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Congressional Daily Record
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June 17, 2026
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Download official Senate Record PDFReturn to issue contextMr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I have long wanted this war with Iran to end. Every single day, this war has become a deepening, cascading disaster for the American people as gas prices eclipse $6 a gallon in many places, as Americans are killed, as new wars break out in the region, as farms go bankrupt with the ballooning diesel prices. Every single day this war has gone on, it has become a worse debacle for the United States and the American people.
the war, and my desire is still to stop this war. I knew the deal was likely going to be bad. I knew the deal was likely going to be humiliating for the United States of America. But I didn't know it was going to be this humiliating. I didn't know the deal was going to be this bad.
for us tonight, as we are reading the details of this agreement, to understand how the terms of this agreement are final, clear, and total proof of how calamitous this war was and how it should be a lesson for both Republicans and Democrats, for this administration and every future administration, to never make this mistake again.
pages, negotiated by real estate developers cosplaying as diplomats. Let's start with the immediate commitments. What are the immediate commitments that Iran is making and the United States is making?
Iran is making no new commitments. They are agreeing to open the strait. The strait was open before the war began.
research program. They were willing to talk about that prior to the war beginning.
war. Before the war, they committed to keep the strait open. Before the war, they committed to develop no nuclear weapons. Before the war, they were willing to talk about the rest of their nuclear research program.
What is the United States committing to in this agreement? Well, it is a little hard to decipher because of the terms, which are either mistakenly or deliberately fuzzy, but we at least know that the United States is committing immediately to release all oil
sanctions and to let Iran trade oil for free all around the world. That is billions—billions—of windfall dollars to the Iranian Treasury.
The United States is agreeing to free up frozen Iranian money. It could be around $24 billion that will be going immediately to the U.S. Treasury.
Those are the immediate commitments that the United States is making. OK. Let's talk about what is not in this agreement—what is not included in the commitments that are being made in the short term.
In fact, you can see a video today of Donald Trump, saying: I think it is cool for Iran to have missiles. I think it is kind of unfair to say that Iran shouldn't have missiles if everybody else has them.
He literally said this on TV today.
telling us that the American people have to sacrifice and go to war and spend billions of dollars and have 13 Americans killed and suffer through $6-a-gallon gas prices because we have to stop Iran from having missiles. The Presiding Officer and I have sat in briefings in which we have been told that the point of this war is to destroy Iran's missile capacity, and now the President is saying: Eh, it just doesn't matter.
regime that was more friendly to the United States and to Israel. We have a harder-line regime now in charge of the country than we did before. We had a doddering, 80-year-old Ayatollah. We now have a, frankly, much more capable and much more provocative hard-line regime.
He said he wanted to get rid of the drone program. The drone program is still there. There is nothing in this agreement about their drone program. He wanted to get rid of their missile program. There is nothing in this agreement about their missile program.
would carry out this war in a way that got a better deal than President Obama did. Of course, he had to promise that because he pulled out of the JCPOA. He got none of it in this agreement. He got none of it in this agreement. Yes, in this agreement, there is a suggestion that there is now going to be a negotiation between the United States and Iran over their nuclear program, but that negotiation was available before this war began.
leverage. That is nonsensical. There is fundamentally less leverage today than there was before the war began. Let's just go through it for a second.
in place. Those are the most serious sanctions, right? Iran runs on oil revenue, so the primary leverage Obama had during those negotiations was the oil sanctions. We are releasing all of the oil sanctions before the nuclear negotiations happen. That is malpractice. Overnight, immediately, the leverage available for nuclear negotiations essentially goes up in smoke.
We are also giving them billions of dollars in frozen funds.
our side. Donald Trump has mishandled foreign relations such that now China and Russia are on the Iranians' side. It is fundamentally different leverage.
action. If you don't get a deal, we can always take military action. Well, that leverage is gone as well because Iran took our best shot and not only survived but got the United States to sign an agreement where we are paying them billions of dollars in order to end the war, including a suggestion that we are going to create a $300 billion reparations fund. Guess what. If you have studied history, you know that the winning side doesn't pay reparations. The losers pay reparations.
So the Iranians don't have to worry about oil sanctions. They are gone. The Iranians don't have to worry about getting back their frozen funds. We are transferring them. They don't have to worry about an American military response because they have already seen it, and they have survived. And they don't need to worry about going up against the United States, China, and Russia because China and Russia are now on their side.
These nuclear negotiations are just destined to fail. I hope I am wrong, but on the backside of this war, the President has almost no leverage. What is left? This agreement drops the oil sanctions. It frees up the frozen funds. He has already played the military card.
specific negotiation about the enriched uranium that Iran holds. Now, remember when Obama was negotiating with Iran, they had 15-percent enriched uranium. They weren't close to the enrichment capacity to make a bomb. Today, they have a 60-percent enrichment capacity. Because Donald Trump pulled out of the agreement, Iran now has 60 percent. Everybody knows that, to get from 60 to the quality you need to produce a bomb, it takes a matter of days.
uranium, but they are willing to talk about the enriched uranium being degraded to 3 percent, which is the number in the JCPOA. So they basically signal in this agreement that, yeah, we will talk about getting rid of our enriched uranium or diluting it, but we are just going to talk about the same thing that we were talking to the Obama administration about.
All of this was predictable. All of this was predictable. I have listened to my hard-line colleagues argue that the only way to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon or to destroy their missiles or to stop their support for terrorism is to go to war with Iran. Well, we went to war with Iran for 100 days, and on the backside of it, they still have their nuclear program, they still have their missiles, they still have their drones, they are still supporting terrorism. It didn't work, and most of us knew it wasn't going to work. Most of us said that, if you go to war with Iran, we will end up in a worse position, and here we are in a fundamentally worse position.
multibillion-dollar payment to Iran so that Iran opens the Strait of Hormuz. What a disaster that is. To add insult to injury, the text says that Iran promises to open the strait—for 10 years? No. For 5 years? For a year? No.
Iran says: We will open the Strait of Hormuz for 2 months toll free. Then, after that period of time, we will consult with the Government of Oman on the tolling structure.
I knew it was going to be a humiliating agreement. I didn't know it was going to be this humiliating. I want the war to end, and I am willing to stomach a bad deal, but this agreement exposes what a colossal mistake it was—the biggest foreign policy blunder of 20 years—to start this war and why every hawk who cheerled us into war with Iran was wrong. We didn't get anything that you thought we were going to get out of this.
I am hopeful that I am wrong about these negotiations. I am hopeful that new leverage will materialize, but I don't see any leverage at all. It is given up in this agreement. It is given up in the way that this war has been perpetuated. I am glad the war is over, but I am furious that it has resulted in our Nation's humiliation and in Iran's becoming stronger and in America's becoming weaker, and everybody— Republicans and Democrats—should be furious about that.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Justice). The Senator from Ohio.