A Few Minutes with… Congressman Doug Lamborn

Secretary of State Tony Blinken said at the House Foreign Affairs Committee that there is not going to be any concession to Iran. What were your thoughts about that?

I like the words, but the actions have to meet the words, and that’s the bottom line. The Iranians are master negotiators, and have been throughout history. It’s going to depend on the amount of backbone that the administration has. Do they have the backbone or not? And that’s what remains to be seen. I hope they do. I’m skeptical, but I would like to be proven wrong.

Republicans opposed the Iran deal under the Trump administration, but they never managed to negotiate a better one. Why?

Because Iran is dead set on producing nuclear weapons, and the deal with Obama lets them do that. A deal with Trump would not have let them do that. So that’s why Trump was never able to make a deal. But we were, I think, moving in the right direction — pushing Iran to come to the negotiating table, through the maximum pressure campaign.

What are acceptable parameters, in your view, when we’re trying to imagine a new deal with Iran?

Well, we should not give them any more money, number one. They should swear off the production of nuclear weapons, not just now, but even in the future. We shouldn’t say, oh, in five years or ten years, you can build all the weapons you want. They have to swear off nuclear weapons. That’s the bottom line. And that’s it.

And also the [ballistic] missiles to deliver them to Israel or Europe or even the United States, because they’re also working on missile technology. So those two things, missile technology and nuclear weapons, and that has to be a red line for the United States and the Biden administration, and it has to be a red line for the civilized world.