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WASHINGTON – On the floor of the U.S. Senate earlier today, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn), Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Near East, South Asia, Central Asia and Counterterrorism, delivered remarks on the floor of the U.S. Senate on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreed upon by Iran and the P5+1. Murphy, who supports the agreement, outlined the dangerous consequences of rejecting the deal.

Below is the full text of Murphy’s floor remarks:

Thank you, Mr. President. I'm coming to the floor today to speak on the nuclear agreement with Iran. But first, let me say having just come back from the region, having spent Sunday morning in one of the biggest refugee camps inside Syria - 80,000, more than half of them children under the age of 18, with more than 250 every day leaving the camp because they’ve lost hope and they are frankly more willing to live inside a dangerous Syria with their lives in danger than to live inside this camp – let me associate myself with the imperative that Senator McCain laid before us: that we can do more.

I don't agree with his diagnosis of how we got here, nor do I likely agree with his solution in terms of prescriptions to solve the problem, but I certainly agree that this body and the administration should be standing up and bearing our share of the burden when it comes to this humanitarian crisis, having seen it now firsthand for myself.

Mr. President, peace is a messy, messy business. As Yitzhak Rabin said upon the recognition of the P.L.O., a really hard thing for the Israelis to do, he said, “You don't make peace with your friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies.” It makes sense, right? The definition of peace is the settlement of old disputes – or even just one big dispute – with someone that you have a long history of disagreement and conflict with. And unless peace comes through unconditional surrender – and that frankly doesn't happen very much in the post-nuclear age – then peace by nature is going to be a compromise. It doesn't come through one side getting everything it wants. And thus, by definition, it’s going to feel fairly unsatisfactory.

I say this because viewing the Iran deal through that prism allows me to understand why so many people are voting "no" and it allows me to understand why many of those that are voting “yes" took a long time to get there. But what I have trouble understanding is all of the revisionist history that is crowding this chamber right now. I don't think there was a single member of the Senate that didn't, in principle, support the idea of negotiating an end to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. And I don't remember anyone who didn’t understand that the sanctions that we layered upon Iran were directed at their nuclear program – not their support for Hezbollah, or for their detainment of hostages, or any other malevolent behavior in the region. Why? Because we had a whole different set of sanctions on that activity.

But now there is all sorts of Sturm und Drang in Congress over the idea that this deal represents a give-and-take between the United States and Iran. “Why don't we get everything?” a lot of people are asking, or the failure of this agreement to settle all of our disputes with Iran at once. “But they still do bad stuff”, people say. Now I view these protests largely as cover for a "no" vote that is likely about something else. Because we always knew this was going to a negotiation. You can complain about the end balance, but you can’t engage in a straight-faced argument about the outrageousness of Iran getting to keep a few centrifuges. And we can all rage about Iran’s support for terrorism, or their dangerous talk about our sacred ally, Israel. But we all passed sanctions bills knowing that they were about their nuclear program, not all these other activities.

Thus, it must stand to reason that these sanctions would be removed if Iran came to the table and satisfied our concerns about their nuclear program, not our concerns about everything else that they do that's terrible.

Peace is never perfect. Diplomacy is frankly mostly ugly, but it matters. Because why on earth do we spend $500 billion every year on the world's biggest, baddest, most capable military force if we aren't willing to use it? And I don't mean “use it” in the way that Senator Graham or Senator Cotton may mean "use it". I mean “use it” by entering into peaceful agreements that are held in place by the threat of overwhelming U.S. military force. Our planes and our bombs and our brigades, these are the muscle that ensures that agreements are lived up to. Not the muscle that substitutes for diplomatic agreement. America, more than any other country in the world, can afford to take a diplomatic risk because we can clean it up fast if it goes wrong.

Now, I don't think this agreement is going to go wrong, but I sure like knowing that a bunker-busting bomb is waiting in the wings if it does. And I'll sleep better at night knowing that by agreeing to this deal, we are keeping together an unprecedented international coalition that will stand with us if we need to drop that bomb – something that they would not do if we dropped it without this agreement.

And this body often seems to forget that American power is not simply exercised through the blunt force of military power. And President Obama frankly is not the first president to be pressed by hawks in Congress and outside of Congress to forsake diplomacy in favor of war. In the first meeting with legislative leaders after the announcement of Russian missies inside Cuba, the bipartisan congressional leadership meeting with President Kennedy was unanimous in its support for an attack and ultimately the possible invasion of Cuba. All of them thought that talking to Russia about a negotiated solution equaled weakness. President Kennedy didn't listen, and over 13 days, he worked out a peaceful solution to the Cuban Missile Crisis that history looks very kindly upon.

President Reagan, upon signing the INF Treaty with Russia, leaned over to Gorbachev and said, "The hard liners in both our countries are bleeding when we shake hands today". Hawks in Congress didn't want an agreement with our sworn enemy, Russia. They didn't understand why we'd sign a nuclear agreement with a country that was still out for American blood on so many other fronts. But history tells us that the INF Treaty was an important piece of our strategy to weaken hardliners inside Russia and open that country to reform.

