ANALYSIS: Vance Sidelined, Kushner Brought In — The Inside Story of Family Diplomacy That’s Playing with Nuclear Fire

Marco Rubio watches from the sidelines

Marco Rubio, who has served as Secretary of State since January 2025, was not mentioned even once in the reports on the Oman negotiations. His spokesperson, Matthew Miller, declined to comment on Kushner and Witkoff’s mission to Pakistan on April 24. The State Department—with its 75,000 employees, 275 embassies, and dozens of Iran experts trained over the past twenty years—is watching from the sidelines while the president’s son-in-law flies to Islamabad in a private jet.

This is not an anomaly of the second Trump administration. It is its guiding principle. Trump has always believed that institutions are obstacles and that personal relationships are solutions. Between 2017 and 2021, Kushner had already conducted parallel negotiations with Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates without systematically informing the State Department. The Abraham Accords—whatever one may think of them—were concluded by bypassing the traditional diplomatic apparatus. For Trump, the proof is in the pudding. The method has been validated. It now applies to nuclear Iran.

The problem with using the Abraham Accords as a model is that they involved countries that already wanted an agreement and were seeking political cover. Khamenei’s Iran is not seeking cover. It is seeking guarantees for the regime’s survival. These are two fundamentally different sets of negotiations—and confusing the two could prove very costly, one way or the other.

Vance: The Man You Send When You Want to Be Able to Say You Tried

JD Vance was deployed to handle the Iran dossier in March 2026, during an initial round of preliminary contacts. At the time, sources close to the national security team described his mission as “exploratory”—a diplomatic term meaning he had no mandate to conclude anything. He was sent to take the temperature, not to sign the thermometer. When the temperature proved too high, he was replaced by someone who, in Trumpian logic, can speak directly to regional decision-makers because he has met them in a business context.

And yet, the problem isn’t Vance. The problem is the structure. No vice president can conduct serious diplomacy when the president reserves the decisive channels for his inner circle. Vance can hold press conferences, fly on official planes, and deliver speeches about American resolve—but when the moment comes to make decisions, he’s not in the room. He’s on the plane back home.

Pakistan is a nuclear power. That is no small matter.

Islamabad possesses between 160 and 170 nuclear warheads, according to estimates by the Federation of American Scientists published in January 2026. Pakistan is one of the few nuclear states to have transferred enrichment technology to other countries—the A.Q. Khan network provided blueprints to Iran, Libya, and North Korea between 1987 and 2003. The fact that Washington has chosen Islamabad as an intermediary for negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program, without this aspect being discussed publicly, is either astonishing naivety or a calculated move that no one is explaining.

Iran, for its part, has been enriching uranium to 60% purity since at least July 2023—just three steps away from weapons-grade material. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency reported in March 2026 that Tehran had restricted their access to two additional underground sites. Every week of fruitless negotiations is a week during which the centrifuges keep spinning. Sending them via Islamabad rather than directly—that is to accept that this delay exists, that these weeks are passing, that this fuel is being enriched.

Let’s be clear: if Iran reaches the threshold of a nuclear bomb during these indirect negotiations led by a son-in-law and a real estate developer, history will record that the United States prioritized the form of its diplomacy over its outcome. It will be in the textbooks. Not as a tragedy. As a mistake.

Iran’s Rejection of Oman: What Tehran Really Said

Sources close to the Iranian delegation, cited by Reuters on April 23, 2026, described a firm stance: Iran agrees to discuss the scope of its nuclear program but refuses any commitment to dismantle enrichment capabilities until economic sanctions are fully lifted. This is not a negotiating position—it is a precondition. The difference is crucial: a negotiating position leaves room for compromise; a precondition closes the door until it is met.

Trump, for his part, declared on April 22 from Mar-a-Lago that “Iran must stop its enrichment before we can talk about anything else.” These two lines intersect at a right angle. They will not find their intersection in Islamabad via Jared Kushner—unless someone, somewhere, agrees to shift their fundamental position. And nothing in the behavior of either side over the past eighteen months suggests that such a person exists.

The Value of Informal Networks in a Formal Deadlock

It would be intellectually dishonest to deny that Kushner has something Vance does not. He is personally acquainted with Mohammed bin Salman, the Emir of Qatar Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and several financial intermediaries in the Gulf who maintain business ties with Iranian entities. These relationships are not diplomatic—they run deeper than diplomacy, in a sense, because they involve money, and money never takes a vacation.

