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Let's bring in Victoria Coates, Vice President of National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation. You probably heard Senator Jack Reed talking to Shannon Bream a little bit earlier in the hour. He said this potential deal with Iran that the Trump administration appears ready to sign is not giving us anything that we didn't have under Barack Obama. Your reaction. Well, good afternoon, John. Good to be with you. I think Senator Reed is in a rather difficult position as a card-carrying supporter of the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the JCPOA, which failed miserably. You know, he's trying to cover his back here and say, "Oh, this deal isn't going to be any good because we already had all this with the JCPOA." That is just categorically false. For starters, we don't know what's in this deal. And I think everybody on X should take a deep breath and stop freaking out about a deal we haven't seen yet and, you know, being in a race to be wrong. But let's look at what we do know. We do know President Trump was the only president willing to take major military action against Iran in advance of any negotiations and to take also major economic action against them to decimate their economy. This gives him leverage President Obama never had in those. And what's more, we're hearing very clearly out of the White House no cash up front like the Obama people did and dismantle the nuclear program. Don't enshrine it in some deal so they can restart it again later. That's what Senator Reed is trying to defend. But apparently there's going to be some kind of a 60-day negotiating period after the agreement is signed. You know, what's to say? What's to prevent Iran from, you know, dragging its feet and at the end of 60 days saying, "Oh, we didn't really mean it. We don't want to do this deal." I think what happened last week is what prevents that from happening, the additional strikes from the United States where, as Secretary Hegseth was saying, we can strike whatever we want whenever we want in Iran. And they know that now. They might not have fully taken that on board before Operation Epic Fury and before the U.S. went back in last week to take out some more, you know, missile launchers, some more radar systems, and we can keep doing that. So it's entirely up to them if they would like to do the sensible thing and actually come to this good deal for the Iranian people. Or do they want to just keep on being obstreperous? And I'm hearing a lot of reports about political fracturing inside Iran. It may be we don't have to do that much to push the situation over the edge. Yeah, so much of their leadership has been decimated. It's kind of hard to know who is in charge right now, but I guess it's the guy who is basically in command of the Revolutionary Guard there. Yeah, that would be Vahini. And so he controls the guns, and that's a pretty good place to start if you want to be in power in Iran right now. But we also have the new supreme leader who's showing potentially signs of life, Mashtaba Khamenei, the son of the old one. And, you know, the president has been saying that he's somebody we might be able to come to an arrangement with. But my big question tonight, John, is it does it even matter what's in this deal? Is Iran too damaged both in terms of their infrastructure and their economy to be able to recover regardless of what's in this deal? I think that's a very real possibility. So let's see what comes out. But they have a just world of problems regardless of what's on this piece of paper. UN Ambassador Michael Walts, as you might expect, is defending the Trump administration's position here. He says this is way better than any negotiating the Obama administration did. Listen. Under the JCPOA, under Obama's deal, there was not anytime anywhere verification. They could determine or even delay the inspectors. And most importantly, they could just call a site a military site, and then it was off limits. And number two, you're not going to see, you know, these pallets of cash moving up front. It is going to be pay for performance. So it seems that after 47 years, the Iranians maybe are realizing there's a new sheriff in town. I think so. And I would add to Ambassador Walts' list, you know, number three, which is I haven't seen any sunsets on this deal. And if there were any, they would be a whole lot longer than 10 years. Say we had Senator Reid's dream. We'd stayed in the JCPOA. Well, guess what? It expired last year. So that wouldn't even be in effect at this point. That's a non-deal. And so that is not a permanent solution as Ambassador Walts was also saying. It didn't get rid of all of this infrastructure. They kept it. And then after President Biden came in in 2021, they activated all of the sophisticated centrifuges. And that's when they spun up their highly enriched uranium. So I think what President Trump has done, which is demonstrating overwhelming, devastating military and economic superiority, has given him the leverage to negotiate something meaningful, but also to damage the regime so badly. As I said before, I don't know that they can recover. We'll see. Victoria Coates from the Heritage Foundation. Thank you.

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