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Interview with Rick Santorum; Iran Nuclear Deal Draws Criticisms; What is Immediate Future of Iran Deal in Congress? Aired 8:30-9a ET

Aired July 14, 2015 - 08:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: The years of sanctions that have been in place against Iran have allowed them to build this massive infrastructure that they have right now.

[08:30:00] Where is your confidence that sanctions, more sanctions, would make a difference given that they've done all this under sanctions?

RICK SANTORUM (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Well, they -- they -- number one, they don't have a nuclear weapon right now, so that's -- that's one thing that we -- we can say that sanctions very well may have -- have certainly limited their ability to get that. Yes, they have built a lot of other things. But the reason they came to the table is because their economy was in shambles, their political situation was tenuous and they came because sanctions were having a huge impact. People obviously say, well, what would you have done? Well, I would have ratcheted up those sanctions. I would have continued to put pressure on this regime to capitulate. And what we have here is not a capitulation. I don't think anyone would suggest here that allowing them to continue their military sites uninspected, allowing their missile development to go on, allowing the weaponization programs to go on, allowing enrichment to go on is anything but a capitulation. It's a catastrophic capitulation on the part of this president.

CUOMO: The U.N. embargoes that have to do with weapons are in place. They will be kept five years, eight years, depending on what type of military you're talking about. You knew you had to trade time for change. You knew that was going to be an aspect. Nothing was going to be permanent. And the idea of ratcheting up the sanctions, the conventional wisdom is the United States could not do that alone. You need the international partners, specifically the tenuous ones, Russia and China, and they weren't willing to do that anymore. So how would you make that happen?

SANTORUM: Well, I mean, you certainly have plenty of examples and continuing examples of Iran being a bad actor in the region, you know, whether --

CUOMO: Absolutely.

SANTORUM: And so you can continue to make the case to the international community that this chief sponsor of terror in the world, chief sponsor of Syria, another pariah state in the region, is a chief supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah and other terrorist groups in the region, that -- that they are -- that they are ones that need to be -- continue to be contained. And what we've done with this agreement is brought Iran into the world community and given them legitimacy that they didn't have and have given them, more importantly, money. And so let's just see.

I mean we're going to say, well what would -- what would you do when you come into office? And let's just see what -- what the next year and a half portends with now a much stronger Iranian state. I mean that's what's going to come out of this negotiation, Iran will be stronger, they'll be financially in better state, they'll be able to project that terror more virulently. That's why the Israelis are as upset as they are because we've now neutered the Israelis. We've taken the Israelis completely out of -- out of -- out of the picture in the ability for them to stop the Iranians from developing a weapon.

CUOMO: Well, Israel, as you know, says that they are poised to do everything they can to make sure that they are safe. So they certainly feel that they have power here, but they also are condemning this deal.

You have mentioned that if you were president you would back out of this deal. Now that's met with a lot of resistance because this idea that you could walk away from the table as the United States and not pay a huge price for that with your international partners is a little naive. So do you really think you could just, as president, walk away from this situation?

SANTORUM: As I said, Chris, that we would have a year -- a year and a half of this deal being in effect. And I have absolutely no doubt that this tiger is not -- is changing its stripes because of this deal. This tiger is -- has taken advantage of the United States, gotten exactly what they wanted out of this deal, so they can continue to do what they've been doing for the last, you know, 30 years.

CUOMO: Right, but assuming that you don't have a violation, you had said, well, if I were president, I'd walk away. Do you think that would be good for the international partnerships that are so important?

SANTORUM: Here -- here's -- here's my assumption, and it's a -- it's a -- it's 100 percent led by certainly, there will be violations. The Iranians have never kept a deal. Never. They're not going to keep this deal. They're going to -- they're going to do everything they can to stall, delay, cheat. And they -- and there's no doubt in my mind that they will continue to export terrorism. There will be plenty of opportunity for the next president of the United States to make a compelling case to the world that this deal is a -- is a -- is fraudulent.

CUOMO: Well, also, though, you would want to also assess the controls that are in place for -- if there is such a violation that you're predicting, that the sanctions would come in and then you would have international cooperation. This deal allows for that mechanism as well. Let's shift to the domestic policy though. Your Pope says tolerance is

the message of Catholicism when asked about gay marriage and LGBT existence within humanity. He says, who am I to judge. That doesn't work for you. You say you want an amendment that keeps marriage between a man and a woman. Why aren't you more like your Pope?

SANTORUM: Well, I don't think the Pope would support a -- the Pope doesn't support a change in the definition of marriage. I mean he's been perfectly clear about that. I think -- I think --

CUOMO: He said, who am I to judge.

SANTORUM: Well, that's not what he said. He's been -- he's been very --

CUOMO: Focus on love. Focus on tolerance.

