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middle east
'Financial Pawn of the Saudi Monarchy': House Judiciary Opens Probe Into Jared Kushner
"You cannot faithfully represent the United States with billions of dollars in Saudi and Emirati cash burning a hole in every pocket of every suit you own," said Rep. Jamie Raskin.
Apr 17, 2026
The ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee on Friday morning announced a "sweeping" probe into alleged self-enrichment by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of US President Donald Trump who has served as a high-profile White House envoy in the Middle East while also, according to Congressman Jamie Raskin, "soliciting billions of dollars from Gulf monarchies for [his] private business ventures."
In a letter addressed to Kushner, the Maryland Democrat charges that by pushing for investments in his international investment firm, A Fin Management LLC (Affinity), while also serving as “Special Envoy for Peace” for the Trump administration, he has created "a glaring and incurable conflict of interest" in the eyes of the American people.
While Raskin points out that Kushner repeatedly vowed to stay out of government during Trump's second term and, going further, said he would not raise funds for Affinity during that time, both promises were "quickly" broken.
In April of 2022, the New York Times reported how Kushner had secured a $2 billion investment from a sovereign wealth fund directed by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MbS. In 2018, during Trump's first term, investigations were demanded over accusations that previous financial ties meant that MbS had Kushner "in his pocket."
According to Raskin's letter on Friday:
Mr. Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, has amassed approximately $6.16 billion in assets under management—including $1.2 billion in the past year alone—with an extraordinary 99 percent of its funding derived from foreign nationals. These include sovereign wealth funds operated by the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. At the same time, Mr. Kushner has assumed a central role in sensitive geopolitical negotiations across the Middle East and beyond.
Despite explicit public assurances that he would avoid both government service and fundraising during President Trump’s second term, Mr. Kushner has done precisely the opposite. He has inserted himself into the world’s most volatile global conflicts as one of the United States’ chief negotiators all while deepening his financial reliance on, and entanglement with, foreign governments.
Citing the horrific US complicity in Israel's ongoing attacks on Gaza as well as Trump's illegal war of choice against Iran, Raskin's letter to Kushner charges that "your decision to play completely irreconcilable and unethical dual roles has been haunting American foreign policy since President Trump returned to Washington in 2025."
Noting that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia remains "your largest investor through Affinity and thus possesses significant financial leverage over" Kushner, Raskin explains to the president's son-in-law in his letter that "you cannot both be a diplomat and a financial pawn of the Saudi monarchy at the same time; you cannot faithfully represent the United States with billions of dollars in Saudi and Emirati cash burning a hole in every pocket of every suit you own."
Due to these concerns, explained Raskin, the House Committee on the Judiciary investigation will probe "your conduct and that of your firm with the goal of learning information critical to reforming our bribery laws, conflict of interest provisions, other statutes and rules governing the conduct of government and special government employees, and FARA."
Offering a list of requests, the letter demands that Kushner provide a detailed account of his communications with various investment partners and entities related to his business dealings and that of his work as special envoy to the president, with a deadline of April 30 to comply.
"This investigation will be a priority for our Committee in the coming period," Raskin's letter states. "We expect your full cooperation and that you will provide us with all relevant documents that touch upon how your business interests, family wealth, and governmental duties and missions have merged and converged."
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Is Iran War Another Vietnam for the US? No, It's Even Worse
It will not be a localized loss in a specific theater of the American Imperium, like Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan were. It will be the defeat on a global scale of the Imperium itself.
Apr 17, 2026
Twenty-two years ago this week, I published an article in this space, “Is Iraq Another Vietnam?” It proved prescient, for the Iraq War was, inevitably, lost. Part of the reason—and this was the burden of that article—was that the US hadn’t learned the obvious lessons from Vietnam, the first war America had ever lost. Nor has it, since.
Because of that, Iran, too, will prove another Vietnam: not the first or even the second or third war America ever lost, but certainly the most consequential. It will not be a localized loss in a specific theater of the American Imperium, like Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan were. It will be the defeat on a global scale of the Imperium itself. It’s worthwhile understanding why this has happened.
The contexts for Vietnam and Iran are different, but they bear haunting similarities; situations the US couldn’t stay out of, but conflicts it couldn’t win, either. That is the working definition of “quagmire.”
Vietnam became a US challenge in the most perilous years of the Cold War. India had joined the Soviet camp when it gained independence, in 1947. China went communist in 1949. The Korean War ended in 1953 but was only fought to a draw. The Vietnamese defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The US was clearly losing the Cold War, at least in Asia.
