As nuclear talks with Iran near a deadline on Tuesday, U.S. Rep. David Price, D-N.C., says he’s been working harder on building support for the negotiations than on any other issue in recent weeks.
It’s still unclear if Iran, the United States and the five other world powers who have been negotiating for more than a year will reach the outline of a deal by the Tuesday deadline, and then a final agreement by June 30. The agreement would lift sanctions if Iran accepts measures intended to prevent it from getting nuclear weapons capability.
“The alternatives are very dire,” Price said in an interview late Wednesday. “Even if we go to war, and that seems to be where some people want us to go, you’re talking about setting the program back two or three years. So I continue to believe the best outcome here, really the only tolerable outcome here, is some kind of negotiated agreement.”
Price, a Democrat from Chapel Hill, has been leading efforts in the House of Representatives in favor of the negotiations in recent years.
As the current talks opened in February 2014, he and Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, wrote a letter to President Barack Obama that said that proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East would threaten the United States and its allies, “particularly Israel,” and that “robust diplomacy remains our best possible strategic option.”
Price led similar letters in 2013 and 2012, urging the U.S. government to push for a negotiated agreement. In a commentary in the London-based The Guardian newspaper in January, Price urged Congress not to take actions that would harm the talks.
“We have multilateral sanctions in place,” Price said in the interview. “We have serious negotiations under way. Let’s give diplomacy a chance. Everybody knows if diplomacy fails we’re back to sanctions.
“You don’t need to pass a law to declare that or you don’t need to be circulating letters that seem to indicate no confidence in the negotiating process,” he continued, referring to the letter by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., signed by 47 Senate Republicans, to Iran’s leaders.
In the Senate, legislation proposed by Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, would require lawmakers to vote to approve or disapprove the final agreement. Another bill in the Senate, by Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., would increase sanctions if no deal is reached by June 30. Both measures could come to a vote in April.
Kirk said he planned to force a symbolic vote on increased sanctions during the Senate’s budget debate on Thursday.
Price said tightening sanctions “until Iran would cry uncle” is unlikely to work. He said Cotton’s letter indicated most Senate Republicans think no deal would be good enough. “Then the Corker bill begins to look like a setup for a very predictable negative vote,” he said.
If the U.S. takes the blame for failure of the negotiations, China and Russia – two of the countries participating – could walk away, and then sanctions would break down, Price said. “When I say that I think that by far our best alternative is a negotiated settlement, part of that is just calculating how poor the alternatives all appear to be.”
Price, a former political science professor, has served more than 26 years in the House. He’s a member of the Appropriations Committee and serves on its subcommittees overseeing funding for transportation, housing, urban development, homeland security, military construction and veterans affairs.
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