There is talks that Congress Plans to unravel the deal. This agreement has attracted opposition from americas middle east allies. They worry that it empowers iran. President obama defended the terms of the deal at a White House Press conference earlier today. Pres. Obama the bottom line is this, it prevents the most serious threat which is iran obtaining a Nuclear Weapon, and that is why this deal makes our country more secure and the alternative means that iran would have no inspections, and there is a risk of a Nuclear Arms Race and a greater risk of nuclear war. All of that would endanger our security. That is the choice that we face. If we dont choose wisely, i believe future generations will judge us harshly for letting this opportunity slip away. Charlie president obama also spoke with tom friedman of the new york times. Pres. Obama we have asked a consensus, but 10 years from now, 15 years from now, the person sitting in my seat, the president of the United States republican or democrat, is not only going to have this same capacity to take necessary military actions or to impose new sanctions, that is actually going to have more insight into the program and will have International Legitimacy if they have to deal with the violation of the program. Charlie joining me now is dennis ross who served as a special assistant of president obama from 20092010, and he was also a middle east peace envoy under both democratic and republican president ial administrations. Also joining me is nick burns. I am pleased to have both of them on this program this evening, and i thank dennis for his appearance here and my colleagues on fox news, where he serves as a consultant for them. Let me ask a question to both of you, and it is this. How difficult is it to achieve a deal like this, given this is a huge task . Dennis even though this became a bilateral negotiation, any negotiation with the islamic republic, given the revolutionary ideology of the Supreme Leader, given the dynamic of the country, given how we look at them and given how they look at us, given the complicated nature of the issue in itself, this was bound to be a difficult negotiation. One can always question how one can negotiate this, and someone once said that anyone who is away from the table always thinks they are a better negotiator than those who are at the table, so i have no doubt about the difficulty of negotiating this. There are certainly times where i preferred our posture to be one that made clear that we didnt need this deal as much as the iranians did and that the diplomacy would have cost them much more than us, what we have done with everything is just the way that i would have preferred to do it. This is definitely still going to be a very hard negotiation and i have no doubts about the difficulty of this. Nick . Nick i agree, this started during the Bush Administration. We turned to the negotiations and then turned to sanctions. I sense that unity between the bush and Obama Administrations with obama strengthening the sanctions regime. Then he got to negotiations over the last year and a half and these were extraordinarily difficult negotiations, if you think about it, charlie. On the one hand, we had to open up the first sustained conversation between the u. S. And iran in 35 years. We basically had no sustained vindication until the autumn of 2013. So you had that dynamic and the political sensitivity between tehran and washington. And then there were other individuals at the negotiating table, and that was russia and china, and they are not easy to deal with, as i know from many years ago. Finally, he had to deal with this difficult political environment in washington and the climate of distrust of this administration by Many Republican leaders, so it was as if the president and secretary kerry were in a three ring circus, and i give them credit for having persisted, and i cant imagine with john kerry, with his broken leg, 18 days in vienna showing strength. My hat is off to the american team. Charlie so then the question is, as the president had stated, this was to achieve one single goal and that was to stop the iranians from having a Nuclear Weapon . Do you agree with that, dennis . Dennis i agree for a number of reasons. Number one, i agree that pursuing a diplomatic outcome, is better than, by far, any other outcome. Number two is there is no military solution to the problem. In other words, if you use force, there is no way to destroy their engineering capabilities. So the question is not whether the approach is the way to do it, but the question is whether the standards meets the way that we have set the standards for ourselves and makes us safer. I think that congress should evaluate this seriously. They should not rush to judgment, they should ask questions about it and treat it to what it amounts to, what it is, a very serious armscontrol agreement, and take a hard look and ask questions and seek clarification and seek interpretations and try to understand exactly what this agreement does and what it doesnt do. Charlie so what would you recommend them do . A lot of people have already seemed to make judgments. Most of the republican candidates for president have already spoken out against it without seeing the deal. Dennis i would have preferred that they not do that and i wouldve preferred that they look at it carefully. But i think there are a lot of positives with this agreement and a lot of vulnerabilities in this agreement, and we can talk about how to try to minimize those vulnerabilities. But if you try to look at the totality of the agreement and where, in fact, it really does seem to set the iranians back, and where it does buy you time yes, this agreement is deferring to the iranians for 15 years and it will ensure