SANTORUM: He's been very, very, very clear about standing for the definition of marriage. I don't think there's any question about that. What he's talking about, and he's absolutely right, is that we need to respect the dignity of all human life and everybody to -- to -- you know, we are all broken. We are all sinners. We all make mistakes. And we have to -- we have to continue to love and support those, you know, who fall short of the mark, including me.

[08:35:13] So I think the Pope is simply stating something that is crystal clear in the Christian faith, which is to -- to love the sinner and condemn the sin, but to stand for the truth of what the institution of marriage is. And I think the Pope has been very clear about that.

CUOMO: With all the things that we're facing as a culture, why would you invest the energy in a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman?

SANTORUM: What I -- what I've said, and I've been very clear about this too, Chris, that the most important thing I would do as president is really to try to strengthen the nuclear family. I wrote a book and this last year called "Blue Collar Conservatives" and I spent a lot of time in that book talking about the -- how the family has broken down. There's a recent book that -- that came out -- maybe you even had it on your program, Robert Putnam wrote a book just a couple of months ago called "Our Kids" and --

CUOMO: I know the book.

SANTORUM: And -- yes. And, I mean, it's a very important book. And as well as other studies that have been done, both from the left and the right, and they all talk about the fundamental problem, the hollowing out of the middle of this country is the breakdown of the American family and --

CUOMO: And that's divorce, though. That is not --

SANTORUM: Oh, it -- it's everything. It's divorce. It's out of wedlock children. I mean -- CUOMO: But none of the Christian resistance to gay marriage ever talks about divorce. Divorce is the big --

SANTORUM: No, no, what I --

CUOMO: Is the big x factor.

SANTORUM: Right. Excuse me, I think if you look at my record, I wrote a book 10 years ago called, "It Takes a Family," and -- and I talked about this long before the debate on gay marriage started. And so I don't -- you may say that about others. You can't say that about me. I've talked about the breakdown of the family for -- for 20 years and talked -- and talked about how important, you know, reknitting this family together and reducing the out of wedlock birthrate, strengthening the institution of marriage so children have the best opportunity to rise in society. So I see the issue of gay marriage as really a continuation of the breakdown of marriage over a long period of time. So in that -- in that respect, I think we can probably agree.

CUOMO: All right, senator, you certainly agree with the Pope that the family is very important. That's why he's coming to the United States.

SANTORUM: Yes. Look forward to seeing him.

CUOMO: We look forward to having you back on NEW DAY as issues arise in the campaign.

SANTORUM: Thank you.

CUOMO: Appreciate having you here.

SANTORUM: My pleasure.

CUOMO: Alisyn.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: OK, Chris.

President Obama trying to sell the Iran nuclear deal to Congress. What does this deal mean for his legacy? We will speak to a former top advisor to the president for some insights. That's next.

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[08:41:22] President Obama says the nuclear deal with Iran will keep Tehran from weaponizing. On a larger scale, this is just another notch in the president's legacy that has grown measurably in a period when he is supposed to be a lame duck.

So let's bring in Dan Pfeiffer to talk about all of this. He's a CNN political commentator and former senior advisor to President Obama.

Good morning, Dan.

DAN PFEIFFER, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Good morning, Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: OK, let's start with this Iran nuclear deal because we've had some experts on already this morning who say that the U.S. got the short end of the stick with this. How do you frame it?

PFEIFFER: I don't think that's right. I think that the -- from what I've seen of the deal thus far, they did several things that are very important, 24/7 inspections and verification, getting rid of --

CAMEROTA: But hold on one second. Let me just stop you at the 24/7 inspections.

PFEIFFER: Sure.

CAMEROTA: Because it does sound like that is still a sticking point because the way it reads is that they will have 24/7 access to Iran's key nuclear facilities. That doesn't mean all and it doesn't mean their military facilities. So some say that that's sort of squishy.

PFEIFFER: Right. I don't -- I think that everyone's going to have to go through the details of the agreement, but I don't think that's squishy. That was a key point for the president. It's been a key point for him going back to when I worked for him when we started down this process in 2013. And so you have 24/7 inspections, getting rid of 98 percent of their enriched uranium, getting -- having what they call the snap back provision, which means that if Iran violates it, you can put all the sanctions right back in place immediately.

A lot of what members of Congress, even opponents of the deal, said they required in the deal is in the framework the president laid out on television this morning. So I think it's a -- it's a very good day for the president, it's a good day for the country, and it's frankly a good day for the world community because we have to remember, this isn't just a deal between the United States and Iran. This is the world community.

CAMEROTA: Yes.

PFEIFFER: The P5+1, Russia, China, Europe, the United States and Iran.

CAMEROTA: It won't surprise you that Israel is not a fan of the deal as it has been laid out.