I hear this analogy to 1938 in Munich almost every day. And it doesn't just come with respect to this agreement. Almost every time we sit across the table from someone we have a disagreement with, the claim is that it’s Munich all over again. But Munich is the exception, not the rule. There are plenty more diplomatic agreements to avert war that went right rather than those that went wrong. It doesn't mean that you don't use 1938 as a caution, but it doesn't mean that it is an automatic parallel to every single time we are trying to settle our disputes with an adversary at the negotiating table rather than through the means of arms.

And, Mr. President, our partners in the Middle East largely get this. I just returned from this trip as I mentioned, to the region – Qatar, UAE, Iraq, Kuwait, and Jordan with Senator Peters. And in every country we visited, we heard about Iran’s dangerous activity in the region – support for the Houthis in Yemen, funding Shiite militias in Iraq, propping up the murderous Bashar al-Assad in Syria, pumping money into Hezbollah and Hamas to threaten Israel. But despite these provocations, every Arab political leader that we met with – every single one – supports this agreement. And they gave two basic reasons and I want to share them with you because they mirror the reasons for my support as well.

First, they know that no matter how dangerous Iran is today, they shudder to think how much more dangerous Iran would be if they possessed a nuclear weapon. And they believe, as I do, that this agreement is the best way to keep Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and they support it, to a country, first and foremost, for that reason. Before this deal, Iran had 19,000 centrifuges spinning. After it they’re going to have just a few thousand. Before this deal, Iran was enriching up to 20% and was only a few months from being able to enrich to a level in which they could get on a pathway to a bomb. After this deal, enrichment will be down to 3.7%. Before this deal, Iran had an enormous stockpile of enriched uranium and after it, that stockpile is, for all intents and purposes, eliminated – reduced by 97%. And before this deal, the only way that we knew what was going on in the nuclear program was through covert surveillance. After the deal, we're going to have a network of inspectors crawling over every inch of their nuclear program to make sure that they aren't cheating.

Now second, our Arab partners that we visited with in the region know that all of the problems in the region can't be solved without Iran at the table. And while they aren't sure that this agreement by itself will draw Iran into peaceful negotiations over Syria or Yemen or Iraq – and I think none of us can be sure that that's how this will play out – they are certain that a rejection of the agreement by the United States Congress will virtually guarantee that Iran won't come to the table. They talk openly about fearing a newly isolated Iran, the rejection of this agreement empowering the hard-liners, punishing the moderates, and pushing Iran away from any constructive dialogue in the region.

Our Arab partners don't love the terms of this agreement any more than the United States Senate does, but they know that the alternative – a retrenched Iran with a green light to start back up their nuclear program – is the most dangerous outcome of all. They understand what supporters of the deal understand: that this idea that if Congress were to reject the agreement we could come back to the table and get a better one, is pure fiction. It’s pure political fiction made up by people who don't want to sound like they don't have an alternative plan, when they really don't. No one with any credible diplomatic experience in the Middle East believes that Iran will come back to the table if Congress rejects this deal. And our international partners have told us to our face that they won't come back to the table if we reject this deal. A better deal is fantasy, plain and simple.

Here's what happens. Here's what really happens if congress rejects this deal that is supported by all of our negotiating partners – Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia, the entirety of the Security Council, and all of our Arab partners in the region. What happens is that Iran starts backing up their nuclear program, centrifuges climb to 25,000, 30,000, enrichment gets closer to the level necessary for a bomb, the inspectors get kicked out, our eyes on their nuclear program disappear, sanctions fray at first and likely fall apart over time. Iran gets everything that it wants. It gets its nuclear program and it gets sanctions relief. What a catastrophic outcome that would be.

But as bad as that reality would be, it actually gets worse. We know the hard-liners have been marginalized as a result of this deal and that the moderates – which I admit is a frankly relative term inside Iran – are gaining power. Rejection of this deal would just be a gift to hard-liners and would likely lead Rouhani to be replaced by a revolutionary guard proxy who would lead Iran down a path that is even more dangerous, hard to believe, than the path that they are on today. And lastly, the United States would just become an international pariah. With all of our partners at the negotiating table, almost every nation around the world supporting this agreement, what would it say if the United States Congress walked away? Our power as a nation would be irreparably damaged.

Now I heard Senator Cruz on the floor earlier today chastising Democrats, yelling at us, about how we could live with ourselves doing a deal with our mortal enemy, Iran. So let me ask him and others who oppose this agreement with the rhetoric that he uses, a question in return: how could opponents of this deal live with themselves if a rejection of this deal would result in one, Iran restarting its nuclear program; two, sanctions dramatically weakening; three, inspections ending; and four, hard-liners being empowered inside Iran? The fact is that many Republicans opposed this agreement before they read it. Senator Cruz opposed it within an hour of its announcement. And so I don't know how some opponents of this deal can live with themselves having made a political decision to oppose the most important diplomatic agreement that most of us will vote on during our time here.

Madam President, this isn't a perfect deal. But no diplomatic agreement ever is. Peace, as the great Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin told us, is never easy. But history almost always judges that it's worthwhile. Thank you, Madam President. I yield the floor.