(FreedomBeacon.com)- The protests going on in Iran have resulted in the negotiations for a revamped 2015 nuclear deal with the U.S. being dead, according to the one-time spokeswoman for the State Department under former President Donald Trump.
The Biden administration had been hoping to strike a new nuclear deal with Iran, after Trump withdrew from it while he was in the White House. However, the protests that have swept through Iran have put an end to that.
Morgan Ortagus spoke at a panel last Friday as part of the Richard Nixon Foundation’s Grand Strategy Summit, which was held in Washington, D.C. He has some insight into the topic of Iran, as he served in the State Department under Mike Pompeo, who was the secretary of state in the Trump administration.
As Ortagus said at the panel discussion:
“I don’t see any room or any space for [the Biden administration] to build back into [the nuclear negotiations]. It would be a political disaster in the U.S. and a disaster for the people of Iran who are rejecting this regime.”
She even asked how President Joe Biden could “financially empower the very oppressors of the women and teenagers we’re supposed to be standing up for and standing with?”
Ortagus was centrally involved during the Trump administration when the former president wanted to sanction the government in Iran. That’s why she has clout when he says that the current White House has “zero leverage” with this current regime at this point in time.
The protests are going on there throughout the country are likely the final straw that will end the Biden administration’s hopes of revamping the nuclear deal in some fashion with Iran.
The people who are protesting in Iran are calling for a total regime change. The Biden administration hasn’t gone that far as of yet, though it has condemned the fact that the government in Iran has cracked down on the protesters in a violent way.
Ortagus further said that when he entered the White House, the team Biden assembled “didn’t have a plan for Iran except for going back into the JCPOA,” which is the acronym that was given to the nuclear deal.
Even if the Biden administration were able to negotiate a “weak and pathetic deal” with Iran, Ortagus said she believed that a large majority of senators would’ve rejected it anyway.
She added that she believed Iran “played [Biden] for 18 months,” saying “I don’t see any strategy” to move forward on it.
Another former official in the State Department, Jon Alterman, who’s now the lead of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Middle East Program, didn’t agree with the assessment Ortagus gave at the panel.
He believe that the campaign of maximum pressure that the Trump administration put on Iran ended up failing because most of America’s allies weren’t on board with it.
He said:
“[It is] deeply mistaken and perhaps dishonest to argue the Biden admin thought the JCPOA was going to fix Iran. Our record of changing governments and putting something better in their place is pretty checkered.”