PFEIFFER: Right. Right.

CAMEROTA: We just had a top official on who says that by lifting sanctions on Iran and the arms embargo, that suddenly tons of money and weapons will flow into what they call an exporter of terror.

PFEIFFER: Look, this is a longstanding agreement between the government of Israel and the United States and, frankly, between the government of Israel and the rest of the world. You know the president is an incredibly strong supporter of Israel. He would never cut a deal that he thought was bad for Israel. And ultimately you have two paths here, you have a diplomatic path or a military path. The president thinks, and correctly I believe, that you have to work through the diplomatic path before you go down the military path. And there are a lot of people who want to short circuit the diplomacy and head right to military. And we've gone down that road in the Middle East before and we know it's a mistake. CAMEROTA: The president has had a busy month or two, I think it's fair --

PFEIFFER: Yes, he has. Yes.

CAMEROTA: it's fair to say. A lot of things that seemed maybe at one time impossible have been happening lately. Obviously there's been a normalizing of relations with Cuba. This historic deal with Iran. The Supreme Court siding with Obamacare in terms of subsidies. How do you -- what do you think will define the president's legacy given -- on the heels of this Iran deal?

PFEIFFER: Well, look, I think that he is going to have a tremendous legacy in the domestic policy front, from saving the economy, preventing us from going into a great depression, passing the Affordable Care Act, tough new rules on Wall Street. On the foreign policy side, this month has been incredibly important. An Iran deal and normalizing relations with Cuba are the sort of things that history books are written about. And so he's had a great -- you know, obviously I'm biased here, he's had a great six and a half years, but this last month is cemented and it's really been the culmination of a lot of work over the six years. And so this is -- it's very important. It's been great. And, you know, I know from having talked to him that he is -- he's got a lot of work he wants to get done in the last 18 months for sure because he's not done yet.

[08:45:00] CAMEROTA: Congress says they're not taking this deal sitting down. They don't like lots of elements of this Iran deal. And in fact they say -- we just had Congressman Michael McCaul and he said that they are going to fight it. And he believes that ultimately they'll send a sort of vote of disapproval to the president. Not sure if they can get 2/3 vote that would override the president's veto. Do you think that that's a possibility coming out of Congress?

PFEIFFER: I think Congress has a role to play here. I think they will look closely at it. I think they're -- you know, you have a lot of Republicans and even some Democrats who disagree with this approach. Ultimately I think that they are not going to be in a position to override the president's veto, so this deal will stand. And it will be up to next president to continue with it. So I think the debate in Congress is good, but I don't think it's going to ultimately affect the final outcome here.

CAMEROTA: All right, Dan Pfeiffer, we will see what happens. Thanks so much for joining us with your insight.

PFEIFFER: Thanks so much, Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: Thanks. Chris.

CUOMO: The Iran deal, it matters internationally, it will matter in the presidential election. So how did it get done? It takes a leap of faith to sit across the table from a geopolitical foe. Can Iran be trusted to hold its end of this deal? We'll discuss the up and the down.

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CUOMO: All right, so we now know that word of the Iran deal is done. It does need to be approved by the parliament in Iran and also here in Congress. So what's going to happen? What's the up and down on this and the real immediate future for it?

Let's discuss and bring in Jim Sciutto, that's CNN's chief national security correspondent, and Peter Beinart, CNN political commentator and professor at the City University of New York. He has covered the Middle East well and for a long time. Gentlemen, thank you very much.

Alisyn, where should we start?

CAMEROTA: Let's start with what we've heard this morning from people who don't like this deal and think that the U.S. got the short end of the stick. How do you assess it?

PETER BEINART, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: You have to compare the deal to the alternative, not to the American utopia in which Iran capitulates completely, but to the alternative. We've known for a long time that we don't have a good military option. Israel knows that too. Benjamin Netanyahu has been prime minister for six years. There's a reason he hasn't taken military action, because military action would start a regional war and be counterproductive.

CAMEROTA: And that was the only alternative? Because some -- what we've heard from some of the critics this morning of the deal, they said the sanctions were working. Why not just ratchet up the pressure with sanctions?

BEINART: The problem is because there's a whole world outside the United States. Even if we ratchet up sanctions, all the evidence suggests that the rest of the world is not going to indefinitely keep sanctions on Iran without a deal. They have more trading relationships with Iran than we do. So global pressure on Iran probably goes down rather than up, which means our leverage for a better deal is lower, not higher. That's why the alternatives to this deal were worse.

CUOMO: All right, screw up the sanctions. That's a big area of pushback. We've now heard on that one. A second one is, well, we could go to war. Senator Tom Cotton is saying it would only last a couple of days. And as we heard from Larry Wilkerson, that smacks a lot of what we were told about Iraq.