By its actions, the US has explicitly, unambiguously repudiated its legitimacy as the global leader. It is taking care of itself, and to hell with everybody else.
In the middle of all that, Vietnam declared that it wanted to detach from the US orbit and align itself with the Soviet Union. If successful, it would be a model to the scores of other nations in Africa and Asia that were then fighting Western imperial powers to become free, themselves, from centuries of colonial bondage.
Where it ended, nobody could tell. President Dwight D. Eisenhower saw dominos falling from Vietnam through Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, all the way to the Persian Gulf and the world’s greatest supply of oil. It had to be stopped.
Because of this, there was no way the US could stay out of Vietnam. But neither would it ever be able to win. Why?
Ho Chi Minh had approached Harry Truman in 1946 asking for US help in ejecting the French who had occupied his country as a colony since 1870. Truman not only didn’t help Vietnam, he sided with the French. That was the “original sin” that made it impossible for the US to ever “win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people, and, therefore, to ever win the war.
Iran: fraught with the seeds of defeat
The stage, today, is no longer the Cold War but the global transition to multipolarity. The Global South wants to end the unipolar era of US dominance and replace it with a more equitable, peaceful, collaborative, sovereignty-respecting global order. The US doesn’t want that. It wants to retain its position as global hegemon. But it is faltering, badly.
It lost its war in Iraq. It lost its war in Afghanistan. It isn’t announced, yet, but it has lost its war against Russia, through its proxy, Ukraine. The US destroyed incalculable moral stature through its lusty, broad-spectrum support of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. It’s hard to fathom more rapid, self-inflicted imperial damage.
As for its economy, the US is actuarily bankrupt. It deindustrialized in the 1980s and 1990s, moving its manufacturing base to low-cost countries. That forced it to have to borrow $38 trillion in the past 45 years (almost $1 trillion a year). It will never be repaid. If foreign countries do not help fund the US’ $2-odd trillion per year budget deficit (in a good year), the lights will go out. That’s not hysteria. It’s accounting.
Meanwhile, China has blown by the US, lifting more people out of poverty in a shorter period of time, than has any country, ever. It became the largest economy in the world, in 2014. China dominates the planet in all manner of manufacturing, trading, exports, and development assistance to other countries. It is the global economic powerhouse of the 2020s that the US was in the 1950s.
The US strategy to deal with this epic, decades-long decline is to try to seize control of the world’s oil and use that control to extort wealth from all the other countries of the world, especially China. It is pure banditry masquerading as muscular strategy.
That’s what the destruction of Libya and Iraq were all about. It’s what the attack, via Ukraine, against Russia was about. It’s what the piracy of seizing Venezuela’s oil was about. It’s what this illegal, unprovoked attack on Iran is about. Control the oil. The US doesn’t have a Plan B to regain its privileged perch atop the global order. It has to try to make this strategy work.
But, as was the case in Vietnam, the US will not be able to win, here, either. The reasons are eerily similar.
In 1953 (the same time the US was helping the French fight the Vietnamese), the US staged a coup d’etat against Mohammed Mossadegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran. It installed a brutal dictator, the Shah Reza Pahlavi, who ruled until he was deposed in the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
In 1980, in retaliation for Iranians taking back control of their own government, the US had its local proxy, Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, attack Iran. The Iran-Iraq War lasted until 1988 and killed an estimated 500,000 Iranians. Since then, the US has imposed a harsh regimen of sanctions against Iran designed to foster domestic discontent and undermine the Iranian state.
So, just as it had done to the 35 million Vietnamese, the US has unified 93 million Iranians into a visceral, unshakable compact against it. That unification was solidified when, in February, President Donald Trump tried to decapitate the Iranian leadership. That gambit backfired, spectacularly, unifying the county even more.
So, that’s the context. As was the case with Vietnam, the US can’t afford to stay out. But it won’t be able to win, either. Again, that is the definition of “quagmire,” the essential, fateful trap of the US in Vietnam.
What about strategy?
In both wars, the US relied on overwhelming force to bring the enemy to submission. In Vietnam, it dropped 12,000,000 TONS of bombs, four times the tonnage dropped in all theaters in all of World War II, combined. Did it work? Obviously not.
The US lost the war, including 58,000 soldiers killed and another 300,000 wounded. It spent $450 billion, or $3 trillion in today’s dollars. It wrecked its economy, inflicted traumatic civic pain on itself, and grievously damaged its reputation in the world.