that they are not going to have a Nuclear Weapon. After 15 years they are legitimized as a Nuclear Weapon state. The difference between a threshold state and a Nuclear Weapon state is not that different. After roughly six months, it means that they will have access to 150 billion in frozen accounts and it sort of strains the bounds of credulity that they wont use a percentage of that, even a small percentage, to provide to hezbollah, to provide to hamas. Charlie the president says he knows that they will use some of it for that purpose, but it is not in the endgame, and it is not at all comparable to the idea of stopping them from getting a Nuclear Weapon. Dennis they think that once they have this money, it frees them up to have the freedom to do Dangerous Things to people that they consider a danger to them. What are the administrations plans to deal with that . Do they have contingencies to deal with increased iranian spending . Do they have plans to deal with iranians dealing that kind of support to these groups . In other words, there are issues opened up by this agreement both by this agreement and without this agreement, and they should look at the questions and address them. Charlie nick, is this the kind of deal that you have accepted . Nick i think this is a sensible deal and i would have accepted it, and i also think it is a complex deal. On the positive side, i think what president obama and secretary kerry negotiated was that iran will not be able to get a Nuclear Weapon. All access to uranium and plutonium are going to be shut off, because they are not going to have enough highly enriched uranium to make a Nuclear Weapon, they are only going to have 300 kilograms at 3. 7 lower uranium. There will be interested inspections as the president said at their major uranium enrichment facility. I think the key thing, charlie is that they are saying potentially that iran is about 12 months away from nuclear capability, a Nuclear Weapon. This agreement will put iran one year away, and i think that is the real achievement of this negotiation. Congress is going to have to ask questions, i testified for nearly four hours yesterday and got a really good idea of what is on the minds of the members. I think theyre worried, and they should be, will the inspection regimes be enough . We have to assume that the iranians are going to cheat at some point, because that is their history. They have lied to the United Nations for 25 years. Will we be able to put sanctions against them should they fundamentally break the agreement . I have a lot of questions about the russians and the chinese and maybe even the indians and the japanese as theyre major consumers of iranian oil and gas. So that is another problem. And the third problem is the question that dennis ended on, and there is a major push for power in the sunni world right now in iraq, syria, and lebanon. The iranian guard has more money to sow chaos in the middle east, so i think there is a risk in both directions. There is a risk in the agreement and a risk in not going forward, but i think it is a sensible deal for us and the president did do something successful today and it was to say to his critics, what is your alternatives . Most of the republican opponents say to step away from the negotiating table and just sanction them further. If we had stepped away from the negotiating table, i know what wouldve happened. The sanctions would have diminished or disappeared altogether. The european five countries would have been made powerless and obamas deal versus the no option with the critics, i would take obamas deal. Charlie the president said two things about sanctions. One, if he didnt make this, the charlie the president said two things about sanctions. One, if he didnt make this, the sanctions regime would be over. And he just made that point, but the president said that a number of times. And if he walked away from the deal that they had, that the sanctions regime would fall away. Secondly, he made the point that a lot of these things would stay in place after 1015 years. A lot of the kind of inspections and restrictions at that they have would stay in place and if in fact there were violations of that, then they could reconsider sanctions and things. Am i wrong about that, nick . I want to make sure that i understood it. Nick nope, and that is what he focused on. Their major focus was this managed inspections and will the iranians have the capacity to cover up any kind of skulduggery . I think the president addressed that and said look, with the existing facilities that we know about, there is going to be 24 7 inspections. If there is a covert idea uncovered, there is a possibility of up to a 24 day period, but we would have a line of sight that he said, and i thought he made the best case but still, congress is going to ask tough questions here. Charlie and Dennis Dennis charlie, can i say one thing here . Charlie go ahead, dennis. Dennis part of the fact that this is a threshold state is that after 2015, there is no limitation to the size of that program. The larger the Program Becomes even with the existing monitoring that will take place under the traditional protocol the harder it is to know everything. So here it is again, one of the points that i am making is that if they are going to be a threshold state and there is no limit on the size and even if there is monitoring, i think the key for us is that deterrence is a concept that needs to be cemented over time. The credibility of deterrence needs to be built over time. The step that we take over the coming years needs to reinforce it. This makes clear that not only are all options on the table but saying explicitly that we will not permit iran to become a Nuclear Weapon state, even if they are a threshold