And then, Jim, we have this other concern, which is that when you lift the sanctions, billions and billions will flood into Iran, legitimizing them and making them a bigger terror tool than ever. Your take?

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY CORREPONDENT: Well, exactly. I think what you have to look at here is the administrations' own standards of success on this deal. Ad I hear Peter on this that -- and I've covered Iran for ten years and I was there when the president made that phone call. When you look at progress in the last two years, it's pretty remarkable. These negotiations are pretty remarkable progress that time peroid.

But, remember, the administration sets standards like inspections any time anywhere. And what we know about this deal says that that's not going to happen, that Iran is going to in effect have a veto on when those inspections might happen.

Here's the other thing, if at the start of these talks you and I and all of us sat around the table and said Iran would be able to keep all these nuclear facilities, including for instance the one at Fordow, which was secret, which Iran kept secret from the international community, it was only revealed due to intelligence work, they get to keep it. They even get to keep centrifuges inside that facility. If you had said that two years ago, or even a year ago, you would have said wait a second. And even some administration officials in support would say, wait a second, we're not going to go that far. And that's where you are today. And I think that's where you're going to see the real pushback on the Hill and not just from Republicans. I've been talking to Democratic lawmakers as well. They're saying wait a second, I got to look closely on this, because this is more than I expected to see when these negotiations started.

CAMEROTA: Peter, what of that, that there were too many concessions to Iran?

BEINART: Yes, but America's guidelines in the beginning were unrealistic. In the real world, you have to measure the deal against the alternative. The people -- yes, in an ideal world, Iran would have capitulated more. But the reason we have this deal is because America did not have better alternatives. We didn't have the capacity to bring Iran to its knees because our economic leverage was going to go down.

CUOMO: Why?

BEINART: And we didn't have a good military option.

CUOMO: How was the leverage going to go down?

BEINART: Because the only reason that countries like India and China, which buy a lot of oil from Iran, agreed to limit their oil purchases was as a prelude to a nuclear deal. They were not going to indefinitely restrain their economic relationship with Iran --

CUOMO: Why not?

BEINART: -- when they have a lot of money at stake. There are a lot of jobs. There's a lot of money at stake. And a lot of these countries frankly don't care as much as Iran's nuclear program as we do.

The Obama administration sold the world on a period of time of economic sanctions as a prelude to a deal. Look at what happened to Iraq in the 1990s. You can't sanction a country permanently and indefinitely. The sanctions start to erode.

CUOMO: We just had Senator Santorum on, and I know that this is just a nuclear deal. I get that it was about nuclear activity. But is it fair criticism, Jim, to say these guys are becoming an increasing exporter of terrorism? Yes, they're helping in some ways with the Iraq fight against ISIS, but they're hurting U.S. interests more than they've helping. And this deal has nothing to do with that. Will that be a basis of pushback?

SCIUTTO: Absolutely. And listen, yes, help on the ground because of shared interests on the ground in Iraq but at logger heads in Syria just across the border, right? I mean, they are the No. 1 bankroller of the Syrian regime of Bashar al Assad. And that's the complication here. I think that's something you have to keep in mind.

And listen, Peter's right that there -- it would be hard to keep the sanctions regime up forever. But here's the thing, in effect the administration is making a bet against the sanctions regime lasting. And they're making a bet that this deal will develop into a stronger relationship over time with the Iranians.

[08:55:04] But here's another thing that has to be mentioned, and that is when you look at the region, Iran will be a nuclear threshold power, not a nuclear power, but a nuclear threshold power. In a year if they decide to make this decision, they could build a bomb. What's to stop now the Saudis, the Egyptians and Turkey if not making the decision to build a bomb but going down that pathway? Because, remember, they are much closer to the Iran threat than we are. And that's a real concern from nonproliferators, is does this spark an arms race in the region?

CUOMO: And a quick word, Jim, you're a great reporter and you are dedicated. And one piece of proof of that is that you are on baby watch right now for your third kid. We all went to school together, Jimmy and I have known each other for over 20 years. To be on TV talking about these heady things when I know you've got the nervous stomach is a real testament to you. God bless you.

SCIUTTO: And I'm sure I'm going to have to pay for it when I get home.

CUOMO: Oh, you'll pay. You'll pay.

(LAUGHTER)

CUOMO: Gloria is going to make you pay, no question about it.

CAMEROTA: Jim, tell us when you have breaking news on that front.

SCIUTTO: I will.

CAMEROTA: Peter, Jim, thanks. Thanks so much, guys. Great to talk to you.

Well, the breaking news on the Iran nuclear deal continues now with "NEWSROOM" with Carol Costello. She will pick it up right after the break. Thanks for watching NEW DAY.

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