Nation & World
Ex-Trump envoy makes case for Iran attack

Morgan Ortagus (far right) with IOP’s Ned Price and student moderator Bahar Moradi ’27.

Photo by Martha Stewart

Christina Pazzanese

Harvard Staff Writer

March 11, 2026 4 min read

President acted in response to ‘culmination of threats,’ says Morgan Ortagus

The war with Iran is not about regime change but rather an effort to protect Americans from a nuclear threat, according to Morgan Ortagus, who until recently served as deputy U.S. special envoy to the Middle East and special envoy to Lebanon under ambassador Steve Witkoff.

But if the elimination of the Supreme Leader of Iran and leaders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps helps Iranians choose what their future looks like, then, “I don’t think it was a mistake,” Ortagus said during a talk at the Kennedy School on Tuesday.

“I don’t feel bad for any of these people,” she said. “These are people that tortured and mass executed their own people and plotted to kill my president.”

The strikes by the U.S. and Israel on Feb. 28 were not triggered by one specific event, but a “culmination of threats” from Iran and years of failed diplomatic efforts by both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations, according to Ortagus, who served as a State Department spokesperson during the first Trump administration.

Among the threats she cited were the Iranian regime’s decades of malign influence in the Middle East, its continuing nuclear ambitions, the escalation of threats to U.S. bases and those of U.S. allies in the region, and plots to assassinate President Trump, former national security adviser John Bolton, and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.

Despite all of that, “President Trump very much wanted a deal with the regime and was willing to give them one” prior to the 12-day war with Israel last June, but he felt Iran was merely “string[ing] along” the U.S., said Ortagus, who was involved in the negotiation.

Ortagus pushed back on criticism of the administration’s actions in the current war. She defended the wide range of rationales the president and top defense and foreign policy officials have offered for the attack, insisting that they give Trump “maximum flexibility” in negotiations with Iran and allow for quick decision-making. She also downplayed the relative inexperience of the lead U.S. negotiators, Witkoff, a New York real estate developer, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.

“What matters is results,” said Ortagus, a former U.S. Navy Reserve intelligence officer.

Asked by co-moderator Ned Price, interim co-director of the HKS Institute of Politics, about the president’s claim that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated” in bombings last year, Ortagus said that Trump was referring only to the specific sites the U.S. had targeted, not Iran’s willingness to develop nuclear weapons.

Trump views the current military action as a means to remove the threat posed by Iran’s navy and to degrade its ballistic missile stockpile, as well as a follow-up on his pledge earlier this year to Iranian protestors that “help is on the way,” she said.

“When you say that, you have to put your money where your mouth is, and I think in this case the president’s done that.”

The administration tried, she said, to coerce Iran’s regime into capitulation before opting for military action.

“The Iranian regime were extended the hand of diplomacy by the president multiple times,” she said. “It’s unfortunate that they’ve chosen, time and time again, to destroy their own country and their own people for some theocratic revolutionary idea of how they are going to reshape the Middle East.”

The event was moderated by Price, who served as deputy to the U.S. representative to the United Nations and as U.S. Department of State spokesperson during the Biden administration, and Bahar Moradi, president of the Harvard Undergraduate Iranian Association.