Secretary of State John Kerry sat down with The Huffington Post's Sam Stein for an interview Thursday, discussing the Iran nuclear deal, the Syrian refugee crisis, Hillary Clinton's emails and much more.

Below is the full transcript from the Sept. 3 interview. Watch a video of the interview above. (Video production by Marielle Olentine, Jon Strauss and Samuel Wilkes.)

SAM STEIN: Thank you, first of all, for joining us. I appreciate it.

JOHN KERRY: Glad to be with you.

STEIN: So we now know that the Iran deal will survive Congress. But roughly half of the country is opposed to it, and virtually every Republican presidential candidate says they're going to rip it up when they get into office. So how secure is the deal really?

KERRY: Well, first of all, enormous amounts of money -- there has been a huge bombardment of distortions and outright, you know, just untruths, I guess is the word I will use, about what this deal does and how it does it. So I'm not surprised that some polls show an imbalance.

STEIN: Sure.

KERRY: But the fact is, a lot of polls show that the country actually supports it, and there's a fairly even divide. I think that's pretty good, considering the amount of money that's been spent with myths being promulgated.

With respect to the presidential candidates and what they say today, look -- if Iran destroys its Arak plutonium reactor core, filling it with cement, and it exists no longer, and Arak dismantles two-thirds of their centrifuges and is no longer enriching, and it lowers its stockpile to 300 kilograms, and it is only enriching to 3.67 percent and it has done everything it said it would do to live up to the agreement. If a new president came in and said, "Oh, I'm going to" -- this would be absurd.

The country will be 90 percent supportive by that point in time because they will see that it is in fact working, and it has eliminated the threat of a nuclear weapon in the Middle East.

STEIN: So you think this is largely bluster?

KERRY: No, I think there are very legitimate questions being asked, Sam.

STEIN: I'm talking specifically about the candidates saying they'd rip it up. You think it's almost impractical.

KERRY: Well, look, I'm not going to characterize what it is or isn't, I'm just giving you my take on what the reality will be when a new president is there.

I cannot see a president willfully taking the United Nations, five other nations who supported us in this negotiation and saying, "Sorry, we're just going to walk away from this and create a more dangerous situation in the Middle East." I just don't see that happening.

STEIN: One of the more persuasive criticisms, I think, of the deal is that, sort of in the out-years, after Iran has benefited from sanctions relief, our hands are sort of tied here. And by that I mean, you know, we won't be able to further crack down on their regional instability, their funding of terrorism because they'll turn around and they'll say, 'Well that's violating the spirit of the deal,' and they might back out. So what do you say to that critic?

KERRY: I say to that critic that this deal is very specifically defined, it is laid out paragraph for paragraph, the expectations are written because we didn't want anything based on trust or based on hope. This agreement is very specific in what it requires people to do.

And if Iran, after X number of years, there is a transition from some of the more stringent restrictions that we negotiated for a period of time, but that's to build some element of confidence about what their program is. That's to get the people in place to be able to inspect. That's to be able to know that in fact there is an efficient implementation process that you can rely on.

And that 15-year period when you suddenly -- not suddenly, but when you know that you have the size of the stockpile change or something -- you still have the total requirement of access for inspection to any site, anywhere where we suspect that they may be engaged in some illicit activity.

You also have 20 years of televised tracking of production of their bellows and rotors, which are critical elements of their centrifuges. And you have, very significantly -- first time ever in any arms control agreement -- 25 years of a tracking of their uranium production from the mine all the way to the grave.

STEIN: But the idea here is that they might not be good-faith actors. That they may take the opportunity of the U.S. clamping down on terrorism funding and say, 'You know what? They're going out --'

KERRY: That's their problem. If they were to do that, it's their problem because we will hold them accountable to this agreement, and if they break it or in any way give us pause to think that they are pursuing a nuclear weapon, we have every option available to us then that we have today.