And yet, there is a line that the address book does not cross. Tehran’s decisions on nuclear issues are not made in boardrooms. They are made in the office of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, 85, who has ruled Iran since 1989, who has outlived Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump again—and who has learned, over the course of these decades, that Americans bluff more often than they strike. No informal intermediary can change this equation.

Khamenei is 85 years old. He has seen seven U.S. presidents come and go. Each one told him that this time was different. None of them changed the fundamental balance of power. Why would Kushner succeed where the state apparatus has failed? Because he knows wealthy people in the Gulf? The wealthy people in the Gulf also know their limits when it comes to Qom.

The Logic of a Possible Agreement—and Its Price

A potential agreement does exist. Its outlines have been known since the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiations: limiting enrichment to a verifiable civilian level, reducing the stockpile of enriched uranium, and granting expanded access to the IAEA—in exchange for a gradual lifting of economic sanctions and security guarantees. This agreement existed. It was working. Trump unilaterally tore it up in May 2018, withdrawing from an agreement that his own intelligence agencies confirmed Iran was complying with.

This precedent is the main reason why Tehran is setting preconditions today. Why commit to reducing its capabilities if the agreement can be torn up by the next U.S. president? This question is not rhetorical—it has a legal basis. And it will not find an answer in Kushner’s diplomatic briefcase, because the answer would require either a treaty ratified by the Senate—something Trump never sought—or a multilateral guarantee that neither Kushner nor Witkoff has the mandate to offer.

Iranian experts at the State Department are looking at their screens

Rob Malley, the Biden administration’s special envoy for Iran, had assembled a team of twelve specialists—Arabists, Farsi speakers, experts in international nuclear law, and former IAEA inspectors. This team was disbanded in January 2025. Some of its members went to work at universities. Others joined NGOs. Still others simply left Washington. The institutional memory of twenty years of negotiations with Iran dissipated in ninety days.

This is not just abstract information. It is a lost capability. When Kushner met with his Pakistani counterpart on April 24, he did not have behind him twenty years of negotiation transcripts with Tehran, maps of Iran’s red lines, or analyses of the signals sent by the regime’s various factions. He has his own memory, the briefings prepared for him, and his conviction—sincere, probably—that personal relationships can replace all of that. They cannot. They never have.

I’ve met diplomats who’ve spent their careers working on Iran. People who read Farsi down to the finest nuances, who know the difference between what Zarif says in public and what he signals in private. Those people are no longer there. In their place, we’ve sent someone who builds buildings in Miami. That’s not a metaphor. It’s the reality of April 24, 2026.

Islamabad has its own agenda

Pakistan is not a neutral messenger. Islamabad has maintained complex relations with Washington—marked by financial dependence and strategic mistrust—since the war in Afghanistan. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif is hosting Kushner and Witkoff amid parallel negotiations on a U.S.-Pakistan trade agreement that Trump has made contingent on Islamabad’s cooperation on several regional issues. Pakistan therefore has an interest in appearing useful—which is not the same as actually being useful.

And yet, Islamabad also has red lines it will not cross. Pakistan cannot afford to alienate Iran—a neighboring country, a trading partner, and a potential energy corridor via the IP gas pipeline, which is blocked by U.S. sanctions. Kushner and Witkoff are asking Pakistan to put pressure on a country with which Pakistan needs to maintain relations. That’s like asking someone to saw off the branch they’re sitting on. The Pakistanis smile, serve tea, and pass on whatever they deem appropriate to share. Not what Washington wants to hear.

A Country That Outsources Its Own Foreign Policy

The United States has the most powerful diplomatic network in human history: 275 embassies and consulates, and thousands of agents trained over decades. Unparalleled technical and human intelligence capabilities. And yet, on the two most dangerous issues facing the planet—nuclear Iran and the war in Ukraine—the Trump administration has chosen to send private emissaries with no legislative mandate, no obligation to transparency, and no mechanism for congressional oversight.

This choice is not a management error. It is an ideological conviction: that the “deep state”—a term Trump uses to refer to the entire institutional apparatus—is an obstacle, not a resource. That trusted individuals are better than competent ones. That personal loyalty is a diplomatic qualification. One can debate this conviction. But we cannot deny what it produces: a U.S. foreign policy that resembles a family council administering an empire—with all that entails in terms of uncharted risks, unassumed responsibilities, and unforeseen damage.

