Iran deal is dead

 Washington Free Beacon:

The Biden administration’s negotiations over a revamped version of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal are dead as the result of massive anti-regime protests that have swept across the Islamic Republic, according to the former Trump administration’s State Department spokeswoman.

"I don’t see any room or any space for [the administration] to build back into" the long-stalled negotiations, Morgan Ortagus, who served under former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, said during a panel discussion Friday afternoon at the Richard Nixon Foundation’s Grand Strategy Summit in Washington, D.C. "It would be a political disaster in the U.S. and a disaster for the people of Iran who are rejecting this regime."

How could the Biden administration "financially empower the very oppressors of the women and teenagers we’re supposed to be standing up for and standing with?" Ortagus asked.

Ortagus, who played a central role in the Trump administration’s 2018 decision to abandon the nuclear deal and heavily sanction the Iranian regime, said the Biden administration has "zero leverage" with the Iranian regime at the moment. The nationwide protests that have swept across Iran in the last month are likely the final nail in the coffin for negotiations over a revamped nuclear deal, she said. While the Biden administration has condemned the Iranian government’s violent crackdown on protesters, it has refrained from repeating the protesters’ calls for regime change.

Upon entering office, President Joe Biden’s team "didn’t have a plan for Iran except for going back into the JCPOA," the official acronym for the Iran deal, Ortagus said. If the administration had been able to finalize another "weak and pathetic deal," Ortagus said that around three-fourths of the Senate would have rejected it. Iran, she added, "played [Biden] for 18 months" and "I don’t see any strategy" going forward.
...

The JCPOA never made any sense.  It put the genocidal religious bigots of Iran on a glide path to nuclear weapons.  The Trump administration was smart to abandon it.  The people of Iran have good reason to be protesting this awful regime.  We should be supporting the people of Iran and not its current government.

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