Experts Debate Whether “Obama’s Iran Deal is Good for America”
Recently, “Intelligence Squared U.S.” held a debate on the nuclear deal currently being negotiated between the United States (along with Great Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia) and Iran.
Philip Gordon, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former senior advisor to President Obama as coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf Region, and Tom Pickering, who served five decades as a U.S. diplomat including positions as Undersecretary of State for political affairs and Ambassador to the U.N. as well as to Russia, Israel, and Jordan, argued that “Obama’s Iran deal is good for America.”
Arguing that the deal is not good were Mike Doran, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and former senior director in the National Security Council, and Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies where he also heads its Center on Sanctions and Illicit Finance.
Intelligence Squared U.S. presents debates on a wide range of provocative topics and aims “to provide a new forum for intelligent discussion, grounded in facts and informed by reasoned analysis; to transcend the toxically emotional and the reflexively ideological; and to encourage recognition that the opposing side has intellectually respectable views.”
The debate winner is determined by audience votes. The audience voted on the proposition that “Obama’s Iran deal is good for America” before the debate and again after the debate. The winner is the side that most increased its share of the vote. In other words, who swayed the most voters? The motion was defeated and the audience voted that the deal is not good for America.
You can read the transcript here or watch the debate here.
The debate is lengthy but certainly worthwhile.
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