This weekend, Jared Kushner will board a military plane and embark on a six-country trip to present foreign diplomats with part of his long-awaited proposal to solve an epic quandary and bring peace to the Middle East. Kushner has said that he and the other members of the trip, including Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt, State Department policy adviser Brian Hook, and deputy assistant to the president Avi Berkowitz, will not present the full peace plan until after the Israeli elections in April. Instead, they will gauge support for various economic incentives in the proposal, including foreign aid for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. These enticements are intended to persuade Palestinian officials to seek a broader deal.
Over the course of seven days, Kushner’s team will travel to Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey. They will also make a stop in Saudi Arabia, where Kushner plans to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. It will be the first time the two will meet since 15 Saudis brutally strangled Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and dismembered him with a bone saw last fall.
Kushner and M.B.S., as he is known, struck up a relationship nearly two years ago, when the Saudi prince visited the White House. Kushner and M.B.S., youthful heirs with complex family rivalries, have met a handful of times since. For a while, it was a mutually beneficial alliance. M.B.S. provided Kushner with a key ally and envoy in the region. Kushner, in turn, convinced his father-in-law to make Riyadh his first stop on a sweeping presidential tour of the Middle East, and helped promote an arms deal between the United States and the kingdom. But their bond came under great scrutiny last fall, after the assassination of Khashoggi.
In the days following, Kushner reached out to M.B.S as the administration launched its investigation, and urged him to be as transparent as possible. (The C.I.A. later concluded that M.B.S. ordered the operation, although the Saudi government has denied the crown prince played any role in the killing.) In a rare town-hall interview with CNN in October, Kushner offered a chilling realpolitik explanation for the administration’s failure to condemn the Saudis. “We have to be able to work with our allies,” he said. “The Middle East is a rough place. It’s been a rough place for a very long time, and we have to be able to pursue our strategic objectives, but we also have to deal with what obviously seems to be a terrible situation.”
The uncomfortable optics of the meeting are not lost on those planning the road show. But Kushner is meeting with the heads of states from the region, a person familiar with the trip explained, and M.B.S. is a head of state. Indeed, Saudi Arabia appears to be the lynchpin of Kushner’s unprecedented strategy to forge lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Whereas past administrations sought to negotiate with both parties, the Trump White House is hoping to assemble a coalition of Gulf states aligned against Iran to exert influence in the region.
The whirlwind tour will come on the heels of a two-day conference in Warsaw last week, during which Kushner met with leaders from 60 countries and obliquely discussed the plan. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in attendance during Kushner’s closed-door presentation, reportedly congratulated him for being “crazy enough” to “come up with ideas” to resolve the conflict. A foreign-affairs minister from Saudi Arabia also offered support for Kushner’s plan, according to The Wall Street Journal. Palestinian officials, who have not engaged in peace talks since the U.S. moved its embassy to Jerusalem, did not attend the conference. On Friday, Kushner, the grandson of Holocaust survivors, joined Vice President Mike Pence at Auschwitz-Birkenau, before they flew to Germany for the weekend to attend the Munich Security Conference. Kushner’s wife, Ivanka Trump, also made the trip.
Much has been said recently, both inside and outside the White House, about Jared and Ivanka’s influence within the Trump administration. The couple survived a series of power struggles with Steve Bannon, Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus, and finally John Kelly. With the West Wing thinned out, people aides have been referring to Kushner as the de facto chief of staff, one person close to the couple told me. But it’s not that Jared or Ivanka have more power as a result of others leaving. It’s that Trumpworld is finally beginning to understand the extent of the power they’ve had all along. “They’ve always been son and daughter of a president who is a famously familial person,” this person said. “The people who misunderstood that are no longer there. Everything takes time, and they have the luxury of time in this administration when most other people do not.”
Trump, of course, is most comfortable when the West Wing is operating as a family office. It was how he ran his business in Trump Tower, and it remains the best way to assess who has staying power. It also helps to explain why, despite an anti-nepotism law that stood for 50 years, he deputized his son-in-law to lead some of the most significant foreign policy initiatives of his administration, any why his daughter frequently represents the administration on trips abroad. While the rest of the White House is in a state of constant turnover, Kushner remains firmly ensconced in a closet of an office near the Oval. Ivanka has a sunny corner room just upstairs, outside of which hangs a blown-up photo of her and Kushner dancing onstage at inauguration, with a note from her dad scrawled out in gold Sharpie, saying how proud of them he was.
They still worry about how they are portrayed in the media, though the negative press has slowed as their antagonists have left the White House. When Ivanka sat down with ABC for an interview earlier this year, she was caught off guard by questions she thought had been deemed off limits, according to two people familiar with the situation. But as time has gone on, Jared and Ivanka, like everyone else, have cared less and less about about each individual story. The country, after all, has reached a late stage of Trump fatigue. Though news cameras panned to take in Ivanka’s stony expression in Munich when German chancellor Angela Merkel criticized her father’s foreign policy, the schadenfreude was fleeting. Back in New York, their social circle is similarly dazed. One former friend of the couple shrugged when NBC News reported that Kushner had only gotten his security clearance restored after a Trump appointee overrode the recommendation of career White House security specialists. “Tomorrow, no one is going to talk about this,” this person said. “Is anything ever going to stick?”
This story was originally published by Vanity Fair
via USAHint.com
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