Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said the return to office of President-elect Donald Trump will be the “beginning of the end” for the Iranian regime.
In a speech in Paris on Jan. 9 to the National Council of the Resistance of Iran, a coalition of overseas Iranian opposition groups, Pompeo said he was confident Trump would reinstate the “maximum pressure” strategy he exerted during his first administration.
“It will be the beginning of the end ... for the malign regime,” he said.
Pompeo, 61, pointed out that he did not speak for the Trump administration but that “it is the time for optimism for the people of Iran.
“I’ve seen this past year and it has been demonstrated, the regime is undoubtedly at its weakest point,” he said, adding that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has “no prayer, no hope, no dream, even of delivering prosperity to the Iranian people.”
“He is no longer even capable of defending those who are willing to risk their lives for him and for his autocratic regime.”
Pompeo, who served as director of the CIA under Trump before taking over as secretary of state in April 2018, told the audience in Paris: “Look inside the regime. It’s in crisis. The 2022 uprising, brutally suppressed by the regime, was a turning point. It showed that the Iranian regime must come to an end. Those deep problems that led to this uprising in 2022 have intensified greatly.”
The former secretary of state pointed out that last month, the Iranian government was forced to introduce power cuts and partial shutdowns of schools and government buildings because of energy shortages.
‘Fomenting War’
Pompeo said the Iranian regime cares “more about fomenting war against their enemies and their radical theology than they do about basic sustenance for their own people.”“The problem isn’t one of resources, it’s a problem of theocracy in politics and a regime that is evil,” he said. “It’s a regime that cares about enriching itself more than taking care of just the basic needs for its own people.”
Pompeo said Iran’s proxies in the Middle East have all been beaten—Hezbollah is “not even a shadow of what it once was,” Hamas is “on the verge of complete defeat and collapse in Gaza,” and the Assad regime, which had been the “bridge between all of the Iranian proxy forces,” is gone.
He said of the Assad regime in Syria, “The fact that it fell so quickly, that it was such a paper tiger and I think that’s told the world that the ayatollah [Khamenei] is finished, that his time is complete.”
Pompeo, who represented a congressional district in Kansas from 2011 to 2017, then compared Khamenei to the Wizard of Oz.
