Podcast: Jared Kushner on Middle East peace & pandemic in the US

Jared Kushner:

Look, it's a global pandemic, and I think you're seeing all over the world, having it under control can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different countries. And so we're not at the beginning, we're not at the end. We're somewhere in the middle.

Ian Bremmer:

Hello and welcome to GZERO World. I'm Ian Bremmer. And today I'm sitting down with Senior Advisor to the President of the United States, Jared Kushner. We're going to talk about Middle East Peace, the pandemic, and the upcoming US election, a little China and Russia too. It's his second time on the show. I spoke with him in January when the White House unveiled its much-anticipated peace plan between Israelis and Palestinians.

Jared Kushner:

I sense this is the first real offer that they've ever had. It's a real offer. It has details. It has a map. And Israel's agreeing to a two-state solution and a map.

Ian Bremmer:

That went nowhere. But now, he says a historic deal between Israel and the UAE is proof that Trump's diplomacy is working. Let's get to it.

Announcer:

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Ian Bremmer:

Jared Kushner, Senior Advisor to the President, wonderful to be with you again.

Jared Kushner:

Thank you, and great to be with you.

Ian Bremmer:

26 years since the last Arab-Israel Agreement. President Trump fashions himself as a deal maker. Why in your eyes, should we really be paying attention to this?

Jared Kushner:

Well, like you just said, this is the first peace agreement that's been made in the Middle East in the last 26 years, and only the third peace agreement in the last 70 years with Israel. President Trump came into office promising to bring a different point of view to the region and the Middle East was a very big topic for discussion. In the last campaign, you had the Iran deal, which was a disaster. ISIS, which was roaming. They had a caliphate the size of Ohio. And you had a lot of our traditional allies feeling very alienated.

And so President Trump came in, and again, you can't turn a battleship around overnight, but over three-and-a-half years, he's done a lot of unconventional things. We've been criticized very much along the way, but this big result shows that the president's strategy has been on the right path. It's now produced some results. And I believe President Trump's also set the stage for many more good things to come in the Middle East and throughout the world.

Ian Bremmer:

Saudi's in play in terms of normalization?

Jared Kushner:

I think everyone's in play. I think that people are tired of being stuck in the past, and I think the younger generation is less stuck in the old conflict the way that the older generation is. But people want, they see Israel now as a military superpower, as an economic superpower, as a technology superpower. And they see huge opportunity by working together. And I think that a lot of the other Gulf countries now are seeing the deals that are starting to be announced out of Israel between Israeli and Emirati firms. And I think that they're saying, "Wait, we want to be in on the action."

And so I do think you're going to have a lot of people following fairly quickly, because again, at our core, we all just want to live better lives, want our countries to do great. We want to succeed. And this is just a really positive development for the region and for the world.

Ian Bremmer:

The top priority for so many administrations in the Middle East, including yours at the beginning, was Israel-Palestine. I wonder if you'd say, is it fair to say that the United States is not an honest broker between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but is an honest broker between Israel and say, the Gulf Allies?

Jared Kushner:

I think that you can only be an honest broker when you're telling the truth and you're saying how you really feel. I think the United States is an effective broker and in being effective, they're honest. We've been honest with everyone in the region about how we feel. And going back to your original statement about where we started, the president's first trip as president, normally a president goes to Canada for a photo op. President Trump got right to work. He went to Saudi Arabia, where he assembled the leaders of the 54 Muslim and Arab countries together. And in that speech, he laid out his four priorities for the Middle East. The first priority was Iran. He said, "We'd just given them 150 billion dollars in the disastrous Iran deal, several billion dollars in cash, and gave them a glide path to a nuclear weapon."

Iran was using that money to fund a lot of their proxies and to further destabilize the region. They always thrive by having the region divided in a way that kept everyone distracted so they could have more strength. The second priority the president laid out was ISIS. ISIS had a caliphate the size of Ohio. They were roaming free. They were beheading American journalists. They were terrorizing people. And they were planning attacks to America and other places from the territory they were holding. The third priority the president laid out was to counter radicalism in the long-term battle. You can't just take back the caliphate, but not fight the long-term ideological battle against people who were trying to pervert the religion of Islam.

