Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff and the Profitable Business of Peace

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/magazine/kushner-witkoff-board-of-peace-iran.html

https://archive.ph/wrnP0

Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff and the Profitable Business of Peace
By Linda Kinstler
May 1, 2026, 5:01 a.m. ET

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Over the past year, Kushner and Witkoff have crisscrossed the globe as White House emissaries: They have met with Hamas and with Vladimir Putin, with Volodymyr Zelensky and with Iranian negotiators. Their near-universal presence at high-stakes negotiations suggests that Kushner and Witkoff, New York real estate developers who are now executive members of Trump’s Board of Peace, have been almost single-handedly tasked with realizing Trump’s desire to be remembered as the “president of peace.”

But these are businessmen first and diplomats second. Their approach to peacemaking is abundantly evident in the settlements they have brokered thus far. The October cease-fire between Israel and Hamas opened the door to Kushner’s aspiration to build a shiny special economic zone where there are now 60 million tons of rubble — with human remains and unexploded ordnance trapped inside. In this vision, the economic zone will house data centers, skyscrapers and advanced manufacturing and run on cryptocurrency. Their draft proposal for a negotiated settlement between Russia and Ukraine included a provision that the United States would receive “50 percent of profits” from the “venture” of rebuilding Ukraine’s destroyed infrastructure. Their view seems to be that peace is an asset to be leveraged and maximized.

On the sidelines of the inaugural meeting of the Board of Peace in February, Witkoff announced an agreement between the United States and Pakistan to redevelop the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, just weeks after the Pakistani government signed a deal with a company affiliated with World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm run by Witkoff’s and Trump’s sons. In the months since, Pakistan has become one of the primary mediators between the United States and Iran.

The apparent entanglement of Kushner’s and Witkoff’s business interests and their public roles — and the many unanswered questions about their personal legal and financial status, as well as that of the Board of Peace itself — is both a cause and a symptom of the near-complete “fusion of peace and corporate governance,” as the scholar Teresa Almeida Cravo describes it, that has come to define Trump’s second term.

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