Against such overwhelming force, Vietnam’s strategy was enervation: Stay alive and sap the foe of its will to fight. Knowing the superiority of US fire power, the North Vietnamese army avoided direct conflicts. It fought opportunistically, when odds favored it, and melted away when necessary, to preserve men, ammunition, and weapons. Did this work? Obviously, it did.
Even though the US inflicted 9 casualties for each 1 it incurred, it couldn’t sustain those losses in its war-fighting context. As more and more boys came home in body bags, the American people demanded the war be ended. The Vietnamese watched this seething, swelling discontent and waited the Americans out. Ho Chi Minh commented, “Eventually, the Americans will tire of their losses and will have to go home.” He was right.
Iran’s strategy reflects many learnings from Vietnam, mainly the learning of resilience. It knew it could not match US firepower. It had to do only two things. It had to survive a withering first attack. And it had to have deep enough resources to deliver a devastating counterattack. It has done this, brilliantly.
Within 48 hours of the US first strike, Iran took out almost all US radar installations in the Persian Gulf, leaving the US largely sightless. Then, it waited while the US fired off thousands of offensive missiles and defensive interceptors, gravely depleting its finite inventories. Then, it began its counterattack.
It decimated more than a dozen US bases in the Persian Gulf, including the Al Udeid airbase in Qatar, the largest air base in the Middle East. Al Udeid is and was the headquarters of the US’ Combined Air Operations Center, which manages US air assets from North Africa to South Asia.
It dealt extensive damage to the Manama Naval Base in Bahrain, the headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet responsible for naval activities in that part of the world. It has destroyed more than 40 US aircraft and billions of dollars worth of other military assets. It drove the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, the largest military ship ever built, from the field of battle.
With both the US and Israel having fired a huge share of their existing stocks of missiles in the expectation of a quick decapitation, they are left gravely exposed. Iran has declared “missile dominance” over Israel, easily choosing the time, place, and nature of the attacks it now freely rains down.
Similarly for the US in the Persian Gulf. Its open-aired military assets with radars destroyed are becoming defenseless against sustained fusillades of Iranian drones and missiles. The US has proven unable to protect its Gulf allies—Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Oman, and Saudi Arabia—against Iranian attacks. Hundreds of billions of dollars of their economic assets have been destroyed, recompense for their providing staging areas for US attacks on Iran.
This is why Iran is not intimidated by Trump’s or Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth’s childish, simian-like chest beating about “bombing them back to the Stone Age.” By the way, it was Curtis LeMay, head of the US Air Force in Vietnam, who, in response to North Vietnam’s resilience, issued the original threat to “bomb them back to the Stone Age.” Who won that face-off?
The tactic of asymmetric warfare
In Vietnam, the Viet Cong had infiltrated US operations, from military bases and fuel depots to armories, staging yards, and more. A single mole—one individual—so placed, could tip off the enemy about US forces’ planned activities, exposing potentially thousands of soldiers to ambush and death. The asymmetry of such effect is almost impossible to register, or counter. It’s a major reason Vietnam won the war, defeating “the greatest military power the world had ever known.”
In Iran, the asymmetry lies with its control of the Straits of Hormuz through which 20% of the world’s oil flows. It needs only threaten to attack ships and all shipping is stopped. With little more than a feint, a bluff, a head fake, it has inflicted hundreds of billions of dollars of damage on the world through higher oil prices.
Most of the world blames that on the US, since the Strait was open before the war, and Iran had announced it would close the Strait if it was attacked, which the US did, unprovoked. At virtually no cost to itself, Iran can inflict hundreds of billions of dollars of damage, which falls to the discredit of the US in the eyes of the world. That is asymmetry exponentiated. Iran has played it masterfully.
A final word about Vietnam and Iran’s allies.
Vietnam’s allies were the Soviet Union and, to a lesser extent, China. In Iran, they are Russia and China. The difference is that in Vietnam, the Soviet Union and China were nowhere close to being able to challenge US power. In the early 1960s, they even became adversaries, making them still less effective in standing up to US aggression.
Today, Russia has shed its inefficient communist past and crushed US weapons, its proxy, and strategy in Ukraine. China, too, abandoned communism and has crushed US manufacturing, technology, and commerce throughout the world. The two now work more closely than ever to provide a new, non-US-centric paradigm for global organization, one that honors civilizational differences, respects national sovereignty, and promotes collaborative frameworks for national development. Most of the world is lining up behind it.
Where does all this leave us?