And we launched in Saudi Arabia, two centers. One was a counter terror finance center to stop money from going to extremist groups. And the second thing that we launched was a counter extremism center to fight people and fight online content that was radicalizing as well. Both have been quite successful. The fourth priority was the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. But the president laid out very clearly, we need to form new alliances and we need to get past grievances. We need to try things differently. And the president's approach was not one where he went out and started lecturing people. He went out and tried to figure out what are our common interests? What are our common challenges? How do we bring people together? And this is a great manifestation.

I will say that after the president stopped in Saudi Arabia, he went from there to Israel, and then he went from Israel to Rome, where he met with the Pope to the back. And we called this agreement the Abraham Accords, which shows that the president's goal has been to bring the three Abrahamic faiths together to try to figure out how we can focus on shared opportunity. We're all come from the same place. We're all human beings. And we have to let some of the past divisions go by the wayside.

Ian Bremmer:

So I mean, if you look at the big steps that have been taken by the Trump administration over the past few years in the Middle East, moved the embassy to Jerusalem, recognition of the annexation of the Golan Heights by Israel. Then you have the Israeli-Palestinian deal that you rolled out with negotiation with the Israelis, but not with the Palestinians. And now, you have the breakthrough agreement and normalization of relations between the UAE and Israel. I mean, one thing that seems very clear is that the prioritization of things that have nothing to do with the Palestinians is pretty high.

I mean, if you're sitting as a Palestinian in today's environment, pretty much everything in the last few years has made it clear that you have less optionality than you used to. You're in a more challenging position vis-a-vis the Israelis, vis-a-vis the Gulf Arabs, vis-a-vis the Americans. Do you think that this is moving them more to a deal? Or do you think that it's just not that relevant? It doesn't matter what the Palestinians are up to going forward?

Jared Kushner:

Well, what I'll tell you, it's not moving them further away from a deal. So again, they have a perfect track record of not making a deal in 25 years. So what they don't have today is a veto over what happens in the rest of the region. What they do have today is a telephone. So anytime they want them engage, they can engage. What they also have today, which they didn't have before, is a very, very detailed outline for what Israel's willing to do. We had Israel, they agreed to a two-state solution. So now, if the Palestinians would like to have a state, they have a framework through which we can get them one. If they'd like to deal with the territorial issues for the first time in the negotiations ever, there's been a map that's been put out that Israel's agreed to publicly.

Again, when we met with President Abbas the first time, he said he wanted to make peace. And he said, "If you can get Israel to agree to a map, the rest will be easy on." That's the most critical item. Well, we've done that. And President Abbas and the Palestinians, they rejected our plan before they even saw what was in it. They started rejecting it before we put it out. I think thinking that it was going to be worse than it is. We also put together, again, our whole plan was about 180 pages filled with detail. And again, not a single detail has been criticized. We put out a 50 billion dollar plan to revitalize their economy and to help them live better lives, which would double the GDP of their area. It would create a million new jobs.

I mean, it's not that big of economy. It's 5 million people, so it's not that hard to do, but you need to have private capital that's willing to go in there. And private capital's not willing to go in if you don't have stable leadership, you don't have rule of law, you don't have security. So we've put a lot on the table for them. And again, President Trump is not going to chase them, but he really would like to make a deal. He promised the Palestinian people he would get them a fair offer. He's gotten them a great offer out of the gate. And again, when they're ready to have a deal, a deal is more real today than I believe it's ever been.

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, no question, people have criticized it in the sense that the percentage of land that they'd be offered is less than they would've been in the Clinton era accords, for example. But as you mentioned, they no longer have a veto over what's happening in the region like with the UAE. So it's more challenging for them in that regard. But they should also understand that that window is narrowing. I mean, it's becoming more challenging for them over time. There's also more pressure on them over time. I mean, the other piece of this is Iran. The Trump administration of course, left the Obama era Iran deal, which you've already referred to as disastrous on a couple of occasions.