state, we will not permit them to take that leap, if we in fact pick up signs that they are moving towards a weapon, getting them that threshold status, we will act materially prevent them. The more that this is done, the more that that will make those steps credible, the more the threat becomes real, and the more that you reduce the vulnerability that flows out of this agreement. Charlie but the president said that explicitly. Nick the president said that explicitly in april, and i agree with dennis, he needs to say that and bring back the credibility to the middle east so that people knows that he means what he says. This is for two presidencies from now, if you think about it, the man or the woman who is in the white house, and it will be well beyond 2025. We will not permit iran to acquire a Nuclear Weapon, but you have to have credibility for the people who were thinking about it, and i think because of the record of this administration, particularly with syria and the redline episode with assad, they need to make sure they have could ability. Charlie do you think you should take this off the table or he has told exposed lead to iran that it is in fact necessary to use the literary action to prevent them from having Nuclear Weapons, then the United States will use it . Dennis there is no doubt in my mind that certainly in the first term, it was unmistakable that when they said the options were on the table and they had us work within that within the ministry and as it exists today to create the capabilities to act on all of the offers being on the table, that this was not something that he meant and that this was something that the rest of the world understood and that he meant it. I think he still means it, but i dont think as nick was just suggesting, that it is necessarily believe. Charlie but that is a very different think of it that have to do with syria and the red line and the perceptions of Benjamin Netanyahu and the crown prince of the emirates and the king of saudi arabia. Dennis but Charlie Charlie their perception is not what he intends to do. Dennis now the Supreme Leader used to say that the United States would never attack us, and he has never said that before. The iranians need to understand that if they make that move, it triggers this kind of response. Today i think it is very important to move and make sure that if iran is left as a threshold state, and when we do this is by repeating the language very clearly. Another way is by being prepared to compete much more in the region to raise the cost of uranium in syria and elsewhere and if in fact we see them providing much more money to hezbollah, to hamas, then we begin to work with our allies in the area to counter that and the point is, you not only make it clear that there is a threshold for us that wont be tolerated but we are taking steps to give a meaning to our words so that everybody doesnt doubt what we say. Charlie nick, this question the president , in talking about these negotiations said that we should have been part of the negotiations, but it was impossible to make them part of these negotiations and that the goal was always a very simple goal, to prevent iran to have the ability to make a Nuclear Weapon. Nick right, and this, as you know, charlie, has been a controversial aspect of these negotiations. Some people believe that we would have been better off to have introduced some of these issues alongside the nuclear issues. I frankly think that secretary kerry and president obama made the right decision to make this only about Nuclear Weapons. During the press conference when the president was admonished by the reporter who said that the president was insensitive about the plight of the americans held captive, and the president said, look, that wasnt true, you are out of bounds, and that would have been a mistake to put the american hostage issue in the negotiations because it wouldve given the iranians perhaps more leverage, so i think they made the right call there. But i also think on following what dennis just said and the question that you asked, charlie, the United States can do more to strengthen its position in the United States. It is two things. Build up the capacity with saudi arabia and the other is to contain iranian power in the persian gulf. Third, very importantly, and this is going to be very difficult, to mend fences with Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu, because they have a profound disagreement, netanyahu and president obama, on this Iranian Nuclear deal. We need to see a strengthening of the u. S. Israel relationship. Dennis and i have both evaluated the quantitative importance of this edge and there is more that we can do to strengthen and that, i think that is just common sense diplomacy for the year ahead. Charlie i hear you, and dennis, you know the israeli Prime Minister as well. The president always reminds his audience that it was the Prime Minister of israel who, how many months ago, warned that the initial agreement would not hold and that the Prime Minister of israel was wrong there and he is wrong in now . Dennis look, there is no question that the Prime Minister of israel feels that this is somehow subjecting israel to dramatically greater threats. To be fair to him, he is not alone in israel. We have seen Werner Herzog came out with a statement, and the statements may not take on the full character of what Prime Minister netanyahu was saying, but they reflect that there is a profound fear that an iran that is legitimized as a Nuclear Threshold state could become a Nuclear Weapon state, and suddenly an iran could become powerful with all this money and could provide it to hezbollah and could provide 100,000 rockets to hezbollah, they could use it against israel and cou