SLEAZE, bribery, and secret alliances allegedly marked Trump’s Middle East policy in his first term, and set him on the road to an illegal and unwinnable war against Iran in his second. The central characters in that sordid set of machinations were his own son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, a few Gulf rulers, and Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu — all working towards a plan to redraw the political map of West Asia. Iran was the adversary to be contained, and it was on this that they converged: a plan to “blow up Obama’s Iran nuclear deal”.
Billions of dollars were allegedly paid to Kushner in what may be the biggest scandal in recent history — one that best defines the link between money and Trump’s conduct of his Middle East policy, and which has pushed the entire region into an intractable conflict with global consequences.
A recently published book, Princes and Thieves by investigative journalist Matthew Cole, provides startling details on how billions of dollars were allegedly transferred into accounts — managed by Kushner — by Gulf sheikhdoms, to implement a plan to break Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and change the “political map of the Middle East”. The author supports his view of the transactions with details drawn from accounts hacked by a Western intelligence agency, though Kushner has called the allegations fabricated.
According to the author, the transfers began in 2017 and were well underway by the spring of 2018, during Trump’s first term — when Kushner served as the president’s special envoy on the Middle East. While he had very close relations with Israel, he also cultivated strong business and diplomatic connections with willing Gulf sheikhdoms to allegedly pay for influence with the Trump administration.
>A recent book details how money and corruption were leveraged to redesign the Middle East.
According to the author, “Kushner, UAE ruler Mohamed bin Zayed (MBZ), and Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) of Saudi Arabia, converged at an auspicious moment. MBS wanted to be crown prince. MBZ wanted to blow up Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, and Kushner wanted both to help him force the Palestinians into a deal that Israel would accept”. The convergence against Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran — formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — brought Saudi Arabia and the UAE together on the issue.
Agreed on July 14, 2015, between Iran and the P5+1, and endorsed by Security Council Resolution 2231, the deal came into effect in January 2016. Under it, Iran capped its enrichment at 3.67 per cent, cut its centrifuge numbers and opened its nuclear facilities to IAEA inspection. In return, nuclear-related sanctions on Iran were lifted on oil exports, banking, and SWIFT access, with frozen assets to be released in stages.
But Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE had strong reservations. Each opposed the JCPOA for different reasons and with different intensity; the common ground was that the agreement was too narrow and too temporary, its restrictions written to expire under sunset clauses. Israel openly campaigned against it, and the two Gulf states lobbied against it too.
For deal sceptics, Trump’s election in 2016 was good news. In May 2018, the president withdrew from the JCPOA and reimposed sanctions in phases under a “maximum pressure” campaign. The move brought the Gulf nations closer to the Trump administration. The billions alleged to have flowed into Kushner’s accounts appeared to have delivered. The book maintains that early in Trump’s first term, “MBZ and MBS offered to pay for a slush fund dedicated to helping the new administration with foreign policy goals”. Both Arab rulers saw this as part of an effort to help Trump win a second presidency.
In the same period, Kushner conceived the so-called Abraham Accords aimed at normalisation between Israel and the Arab states. He owned the file. No State Department desk, no regional bureau, no ambassador in the chain: a son-in-law with a security clearance and a direct line to the president negotiated directly with the Gulf rulers, according to the book. One goal was to sideline the question of a separate Palestinian state. The UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan signed.
The book also reveals that during that period Kushner helped negotiate a secret warming of diplomatic relations between Israel and the UAE — the arrangement that later became public as the Abraham Accords. Cole writes that “Kushner helped negotiate an agreement by Israel to help defend the UAE against a major Iranian military attack. The UAE needed to cover the cost of that emergency defence, and its government secretly made another transfer to Israel’s Central Bank. This was something like a rainy-day defence fund. Combined, the three accounts represented a secret foreign policy negotiated by Kushner with the leaders of Israel, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia.
“Although Kushner’s position as senior adviser to the president was unpaid, he was an official government employee. Not only did his position require financial disclosure for ethics regulations, but each year he worked in the White House he had to file both a public and a confidential financial form, the Executive Branch Personnel Public Financial Disclosure Report, known as a 278e disclosure. Because he had access to classified government secrets, Kushner was required to disclose any bank account to which he had signatory — or beneficiary — access.” But apparently, the president’s son-in-law did not comply.
The writer quotes a source that Kushner “promised MBZ he’d push their agenda with Trump if they participated in a fund. He wanted normalisation with Israel so that business could take off”. For the Gulf Arab governments, money was not a problem. “The Emiratis and the Saudis do this once a year. A billion or two is nothing for them, and if it gets them what they want, it’s money well spent,” the source told the author.
The book exposes the sordid linkage between power and corruption that marked Trump’s presidency. It also lays bare the unholy alliance between Israel and the Gulf governments, formed to change the political map of the Middle East. In the end, this design has left the region more destabilised than before.
The writer is an author and journalist.
X: @hidhussain
Published in Dawn, November 11th, 2026
Source: www.dawn.com