The fact that the UAE and the Israelis prioritize their concern about Iran much more than they do the Palestinian issue certainly puts more pressure on the Iranians going forward. If Trump were to win, I mean, we know that if Biden wins, his interest would be to try to remake something that looks like the old Iranian deal that he was a part of. If Trump wins reelection, what do you think the next steps are? Do we see anything different as a consequence of another four years between the Trump administration and the Iranian government?

Jared Kushner:

So what I would say is that President Trump has worked so hard over the last three-and-a-half years to change the balance of power, to rebuild alliances that were broken, to I would say realign the region. And so that's taken a lot of work. The Iranian deal, what President Trump will do is he'll wait to make the right deal. But what he's been able to do, Iran used to export 2.6 million barrels of oil when President Trump got into office a day. That's now down to almost zero. So their foreign reserves are crumbling. Their economy is crumbling. President Trump has nothing against the Iranian people. He wants them to thrive. It's a fabulous culture, a fabulous society.

But their leadership right now is taking the money away from the people. And it's using what resources they had in order to really fund their proxy groups, which are really destabilizing the region all over the Middle East. And so I think what we've done is we've significantly weakened them, and that's led to less stability in Yemen, less stability in Syria. Even now, you see in Lebanon how much weakened Hezbollah is. And that's because we've stopped a lot of the funding that Iran's had. So giving Iran back the ability to have resources without a meaningful change in their behavior, I think would be a very destructive thing. And all of the great progress that we've made over three-and-a-half years would be gone like that in a second.

So I think that President Trump, he'll make a deal. Again, they keep saying to him, "Well, we'll meet if you go back into the JCPOA." And we say, "Well, if we like the JCPOA we wouldn't have gotten out of the JCPOA." And I will just say objectively, you look at the deals President Trump's made, there's some deals he hasn't made, but that's because he's not going to make bad deals. But I do think the JCPOA is probably one of the worst deals that America's ever made in the history of our country. And it caused a lot of instability in the world. And we've spent the last three-and-a-half years cleaning up the messes that it caused.

But thanks to the great diplomacy of the team and the leadership of the president, we've been able to create some lemonade out of the lemon, and we're trying to figure out how to continue to build on the momentum that we have right now.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, I think to the extent that you and I have talked about this in the past, that there are really big changes, I think a lot of it just has to do with where there's a recognition that the United States is a lot more asymmetrically powerful than the countries that it's dealing with. I think you see that with the ability to pass through the USMCA, between the Mexicans and the Canadians, immigration issues on the south, the Mexican border, as well as when we're talking about the UAE or the Saudis or the Israelis. There are countries that the United States gets along with very well, but they're also the countries that the United States does not need as much nearly as they need the United States.

And I think to the extent that that was something that you guys are willing to lean into, that ended up leading to more influence and more changes from your administration than others would've otherwise seen. So I think that's an interesting dynamic that we're playing out. It certainly makes China harder. President Trump has said that China is, his relationship with President Xi is not as good as it was a year ago, two years ago. In fact, on almost every area of US-China policy, it seems to be heading towards more confrontation right now. Would you say that we are turning towards containment as a policy towards a China that is not behaving the way we want them to?

Jared Kushner:

I'm not sure that you can use a traditional framing to describe where we're headed with China. I think that we're right now in unchartered waters. Before the virus, I think that we'd agreed to a relationship of coexistence, where we were fighting to protect American interests. I think we'd made a great trade deal that, again, it took us many years to fight. And keep in mind, even when the president made the trade deal, we still have 250 billion dollars of tariffs on China, 25% and then another a hundred, and I think 17 billion, 10%. So we still have not taken off a lot of our tariffs. We just haven't up update. And that really was showing China that for the first time, they didn't have a sucker in the White House. They were being dealt with appropriately. We were dealing with their aggression.