The context, strategy, tactics, and alliances in the war all weigh heavily against the US, just as they did in Vietnam. That’s why the US has not achieved any of its objectives. It hasn’t achieved regime change. It hasn’t seized the enriched uranium. It hasn’t deterred Iran from enriching more uranium, nor going for a nuclear weapon. It hasn’t stopped the missile and drone attacks. It hasn’t opened the Strait. It hasn’t undercut Iran’s support of its regional allies: Hezbollah; the Houthis; the Islamic Resistance in Iraq; etc. These things matter, greatly. Here’s why.
The most important public goods a global leader must provide to earn its legitimacy in the eyes of the world are peace, respect for the rule of law, and an economic environment that makes possible prosperity for all. With its nakedly illegal, unprovoked attack on Iran, the US has delivered exactly the opposite: the hottest war in decades, piracy as policy, and a global economic environment that, through higher oil prices, reliably syphons wealth and, therefore, prosperity from every country in the world.
By its actions, the US has explicitly, unambiguously repudiated its legitimacy as the global leader. It is taking care of itself, and to hell with everybody else.
Russia and China, on the other hand, however imperfectly, form an able and ready replacement for the US as the organizing locus of the global community. The world sees the destruction attendant on the US hegemonic model: economic extortion, resource banditry, military thuggery, and diplomatic blackmail. Nobody wants it anymore. Even US allies are distancing themselves from it.
Iran will prove the catalytic event where US primacy in the world was taken down, where it was defeated militarily, broken economically, isolated diplomatically, and humiliated strategically. Had it better learned from its errors in Vietnam, instead of repeating them, again, and again, and again, it might have enjoyed a more graceful, self-directed descent. That is the fatal cost of arrogance, immaturity, and stupidity.
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To Organize for Peace, We Must First Dare to Imagine It
The Middle East will not be stabilized by threading one crisis at a time. It will only be stabilized by a framework comprehensive enough to hold all of them at once.
Apr 15, 2026
On April 7, the United States, Israel, and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire. By the afternoon of the same day, it was already unraveling.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who mediated the deal, announced it would cover "everywhere, including Lebanon and elsewhere—effective immediately." Within hours, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office contradicted him: The ceasefire "does not include Lebanon." Israel's military said it "continues fighting and ground operations" against Hezbollah. Missile alerts sounded across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait. A gas facility in Abu Dhabi was ablaze. Iran and Israel each accused the other of violating a truce that neither had fully agreed to in the first place.
This is not a diplomatic miscommunication. This is a structural diagnosis. A ceasefire that each party defines differently, that excludes Lebanon while Lebanon burns, that leaves unresolved the nuclear question, the proxies, the sanctions, and the fate of millions of displaced people—is not a ceasefire. It is a pause in a war that has no agreed-upon end. And it proves, more vividly than any argument could, the central claim of this piece: There is no lasting peace to be found in bilateral arrangements, back-channel deals, or sequenced diplomacy that takes each front separately. Everything must be on the table, simultaneously, in the open. The region will not be stabilized by threading one crisis at a time. It will only be stabilized by a framework comprehensive enough to hold all of them at once.
For years, the pogroms in the West Bank grew more violent in the dark, largely ignored by media and public attention. The lawlessness of those carrying them out was enabled—sometimes actively, sometimes through willful inaction—by those whose job was to enforce the law. This ongoing catastrophe, beyond being war crimes and perhaps crimes against humanity, has already fueled new waves of antisemitic violence worldwide.
What is needed is not just pressure, but a credible vision—something to organize toward, not only against.
Now the world is paying attention. But attention, it turns out, is not the same as action.
Two and a half years of genocide in Gaza. Bombing campaigns across half a dozen countries. The Israeli Knesset's passage of a death penalty law for Arabs—62 in favor, 48 against, 1 abstained—while Germany, Britain, France, and Italy issued a statement fretting over the law "undermining Israel's commitments with regards to democratic principles." It would be funny if it weren't so revealing. The shrewdest member of the Knesset, Ahmad Tibi, used to say that Israel is Jewish and democratic—Jewish for the Arabs, democratic for the Jews. Now even that uneasy equation has collapsed. Anti-government protesters are being violently suppressed. Activists are being arrested.
What, exactly, are we waiting for? Another October 7 to green-light a massive genocide in the West Bank?
In the 1980s, the world still maintained a façade of respecting international law, human rights, sovereignty, and human dignity. Today those principles are treated as virtue signaling, carrying zero weight in global politics. The massacre at Sabra and Shatila produced one of the largest anti-war protests in Israeli history, the removal of a defense minister, the resignation of a prime minister. Today, the same events would merit a public yawn. Israelis would say there was no choice; in war, civilians die; terrorists hide among civilians.
