outflank the united states by being more soft. what do you think is going on here? the other members were furious. you have to understand everybody else was in agreement and even the french negotiators were in agreement until the foreign minister arrived and threw a spanner in the works. some suspect this has commercial motivations. france is trying to position itself for lucrative contracts with the saudis and other gulf states by showing opposition to iran. some think it s a play for attention. the reason i m optimistic is underlying it the core strategic objectives of iran and united states and other states line up. we re moving toward a deal. there is a strategic shift that s taken place in iran. we have a secretary of state and administration that s ready to take advantage of that. i m hopeful we can work it out and take out the overload the french want to put on the card and come up with a clean, initial first step. ken, final thought on the
israel. what do you think that tells us? it s not clear exactly what the israelis are doing. we should hope what they are doing is simply trying to play bad cop to get the best deal possible. prime minister netanyahu s rhetoric has been so far off to the other side that it raises the question that perhaps he is trying to blow up the negotiations. perhaps he doesn t want a deal. that would be enormously damaging. if at the end of the day we don t get a deal between the international community and iran and israel is the culprit that backfires against israel and the united states and very much in favor of iran s hardliners. exactly the people that netanyahu shouldn t be trying to empower. joe, what do you think about the french? ken was saying there is some part the french has taken a harder line position on the iranian nuclear program. puzzling because with everything else in the middle east they
the last. we re very, very close. they come back again in ten days, i expect we ll get a deal very soon. ken, are you as optimistic? i certainly share joe s hope that this deal can be brought about. and i share both of your hope or expectation that this is a good deal. i think the problems that have a rarisen is that these are things that howled be dealt with in a final status agreement between the two of them. it s not really clear why the french decided to make an issue of this now. that makes me a little bit more concerned about what it was going into this, about how hard it s going to be to get it. i wonder why you think the biggest obstacle that has been talked about isn t really an obstacle. there s a plutonium based reactor in iraq. there is concern that if it gets
proposing relief of very small kinds. the argument is that iran should make significant concessions, but that the west should make none at all. that s not negotiations, that s a requirement that the other side surrender. which makes one wonder. do the critics of this negotiating process want a better deal? or do they really want no deal at all? so that it opens up another path to deal with the problem, which is war. in that case, the danger for those critics was not that the geneva negotiations were failing, but rather that they were succeeding. let s get started. you just heard my take, let s bring in some experts, ken pollack is a former cia analyst, he s been a staffer at the national security council. he s the author of a great new book, unthinkable.
foreign minister as part of the seven year effort to curb iran s nuclear program. this will be the highest level talks with iran in three decades but they can be trusted? back on the show is middle east expert and former cia intel analyst ken pollack. ken, in relationship that has not known trust in about 30 years, how do we assess whether or not rowhani is any different from ahmadinejad? he says he has the heir of the supreme leader and has control of their nuclear as pieration. what are the actions that need to come out of iran to prove the point rowhani is as advertised? let s start with the words. it s important, everyone is saying, these are just words and meaningless. in the iranian context they are not meaningless. it s takes a lot for a iranian politician to stand up and say the things rowhani has, saying the holocaust took place and