And they said that they really wanted to make some changes, and the agreement laid out a pathway for them to do that. And so we were on that course. And look, we weren't sure if they were going to do it or not, but we were going to give them a shot to go that way. And I think that if they would've followed the pathway, which it was looking like they were going to do, that would've led to a place, we're going to a good place. And keep in mind at that point, President Trump was not mad at China because again, they got away with murder in terms of what they were doing from a trade point of view. They were not following all the international rules. They were cheating and doing things differently. And nobody was calling them out or enforcing any consequences to it.

And they had a phenomenal strategy of just tapping people along and playing a lot of the politicians around the world for suckers. And they got away with it. President Trump was the first president and the first world leader to really confront them. He had the might of the American economy to do that. And we were able to come to an understanding and come to what was a fairly good step forward. And we thought that there were more steps that could be taken. The virus that came over from China obviously, is a major setback. We still are not satisfied to understand exactly where it came from, how it came about. The World Health Organization, the Chinese authorities, they have not provided the access that we've asked for.

I do think there's a lot of decisions that were made that we still have a lot of questions about. And hopefully, those questions will start to get answered soon. But the relationship between America and China will not be the same until we get to some kind of satisfactory answer on what happened with this virus. And then we need to figure out what happens next. But I would say that China's relationship with America and with the rest of the world has been severely hampered by the virus. But the first priority right now is getting through the virus, making sure we can keep people safe, we get all the necessary resources we need to all the places that need it. And then in addition, making sure that we keep our economy strong, because we're doing great with vaccines.

We have six vaccines that we're manufacturing and they're in different phases. We had the fastest vaccine ever to a phase three trial. The previous record was 13 months. We were able to do it in four. And then the second vaccine went in four months and one week. So we're making significant progress on vaccines. But President Trump is very intent on when we get to a vaccine and we're able to defeat this pandemic, he wants to make sure we have a strong country left at the end of it. And we haven't surrendered our entire economy in the course of this fight. So this is a very intense time for America. We have a lot of issues obviously, that we're focused on at home. But what happens with China when this is over will be probably one of the most significant course settings of the next several decades.

Ian Bremmer:

Would you say that we now have the pandemic under control in our country?

Jared Kushner:

Look, it's a global pandemic. And I think you're seeing all over the world, having it under control can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different countries. But where we are now is we know a lot more than we did five months ago. We know who's most at risk. We know who has much less risk. We continue to make decisions based on the data. Five months ago, there was a lot of fear about the fatality rates that came, and we realized that certain populations have different impact than others. And we also had a lot of fear on the supply side. So at that time, a lot of things were being invented. We had governors saying they needed 40,000 ventilators. We had states saying they didn't have enough personal protective equipment for the hospitals, masks, ventilators, tests, all these things.

We've dramatically surged supplies. We've been working with all the governors. Some governors have done a better job than others. And obviously, when this is done, people will look back on the case fatality rates, they'll look on the economy, they'll look at all the different criteria that they'll judge it and they'll say, "Who did better?" But at this point in time, we feel like we do have all the resources we need, both in terms of what we've produced domestically, what we've brought back from overseas to manufacture, and what we've been able to ship in through Project Air Bridge. And then in addition to that, we now have a lot of therapeutics.

So we have Remdesivir. We're working on something with convalescent plasma, monoclonal antibodies. So what we're finding is that if you get the disease today, it's much less deadly than if you would've gotten it five months ago, just because we know how to treat it much better. And that's a good thing. And then we're very advanced in the vaccine, and obviously, that's a critical priority, because once we get to the vaccine and we can prove that it's safe and effective, that really allows us to start the beginning of the end. So we're not at the beginning, we're not at the end. We're somewhere in the middle, but we're trying to use the data we have to be much more strategic.

One great example is we're doubling and tripling down on the nursing homes. I think about 50% of the mortality right now has come from nursing homes. So we have to do everything we can to prevent spread to nursing homes, because you have a lot of DNRs, do not resuscitate, in the nursing home. And once people get it it's just harder and it leads to death much quicker. So over the last month, we've been redirecting all of our point-of-care tests, which are the fastest tests that we have to protect the nursing homes to make sure that we can keep the virus out of those nursing homes. And that will enable us to significantly decrease the mortality.