What haunts me about this story is not Vance’s humiliation or Kushner’s overwhelming power. It is the image of the centrifuges. They spin at Fordow, 80 meters beneath the mountain, while men in suits discuss informal arrangements in hotels in Islamabad. The composition of the rock does not change based on the quality of the negotiators. Nor does that of the uranium.

Europe Is Missing from the Picture

In all these maneuvers—Oman, Islamabad, the Gulf consultations—Europe is absent. It was not consulted, not kept informed in real time, and not included in the decision-making processes. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom—the three European members of the 2015 agreement, the “E3”—learned of the failure of the Oman talks through the same news agency dispatches as the general public. The European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Kaja Kallas, issued a statement “taking note” of the developments—a diplomatic way of saying that there is nothing to say because nothing was known.

And yet, the consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran—or a U.S. military strike on its facilities—do not stop at the Atlantic. Oil prices, migration flows from a region in turmoil, the stability of European allies in the Gulf, and Israel’s stance—all of this affects Europe directly, immediately, and physically. Being excluded from the negotiations does not shield us from these consequences. Europe knows this. It is watching from the sidelines nonetheless, because it has not found a way to force its way in.

When Informal Diplomacy Fails on the Nuclear Issue

There is a scenario that analysts discuss in private but that governments refuse to articulate publicly: if indirect negotiations fail, and if Iran crosses the threshold to a nuclear bomb within the next eighteen months, Trump will face a binary choice that all his predecessors have rejected. Accept a nuclear Iran—something he has said he would never do. Or launch a military strike—something he has threatened to do, though no one knows if he will actually follow through.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, has been waiting for the answer to this question for three years. Israel has carried out at least four sabotage operations against Iran’s nuclear program since 2020—assassinations of scientists, explosions at enrichment sites, and cyberattacks on control systems. These operations have slowed the program without stopping it. If Washington sends signals of resignation, Jerusalem could decide to strike on its own—triggering an Iranian response that would not stop at Israel’s borders. This is the scenario that Kushner and Witkoff are supposed to prevent with their address books and private jet flights.

Here is the truth that no one dares to write in the hushed columns of foreign policy: we may be eighteen months away from a war in the Middle East on a scale greater than anything we’ve seen since 1973, and the diplomacy tasked with preventing it is led by men who are not accountable to Congress, have no obligation to transparency, and no experience with the military consequences of their miscalculations.

The Korean Precedent: When Informal Diplomacy Almost Worked

In 2018, Trump’s personal diplomacy produced something unexpected: three meetings with Kim Jong-un in Singapore, Hanoi, and the Korean Demilitarized Zone. These meetings did not result in any verifiable agreement, any documented dismantlement, or any international inspections. North Korea now possesses between 40 and 50 nuclear warheads, according to the U.S. Institute for Science and International Security—twice as many as in 2017. Personal diplomacy produced historic photos and a deteriorated strategic situation.

Iran is watching this precedent closely. Tehran has learned its lesson from Pyongyang: negotiating with Trump without institutional constraints means risking an agreement that is non-binding and can be scrapped with the next tweet. That is why Iran is setting preconditions rather than entering into open negotiations. That is why Oman failed. That is why Islamabad will not be enough. And that is why we are here, in April 2026, watching a vice president return empty-handed while the president’s son-in-law boards another plane.

Western Complicity in Family Arrangements

Since 2017, Western democracies have struck an uncomfortable balance with the Trump method: protesting publicly, adapting discreetly, and continuing to work. When Kushner led the negotiations on the Abraham Accords without coordinating with Europe, people shrugged it off, saying that the result mattered more than the method. When Witkoff negotiated the ceasefire in Gaza in January 2025 by bypassing UN mechanisms, people welcomed the agreement while ignoring how it had been reached. We’ve normalized the exceptional. We’ve incorporated the anomaly as standard operating procedure.

And we—you reading this from Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Montreal—scrolled past these news stories without really pausing to consider them. We accepted that negotiations on the survival of nuclear nonproliferation were led by men chosen for their personal loyalty rather than their proven expertise. We found it interesting, sometimes shocking, often spectacular—and we moved on. That is our part in this story. It is not flattering.

I wonder what our children will say when they study this period. Not “How could you have let this happen?”—that question has already been answered. But: “Did you know?” Yes. We knew. We watched. We found it fascinating. We didn’t press the issue long enough for our persistence to cost the decision-makers anything.

