The Iran Nuclear Deal was a signature foreign policy achievement of the Obama Administration. Despite keeping the United States in the nuclear deal, President Trump has repeatedly stated that he wants a major renegotiation or withdrawal from the agreement. What will the future of the Iran nuclear deal be? How will modifying the deal affect Middle Eastern politics?

Join the Government and Politics Association in a discussion of the future of the Iran nuclear deal. Moderated by Political Science Professor Alex Weisiger, the panel will feature:
– Jamal Abdi, Vice President of Policy at the National Iranian American Council.
– John Ghazvinian, Associate Director of the Penn Middle East Center
– Jeffrey Prescott, former Senior Director of the National Security Council under the Obama Administration.

The panel will be held on April 16th at 5:30 pm at Perry World House, Global Policy Lab. Food will be served!

Jamal Abdi, Vice President for Policy at the NIAC
Jamal Abdi joined the National Iranian American Council as Policy Director in November 2009, directing NIAC’s efforts to monitor policies and legislation, and to educate and advocate on behalf of the Iranian-American community.

Abdi joined NIAC’s team following his work in the US Congress as Policy Advisor to Representative Brian Baird (D-WA). As one of a small number of Iranian Americans working on the Hill, he served as a Congressional advisor, liaison, and expert on foreign affairs, immigration, and defense. Prior to coming to DC, Abdi worked in his home state of Washington as a field organizer for national Congressional elections, coordinating and establishing grassroots campaign efforts in Seattle and Bellevue. He received his B.A. from the University of Washington in Seattle, majoring in Political Science with a focus on International Relations.

Jeffrey Prescott
Jeffrey Prescott is a strategic consultant to the Penn Biden Center. Prescott served as Special Assistant to President Obama and Senior Director for Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the Gulf States on the National Security Council. He joined the Obama Administration in 2010 as a White House Fellow, serving as Vice President Biden’s Deputy National Security Advisor and senior Asia advisor. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Prior to the White House, Prescott was a Senior Research Scholar and Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School and Deputy Director of Yale’s China Center. He founded and directed the Yale Center’s Beijing office in 2002 and was a Visiting Scholar at Peking University Law School. As a Luce Scholar in 2001, he was a visiting professor at Fudan University in Shanghai.

Previously, Prescott was a Bernstein Fellow and staff attorney at the Lawyers Committee on Human Rights (now Human Rights First), where he helped establish a rights defenders program to protect lawyers and activists at risk around the world. He also served as law clerk to the Hon. Walter K. Stapleton, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Prescott is a graduate of Boston University and Yale Law School.

John Ghazvinian
John Ghazvinian is an author, historian and former journalist, specializing in the history of US-Iran relations. He is the author of Iran and America: A History (Knopf, 2019) and Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil (Harcourt, 2007), as well as coeditor of American and Muslim Worlds before 1900 (Routledge, 2019). He has written for such publications as Newsweek, The Nation, the Sunday Times and the Huffington Post, and has taught modern Middle East history at a number of colleges and universities in the Philadelphia area. He earned his doctorate in history at Oxford University, with a specialization in British travelers to the Middle East in the seventeenth century.

Alex Weisiger
Alex Weisiger, Ph.D. Columbia University, 2008, studies international politics, focusing in particular on political decisions relating to the use of force. His book, Logics of War: Explanations for Limited and Unlimited Conflicts, explores the sources of variation in the destructiveness of wars between countries. In other work, he examines the phenomenon of regional systems of war, the relevance of systemic variables for the democratic peace, and the role of reputation in international politics. He has held fellowships at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University.
His teaching interests include the causes of war and peace, war termination and peacebuilding after conflict, international relations theory, and game theory.