So we're doing our best to work with the governors to balance keeping ourselves open as a country, protecting the American way of life, making sure we're not taking away citizens liberties. We trust people to make the right decisions. We continue to put out the right information. We've tried very hard not to allow people who want to politicize the pandemic to be successful in doing so. And we're doing our best to preserve life, to bring safety, and obviously, to save the economy. But it's a global pandemic. It's an unprecedented challenge. And we've pulled off a lot of amazing things in order to put ourselves in the position we're in right now to hopefully get through this as well as possible.

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, nobody would want to have a pandemic hit the country, certainly not in an election cycle. It makes it a lot more challenging. We've seen in blue states versus red states, the cases first, of course, were hitting the blue states a hell of a lot harder than the red states after that. You've said that you do not believe that President Trump is in any way politicizing the pandemic. I'm asking you, Jared, do you really believe that in the middle of this election campaign?

Jared Kushner:

Look, there are certain people who are attacking him based on what he does or doesn't do. I'll give you an example. And now again, I really don't want to get into the politics of the pandemic, but you have certain senators who will keep tweeting, "Where is the President's testing plan?" Well, we submitted it. We put out a testing plan three months ago. And then we submitted a plan to Congress. Yet they keep saying that there's no testing plan. You have some people saying, "Use the Defense Production Act." We've been using the Defense Production Act. You had certain politician who may or may not be running against the president, say, "These are the seven things I would do if I was in control." Well, we did all those seven things.

So they're putting out a lot of misinformation, which undermines public trust. And quite frankly, I don't think that that's very helpful at this point in time. What's most helpful is being in a position where we can continue to inform the public, not scare the public, give public data and make sure that we are able to... You don't have unlimited amount of resources. No country does. We have a lot more than other countries based on the great job that the federal government has done to resource it. But obviously, you have a lot of politicians who have played politics with it. But we continue just to do the job and inform the American people and get people what they need.

Again, you saw the news reports initially about how hospitals weren't going to have masks and people were going to die 'cause they didn't have ventilators. And you saw that happening in Italy. But I can tell you, after all these months, we got all the supplies needed to the frontline medical workers who needed it. Anyone who needed a ventilator got a ventilator. And people say we're not doing enough testing, but we've done more testing than anyone else in the world, and we continue to accelerate that. So we're trying to use testing as a strategic tool to help us reduce mortality. And our case fatality rate has gone down dramatically, and it continues to every month as we know more.

So again, we're just focused on doing the job. And my sense is people will judge afterwards whether we did the right job or the wrong job. I think we've done a lot more right than we've done wrong, and we've saved a lot of lives because of that.

Ian Bremmer:

Do you feel comfortable... A lot of people have been... A big controversy around how people are going to vote. Given what you just said. Do you feel comfortable assuring the American people that it will be safe for them to vote in person come Election Day?

Jared Kushner:

So I think that there's a lot of precautions being taken. Again, if it's safe to go to the supermarket to buy groceries, there's a lot of things that you can do, then it should be safe to go out and vote. I do think that what's happening now is you're seeing a lot of people trying to push a system that has not been proven. So universal mail-in voting is something that has not been done. If you want to do it right, it would probably take five to 10 years to get it right, and they're trying to push this through in five months. Dr. Fauci the other day said that people should not be at risk to go out and vote in person.

There are some accommodations. If you want to request an absentee ballot, that's a tried-and-true method. But a universal mail-in push ballot like they're trying to do, where they send ballots to everybody now, I think that's a recipe for a total disaster and will definitely take steps to undermine people's confidence in the democracy, which is not what we need in this time.

Ian Bremmer:

Thank you very much. Jared Kushner, always good to be with you. Thanks for coming on the show.

Jared Kushner:

Thank you, Ian. All the best.

Announcer:

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