The campaign against apartheid South Africa helped end that regime—sanctions were part of it, though not the whole story. Today the world is reluctant to act similarly, and Israel's stocks are rising. Military and technology exports have grown. The Israeli economy remains stable, the shekel as strong as it has been in years.
So what is the world to do? What are the Palestinians to do?
Here is the honest assessment: Pressure alone will not work. The Israeli public's mental condition now requires constant war to manage its anxieties, and the government has mastered the manipulation of fear to sustain itself. Geopolitical realities ensure Israel will always have trade partners—including countries that position themselves as critics, including in the Arab Middle East. And if isolation were somehow achieved comprehensively, the best-case scenario is Israel becoming a North Korea: The boycott succeeds, and we are not one inch closer to Palestinian liberation or regional normalcy. What is needed is not just pressure, but a credible vision—something to organize toward, not only against.
Martin Luther King Jr. taught us that "those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war." That is the question before us.
As today's unraveling ceasefire makes clear, there is no safe region without a framework that addresses everyone's security simultaneously.
There are credible levers that have worked before. President Dwight D. Eisenhower forced Israel's hand in 1956. President George H.W. Bush did it again in Madrid. Real leverage—the kind that changes calculations—is possible. The platform already exists: the Arab League Peace Initiative of March 2002. The Middle East is different now, but the architecture of that initiative remains usable. When Israeli leadership presented peace prospects with Egypt, Jordan, and even in the Oslo Accords, the Israeli public responded favorably. Public opinion in this region can shift quickly when circumstances change.
And this framework could do something even more ambitious: help resolve the conflict with Iran—comprehensively, not bilaterally. The ceasefire announced last week, already disputed and already violated, shows exactly why. Iran has insisted Lebanon must be part of any deal. Israel says it won't be. The US sits somewhere between the two, unable to enforce its own mediated agreement. This is the logic of piecemeal diplomacy: It produces temporary pauses, not durable peace. On multiple occasions, Iran reaffirmed the Arab League Peace Initiative and suggested that if Palestinians reach an agreement that earns the approval of a Palestinian majority, Iran would not carry the banner of the Palestinian struggle. Iran can become part of the solution. Imagine a Middle East in which the genuine security concerns of Palestine, Israel, Iran, and Lebanon are all taken into account—together, not sequentially—and prove compatible. Such a deal could include a final resolution to the nuclear question (dare we dream of dismantling both Iran's and Israel's programs?), the disbanding of proxy forces, and enforceable benchmarks for human and civil rights across all parties. After years of genocide, wars, and hundreds of thousands of victims, none of this would come easily. The international community would have to deploy every tool at its disposal, every credible threat.
Today, no leadership anywhere is offering a viable future. Here is the vision nobody in the entire Zionist political spectrum is proposing: a grand bargain. Israel accepts the Arab League Peace Initiative. A Palestinian state is established in all the territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip—with real elections—before the end of 2027. This is a first stage enabling the self-determination of both national collectives, which could develop over time into various arrangements: a two-state solution, a confederation, a single democratic state, or something in-between. The international community guarantees security for all sides during the transition. And the pressure must be real: If Israel refuses, it is immediately removed from EU treaties, the OECD, and every international institution it depends on.
And then there is the bonus—the kind of audacious proposal that makes a vision legible to ordinary people. The 2026 World Cup will be hosted in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. The 2030 tournament goes to Morocco, Portugal, and Spain. The 2034 tournament is slated for Saudi Arabia—the country that originally proposed the 2002 Peace Initiative. What if the 2034 World Cup became a Peace World Cup, hosted jointly by Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Palestine? Imagine the region's countries spending the coming years building sports infrastructure. Imagine the tourism economy it would generate—not only in those three countries, but in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. Absurd? Maybe. But the question MLK poses is whether peace-loving people can organize as effectively as those who love war. A concrete, imaginable future is part of that organizing.
I have always argued that the only genuinely pro-Israel position is also a pro-Palestine position. There is no safe Israel without a free and safe Palestine—and, as today's unraveling ceasefire makes clear, there is no safe region without a framework that addresses everyone's security simultaneously. To be pro-Israel means ensuring Israel's ability to become a nation among nations—secure, recognized, legitimate. That cannot happen while Israel is an occupying power. It cannot happen alongside an apartheid regime. It cannot happen while Palestinian citizens of Israel face systematic discrimination and neglect. And it cannot happen while a two-week truce substitutes for the comprehensive, just, and durable peace that the entire region is owed.
We cannot wait any longer. The question is whether we are willing to organize for a vision, or only against an atrocity.
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