. But even if you accept that they are, they’re horrible on a lot of other issues we should also care about. If you actually care about the human rights of Palestinians, you should also care about the human rights of people in ICE detention facilities in the US. You should care about minorities and migrants who are being repressed here in the US. You should also care about Black Lives Matter. You should care about mass incarceration of black people and horrible repression of minority communities. Those are all issues that you should also care about. And therefore, the vehicle for that cannot be the current Republican party.

In the Democratic party, there are also people like Delia Ramirez, who’s right now trying to block bombs from being sent to Israel. There’s people like Greg Casar, the chair of the progressive caucus who’s been very outspoken about military aid to Israel. There’s people like AOC and Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib who has led the charge against the war in Iran and tried to put out the war powers resolution. There are people running in primaries right now calling out Israel. There’s a Democratic mayor of New York who’s willing to call Trump a fascist to his face and say the G-word genocide in the Oval Office—Zohran Mamdani.

There was this great TikTok comment on a video of Tucker: “Pay attention. You’re not agreeing with Tucker Carlson. He’s agreeing with you.” And I think it’s high time for a lot of people to own their positions.

We should accept that people are coming to our way of thinking and not chase after crumbs from the right-wing table.

Finally, on Trump’s Truth Social post depicting himself as Jesus curing America: This is Trump loves his AI slop on Truth Social. This is the most unchristian, anti-Christian, irreligious, anti-religious, amoral, immoral man to ever run for the presidency of the United States. This guy, it’s not just that he’s not religious. He is a malignant narcissist. He worships himself. The man has no sense of self-reflection, self-criticism. He’s never said sorry for anything in his life. He’s never accepted he’s done anything wrong. He’s never conceded an election. And he does see himself now as some godly figure. He’s got a cult of sycophants both in his cabinet and in his base who worship him, who hang on his every word.

A bunch of conservatives—Riley Gaines, Megan Basham from Daily Wire—are now saying, “This is wrong. This is blasphemy. Why would he post this?” And it’s like, it took you 11 years to work out what the rest of us realized on day one. These MAGA influencers, they’ll be fine by tomorrow. No one’s actually going to hold him to account for this kind of stuff.

Take care everyone. Appreciate you. See you again next week. Bye-bye.