Indignation Fatigue and Its Real Consequences

There is an economy of outrage. Every new violation of norms—every private envoy, every circumvention of institutions, every deal struck in a hotel hallway—generates a few hours of anger on social media, a few editorials, a few parliamentary sessions. Then the next story comes along. This fatigue of outrage is not a moral failing—it is a neurological limitation. But it has concrete political consequences: norms erode not because we decide to abandon them, but because we no longer have the energy to defend them.

The diplomatic institutions that Trump is bypassing with Kushner and Witkoff were built after 1945 precisely because the previous generation had learned, at the cost of fifty million lives, what informal arrangements between trusted confidants lead to when it comes to matters of war and peace. These institutions are imperfect, slow, bureaucratic, and sometimes corrupt. They are also the only thing standing between “we’ll work it out among ourselves” and “we’ll go to war.”

The Inevitable Failure of an Approach That Has Already Failed

The talks in Islamabad will not result in an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. Not this week. Probably not this year. Not because Kushner and Witkoff lack the will or the intelligence—but because the nature of the problem exceeds the capacity of any informal intermediary. Iran wants guarantees of durability that only a treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate can offer. Trump isn’t looking for a treaty—he’s looking for a photo op and a victory statement before the November 2026 midterms. These two objectives cannot be reconciled in a hotel room in Islamabad.

What will come to be known as “the Kushner approach” will therefore, at best, be a new round of preliminary discussions that will allow each side to say it tried without having truly risked anything. At worst, it will be a resounding failure that will give Tehran the argument it has been waiting for to accelerate its program, claiming that Washington was never serious. In either case, the centrifuges at Fordow will continue to spin. In either case, JD Vance will be watching from outside the room where the real decisions are being made.

What sticks with me about this story isn’t the palace intrigue—Vance versus Kushner, the state versus the family. It’s the image of a 75,000-person U.S. diplomatic apparatus reduced to spectators while two men with no legal mandate attempt to negotiate the future of the Middle East in a third country. If it works, Trump will say he was right to do without the experts. If it fails, he’ll say it’s the fault of the experts who weren’t there. In either case, the institution loses. In either case, the centrifuges win.

What Remains When Everything Else Disappears

Somewhere in Natanz or Fordow, there are technicians who arrive every morning, put on their coveralls, check the control screens, and record the enrichment levels in logbooks. They don’t know who Jared Kushner is. They probably don’t know that men are debating their work in hotels in Islamabad. They do what they’ve been told to do. They turn the knobs. They read the numbers. They record the progress.

And every day that passes without a verifiable, binding agreement is a day when those numbers rise. 60%, then 70%, then 90%. Not because someone decided to go to war. Not because diplomacy has officially failed. But because while trusted envoys shuttle between capitals with their address books and their confidence in their connections, no one has the key to lock the door to the engine room.

What History Will Remember About April 24, 2026

On April 24, 2026, while Jared Kushner was landing in Islamabad and JD Vance was unloading his luggage in Washington, the International Atomic Energy Agency released its quarterly report on Iran. Iran’s stockpile of 60% enriched uranium had increased by 23% in three months. The report was available on the IAEA’s website. No one in the major U.S. media mentioned it that day. The story of the day was the son-in-law and the vice president.

And yet—and this is perhaps the most important point of everything I’ve written here—these two stories are one and the same. Vance’s ouster and the increase in uranium stockpiles are not two separate issues. They are two sides of the same reality: a superpower that chooses to handle the most dangerous issue on the planet as a family affair, while the raw material for a bomb accumulates beneath an Iranian mountain that no one can photograph and no one can inspect.

I have no neat conclusion to offer you. I have no formula that neatly heals this wound. What I do have is the image of centrifuges spinning while men negotiate. And the intuition—unfortunately well-documented—that we may be witnessing, right now, the final months during which an agreement was still possible without anyone paying the price in blood.

The question that remains after you put down your phone

If Kushner and Witkoff return from Islamabad without a deal—as they will—and if Vance remains sidelined from the next rounds of negotiations—as he will be—and if the centrifuges continue to spin—as they are doing—who, within the U.S. government, will have the mandate, the legitimacy, and the courage to tell Trump that this approach isn’t working? Marco Rubio, whose department is being bypassed? Congress, which is watching? The European allies, who aren’t in the room?

There is no reassuring answer to this question. There are only trusted aides on planes, centrifuges in the mountains, and the dull thud of a door that we failed to open in time—closing, millimeter by millimeter, on everything we had vowed never to let happen.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist