The war in Gaza is much more than a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians; it is part of a broader Iranian plan to undermine the American-led order in the Middle East. As 3,000 Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas terrorists stormed over the border from Gaza and murdered 1,400 Israelis, Lebanese Hezbollah—another Iranian proxy—increased its pressure on Israel’s northern border. As Israel began its ground incursion, the Iranian-sponsored Houthis fired drones and missiles toward Israeli cities. Meanwhile, Iranian cutouts in Iraq and Syria have attacked American bases no fewer than 24 times since October 17.
Join Hudson’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East for a discussion between Distinguished Fellow Michael R. Pompeo, the seventieth US secretary of state, and Senior Fellow Michael Doran on the ongoing Israel-Hamas war’s place in the Iranian strategy to undermine the United States.
Mike Doran:
Thank you everyone for coming. I am here with a man who needs no introduction, Former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. I'm Mike Doran. I'm the director for the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East here at the Hudson Institute, and we are going to have a discussion about the Gaza War in the crisis in the Middle East with Secretary Pompeo and about anything else that's on his mind. So Secretary Pompeo, let me start by saying welcome.
Mike Pompeo:
Thank you. It's great to be back with you. I don't think we've been together since October 7th, so timely that we have this conversation.
Mike Doran:
Yeah. Oh, sorry, I didn't realize you were saying since October 7th. Yeah, no, terrible since October 7th. I want to ask you just give us your first reactions to the events of October 7th.
Mike Pompeo:
So I remember watching, as we all did, as near real time, this unfolding of this barbaric set of incidents and it boggled the mind then, and I think people have seen footage that's come out in the aftermath. I saw some footage that's not been released publicly, and just very difficult to get your head around the absolute absence of soul, the evil nature of these human beings that committed these atrocities. I remember thinking that day a couple things. First, how the heck did this happen? How is it the case that it took so long for the response to arrive? I still don't know the answer to that, but then I remember thinking as we went through, I remember thinking about the times that we had lost deterrence against Iran during our four years and the actions that were required and that the context, the backdrop against which October 7th took place was in Iran that had been appeased for two and a half years and had observed in America that wasn't prepared to take actions that would cause our adversaries to fear that there might be real costs imposed on them.
And so we'll never know for sure exactly I suspect why they picked that date. But the cumulative impact of all the inaction of the United States to hold back bad actors accountable, I am confident emboldened Iran, you add the fact that they now have access to foreign exchange reserves somewhere on the order of $65 or $70 billion, I think gave them a high confidence that they could do precisely what they did. Permit Hamas, one of their pieces on the chess board, to kill 1400 Israelis. And I always remind folks here, kill Americans too, and they're still holding Americans hostage and Israelis hostage.
Mike Doran:
Well, you went right for Iran, which is where I wanted to take you, so that was easy enough.
Mike Pompeo:
It is funny, Mike, you say that, I think about them inseparably, it is not possible to talk about the Houthis without talking about Iran. It's not possible to talk about the fact that there was artillery fired at the American Embassy in Baghdad on my watch. They probably were born in Iraq, but for all intents and purposes, they were Iranian actors on the ground. So when I say Hezbollah, I am really thinking certainly about Nasrallah. There are differences amongst them, but this is all driven, fueled, funded, drained by the IRGC, the Iranian external forces. And so yeah, it's not surprising I speak about them as a unitary adversary.
Mike Doran:
Well, that's certainly the way I see it. But the administration has gone to great lengths, I would say twisted itself into a pretzel in order to distance Iran from the events of October 7th. They've made a big point that the Iranians, according to them, had no operational role in October 7th. Some senior administration officials told the press that they saw in the intel surprise from Iranian officials who they think would've known that this was going to happen, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, I think you and I would say Iran is so obviously involved in army training, equipping, paying for, having command and control over Palestinian Islamic Jihad, orchestrating the response with the Houthis Isabel and so on, that this almost doesn't matter. But why do you think they're making this distinction that Iran's not operationally involved? The most ridiculous thing I saw was a quote from a senior official in the Pentagon saying about the attacks on our forces that we don't have evidence of Ali Khamenei giving an order to do this.
Mike Pompeo:
Right.
Mike Doran:
So who do they have evidence of giving orders?
Mike Pompeo:
Yes. So you asked why, I think this is part and parcel of how President Obama and President Biden have approached security in the Middle East. Their theory of the case has been some idea that you could balance Iran against the Gulf Sunni Arab states, and you could increase peace and prosperity. When you're that locked into it, when you know that you have ceased to enforce sanctions which are completely enforceable, you can prove it.
Mike Doran:
You did it.
Mike Pompeo:
Yeah, it happened. We did it. When you have unfrozen funds on some theory that boy, $6 billion, it's their rightful money. When you have called the leader of one of the most important countries in the Gulf a pariah, when you've locked yourself into that place, you can't acknowledge it, right? You can't admit that failure in the moment of crisis because once you do that, you have to respond to it. And so what they have tried to do is create that separation so that they can continue to under respond. You mentioned the attacks. It sounds like we responded again overnight. I promise you that the ayatollah didn't take seriously and isn't changing any of his thinking about the risk to his regime as a result of the response the Americans have taken today. And so the reason they downplay it is because if you actually spoke the truth, if you had moral clarity about the Iranian regime being there, it would require a more forcible response. And they simply don't want to do that.
Mike Doran:
And you don't see any... Pardon me. You don't see any sign that they're shifting on this, that what those initial responses you saw were momentum from the established policy. Maybe also, I'm telling you things that I've heard when I've said to people that they haven't switched, they say there are prudential reasons to do this because we want to narrow the front, give the Israelis time to work on Hamas. If we start saying, "Iran, Iran, Iran," now, then we're going to widen the front. So there's a prudential reason here. What would you say to that?
Mike Pompeo:
Yeah, I think they have the logic backwards. This is the same logic that said, "We have to make sure we don't provoke Vladimir Putin." It's this constant fear that if you take serious action and you draw a red line and then enforce it, that you'll be provocative. I think they have it exactly backwards to the extent we allow Iran to hide behind the Houthis or whomever, the PIJ, whoever we allow them to hide behind. I think that I told us, sure enough, if you're not going to call me out, I'm going to keep at it. When you fire at an empty weapons munitions facility in Syria in response to the Iranians killing Americans, which is what I believe happened on October 7th, in what school of thought would deterrence be reestablished? And so that's the central failure. And so this is why they want to walk away from it. They are hoping they can... Look, I'll give you one other idea around this. Who have they asked to limit their use of firepower?
Mike Doran:
They, the administration.
Mike Pompeo:
The administration who is the Biden administration, they've condemned what happened in the desert on October 7th, but all their activities at the United Nations diplomatically, every time a US senior US official speaks about this, they talk about Israel needs to make sure they comply with the laws of war. We need a pause or a semi cease fire or whatever the heck it is, whatever. These are all restrictions on the victim.
Mike Doran:
And on the ally.
Mike Pompeo:
And on the ally and on the partner and emboldening the aggressor. And so the same thing with respect to not calling at Iran, my judgment, my logic for deterrence restoration is they understand power. They understand risk to their own regime. They understand costs. And to the extent today, today, today you're permitted to ship 3 million barrels of crude oil and collect cash for it while the Iranians are holding Americans hostage. That is green light time for the regime.
Mike Doran:
So the news last night is that the Houthis shot down an MQ-9. Now, I don't know that that's been 100%... If that report has been verified, but let's just assume for the sake of discussion that it happened, give us what you would be thinking if you were Secretary of State right now about how to respond to that.
Mike Pompeo:
Well, first of all, the good news is that they're not terrorists. I suppose we should-
Mike Doran:
Refer of course to the Fed, that the Biden administration took the Houthis off the terrorism-
Mike Pompeo:
Within a couple of hours of them taking office on the theory that if you delisted them from the terrorists, that they would become boy scouts and good citizens of the world. I think we could see that it was an epic failure. We should also remember when we think about our friends and allies and partners in the region, that the Houthis fire missiles and rockets into the kingdom of Saudi Arabia almost every day. It goes largely unreported in the Western media. Saudi lives at risk almost every day from Iran, and yet the United States does almost nothing to support their capacity to defend themselves.
I don't want to go through the particular response things. I know the list of potential responses, and we always immediately think of kinetic, what can you go make blow up? There are hundreds of responses that the United States government has been preparing to put pressure on Iran along a continuum of seriousness. And I'm confident President Biden has seen at least some of that menu been presented to him. I don't know that, I just assume that the Department of Defense in the intelligence community and the diplomatic community are presenting him a wide suite of alternatives, and he has clearly chosen from the least aggressive responses. So if they go from a scale of one to 100 in terms of capacity to deter, we're probably at a two.
Mike Doran:
Right. It's the second time we've hit basically empty containers in Syria.
Mike Pompeo:
Yeah. And by the way, this in response to the fact that they threatened American lives and clearly injured several dozens of Americans. By the way, the information warfare around this too is really quite something. I remember when we-
Mike Pompeo:
... around this too is really quite something. I remember when we took the strike on Soleimani, the response was fired into al-Asad, so it was missiles fired into al-Asad where we had some Americans injured then too, a couple had serious traumatic brain injuries. I remember the media went crazy over the fact that we'd taken the strike, and we had some Americans there. I had Nancy Pelosi get in my face and scream at me.
Mike Doran:
Because you were putting Americans at risk.
Mike Pompeo:
Because we were putting Americans at risk. The truth of the matter is we created an enormous amount of deterrence, and we've now had multiples of that injured under the Biden administration, and I am pretty confident Nancy Pelosi is not screaming at President Biden. They have politicized this in a way that actually encourages President Biden to continue to be way too passive and create risk for the United States. I don't know if he saw too, in the last 48 hours, a report that Mossad and the Brazilian Intelligence Service took down a Hezbollah plot in Brazil.
Mike Doran:
Yeah, I saw that.
Mike Pompeo:
We all know I've been to a synagogue that was blown up in South America not too terribly long ago. We have a wide open southern border. The plot on October 7th was at least in the making for 12, 14 months. During that time, I think it's 1.6 million people that we know of got away from our border. Query what's taking place here in the United States today. I don't know, I have no intelligence that presents this.
Mike Doran:
Right.
Mike Pompeo:
But we should not for a moment think that there is no risk, and if we are not serious about deterring Iran, then it won't just be something that happens in Oman or in Kuwait or in the Emirates, then it's something in Denver or Chicago or Houston goes boom.
Mike Doran:
Another problem with the way the Biden administration has defined it, because they have defined the conflict in Gaza as a bilateral Israeli-Palestinian affair, and ignored Iran, and downplayed the role of Hezbollah as well. It means then that when Iran attacks our forces, there's an implication that Israel is endangering-
Mike Pompeo:
Yeah, sure.
Mike Doran:
If their messaging is saying that Israel needs to use more restraint, and Israel should think about a pause or a ceasefire, and our forces are coming into attack, it's just one step to saying, Israel's endangering our forces. Rather than if you put it in the frame that you're saying-
Mike Pompeo:
Right.
Mike Doran:
... this is Iran against the US alliance system, then Israel is on the front lines for us against-
Mike Pompeo:
That's right.
Mike Doran:
It's a totally different picture.
Mike Pompeo:
It's a completely different way to frame it. Logic would tell you that the framing that the Biden administration has grabbed creates risk for America. It's not about politics, it's about how do you keep Americans safe? And the answer can't be, we should do everything we can to slow the Israelis down from taking Hamas off the chess board for the Ayatollah. In fact, we should be doing just the opposite. We should be telling them, go fast, go hard. I'm also confident that Gulf Arab leaders, while they will not say it, they think the same. This extremism, this radical political Islam, is something that they know undermines their efforts to move their nations forward. We saw it with the Abraham Accords, it's the direction that they want to go, they think it's in the best interest of their nations to do so. And so, I am very confident that it's not only the Israelis that want Hamas gone in the region. Save for Iran, I'm convinced everybody else in the region wants them gone as well.
Mike Doran:
I saw that in 2006 when I was in the White House during the second Lebanon war.
Mike Pompeo:
Lebanon, sure.
Mike Doran:
There was a rush by the Europeans to come in and tell the Israelis to shut down the war, and there was some quiet words from the Gulf states to the Europeans to say, give it a little bit of time. It was amusing to see, and it shocked the Europeans. They hadn't absorbed the fact that the other countries in the region felt as threatened by Iran and its proxies as Israel did.
Mike Pompeo:
Yeah. The Abraham Accords happened because we isolated Iran, and the Gulf leaders there came to know that if they had a bad day there, we'd be with them, and they came to know that there wasn't ever going to be an inch of daylight between the United States and Israel. When you set those two things up, then you can begin to isolate the bad actor in the region, and we did, and this administration did precisely the opposite of that. This was something that one can never predict what happened on October 7th, I don't think, no amount of intelligence, no amount of analysis can say, I think this is likely to happen, but you can certainly talk about, have you increased risk or increased probabilities? And there is no doubt, to the extent you allow resources to flow to Iran and you do not push back against them, you can articulate a clear pathway where the likelihood of something like October 7th is much more likely.
Mike Doran:
Okay. This is obvious to you, it's obvious to me, it's obvious to millions of Middle Easterners. How do we make this obvious to the White House? They are actually, if you look at Jake Sullivan's Foreign Affairs article, which came out in print, and it was taking such a victory lap for all the quiet in the Middle East that they had to edit it online, but I think they're genuinely proud of their Middle East policy.
Mike Pompeo:
Sure. Remember, they talked about Afghanistan being an enormous success.
Mike Doran:
So this is an impenetrable epistemological bubble they're in. You probably don't have an answer for this, but-
Mike Pompeo:
I don't.
Mike Doran:
... is there anything more we can be doing?
Mike Pompeo:
This is a moment for absolute moral clarity about who's good and who's evil, and I don't know what more to say, I don't have an answer. I've been asked to articulate President Biden's Iran policy, and I can almost always... I can have it with reasoned people, I can have an intellectual debate, and I can understand their logic chain. We'll have different priorities or different sequences. This one, I'm at a loss for thinking that you are materially better off paying ransom to the Iranians. Literally, my staff pulled a quote 10 weeks ago, right after we'd given $6 billion for five American hostages to get home, and in some remarks, I said, it is almost certain that Iran now knows the market price for an American hostage, and there'll be more.
Mike Doran:
I thought of you, because there was a Hamas leader who subsequently said, he was talking about their hostages and he said, look, the Iranians just got $6 billion, we should get something now.
Mike Pompeo:
Yeah.
Mike Doran:
So it was explicitly on their minds.
Mike Pompeo:
There is nothing more serious than these hostage issues. Yeah, of course it is. By the way, certainly Hamas was thinking of it, the Iranians were thinking about it too. They know the leverage points. They know what they got for Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who was...
Mike Doran:
Right.
Mike Pompeo:
So they know, and they know that we care about human life, and they use it in ways that make it very difficult for us. And so, what you can't do is you can't reinforce their incentive structure. And so, to your point about how do you articulate the Biden administration's logic, it's inexplicable to me to think that you didn't go create the very conditions that would encourage further hostage taking by the Iranian regime.
Mike Doran:
Let's talk a little bit about the hostages. It's a complex subject now, because we've got hostages held by Hamas, by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and by criminal elements in the Gaza Strip, so three different actors you have to go to, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad is basically Iran. So you've got to talk to Hamas, you got to talk to the Iranians, and you have to... Who knows about the 20 something others that are in the hands of criminal elements.
If you were in the State Department and you're confronted with this problem, and you've got some who are Americans and some who are not, how do you begin thinking about this? Because President Biden is saying, we need to pause in order to get some of the hostages out. Of course, that's going to be... Hamas is not going to give up all of the hostages, or even most of them. It's going to be as much as they can get for each individual. So do you look at it as a package and say, no seats fired until we get all of them out. Do you make separate deals? It's a hard problem.
Mike Pompeo:
These are very hard problems. Hostage issues are always incredibly complicated. I met some of the families yesterday morning, they've been here in Washington, I know some others have met with them too, and just you feel for them in ways that's incomprehensible to those of us who've not been in the place that they are. I pray that all of those that are still alive and held will be returned to their families.
As for how to get there, I think as a practitioner, I am confident that if there's an opportunity to get even one back, that they'll do their best to get one back, or if it's 50 or 75. It's hard to even think about these numbers, we were never talking about numbers like this, I don't know what it means. It's hard to comprehend 220 to as many as 250 people that are held there. I think my recommendation to the President of the United States or the Secretary of State would be, go faster, direct the Israelis to go faster, apply pressure-
Mike Doran:
Militarily?
Mike Pompeo:
Militarily, on the ground.
Mike Doran:
Because only military pressure is going to create the incentive.
Mike Pompeo:
Going to do it. Second, to the extent you begin to talk about forcing the Israelis into a time-limited operation, you are creating exactly the incentive that Hamas wants, or that the PIJ wants. They want to say, hey, we're going to hang on these folks until you all lose the temerity to continue to prosecute and destroy us. And so, every time you talk about a ceasefire, or Secretary-General Guterres, who probably issued the singular worst statement about what happened on October 7th-
Mike Doran:
That was horrendous.
Mike Pompeo:
Some of the statements from the Gulf Arabs weren't my cup of tea, but I understand their dynamic. I do not understand the gentleman who runs the United Nations making such a horrific statement. The absence of decency and morality coming out of the leader of the UN was something that I just found horribly appalling. But it applies pressure, and when the bad guys, when PIJ and Hamas, think, you know what? These guys are going to lose their license to continue to prosecute this claim. They're going to clinging to those hostages, because they know that is the durational asset that they can use to maintain power for a longer period of time.
And so, the other thing I would be saying to the President of the United States is, do not in any way suggest that we're not going to continue to allow the Israelis to prosecute this until every last Hamas official has been eliminated.
Mike Doran:
One of the things that-
Mike Pompeo:
And I think that will encourage them to up the number of hostages they will release in exchange for something
Mike Doran:
One of-
Mike Pompeo:
... Hostages, they were released in exchange for something.
Mike Doran:
One of the things that the administration's distinction between Iran and the conflict has done for them is I think it is at least taking some of the attention away from the attacks on the Americans on the American basis and the connection to Gaza. Because when the Americans call out for restraint on the Israelis, in addition to weakening the Israeli hand, it does send a message to the whole region. Everyone else in the region knows that Iran is attacking Americans and telling Americans that they, the Americans, have to restrain the Israelis. So it looks like we are buckling. We are-
Mike Pompeo:
Of course.
Mike Doran:
In fact, we are buckling, buckling to Iranian military pressure against us, which further erodes our deterrence as you mentioned at the beginning.
Mike Pompeo:
It is a very difficult place the Biden administration has wound itself into because now it's the case that if they begin to reverse course, it will look disjointed and inconsistent in the Gulf-Arab Partners, including Doha and Qatar who are the most likely interlocutor to get us to a successful resolution of getting these hostages back. It's very hard for them. One thing that we were able to do in our four years was we had a core set of really simple ideas. I think folks some here would say too simple, but they are a core set of simple ideas. We drew fewer red lines, certainly in the Middle East, but elsewhere as well. But when we did, we were vigorous about enforcing them. And that credibility matters and you can't get it in a crisis.
In the crisis moment, it looks like a... Everybody who's been sentenced to jail in America, at sentencing, they find Jesus. All of a sudden, "I'll never do this again. I'm going to clean up my act. I won't touch drugs, I'll never steal money, I'll never do whatever." Come on. So here we're in a crisis. If the Biden administration took up a counter view, the Gulf-Arab states would know that this was temporal, that this was temporary and wasn't something that was at their core. So you have to develop that trust and consistency over time to establish the very credibility that is required to restore deterrence against Iran. And that is very tough for the Biden administration to do over the course of the next 14 months.
Mike Doran:
To what extent do you think that the Biden administration feels militarily constrained in the sense that they're very busy in Ukraine. We're not directly involved in Ukraine, but it's eating up an enormous amount of time and resources, attention, and there's concern about China in Taiwan. Just talking about the Pentagon, they want a quiet life. It seems to me like the Pentagon is bought in, to a certain extent, to the thesis of the Biden administration, that appeasement of Iran is going to buy us quiet in the Middle East. Do you think that's the case? And if you were president dealing with that, would that be particularly difficult for you to deal with?
Mike Pompeo:
It's an interesting question. It is certainly the case... My experience was that the Department of Defense was the least willing of all the major bureaucracies to confront Iran. When we went to do it, they performed with incredible... The strike on Soleimani, there's no other military in the world that could have pulled off what they did. And I get this having been a soldier, they are reluctant to press the case. We saw it with-
Mike Doran:
Civilians always want to use them.
Mike Pompeo:
But we saw the amazing work they can do. We are praying mantis, right? We know that we know how to take down the Iranian infrastructure and impose real costs on them in a way with minimal risk to our soldier, sailors, airmen, and marines. So we have the tools to do it. But yeah, I'm confident he's being told, "Sir, we have to keep X for the Pacific. We've got to make sure that we're still providing resources to do R&D program," all this... There's the bureaucratic inertial response that says, "Hey, let's just see if we can't get this one to move on its way." I'm sure that that's true. I'm confident that the state department, not just in dissent memos... Which by the way is a goofy thing. There's no corporation in America that permits dissent memos.
Mike Doran:
I'll ask you-
Mike Pompeo:
But having run the State Department, this has a special place in my heart. Everybody gets to say their piece. That's not the point. That's why you hire people. You want to hear their views of the world. But when the boss tells, "We're going left, folks," it is like left tackle poles, the guard poles, everybody's coming out, we're going left. I hope that that's the case today, that when President Biden's telling them what to do, that the entire team is moving towards that. But the inertial reluctance inside the Pentagon, I'm sure is very real. I don't know that they feel it's constraining because I think that is consistent with this administration.
Mike Doran:
They're there anyway, so they are-
Mike Pompeo:
Exactly.
Mike Doran:
Let's talk about the... I don't know the dissent memo, if it was ever generated, but I read that there was a dissent memo percolating up in the State Department. We also read in the press about the struggle sessions in the White House where they had to let staff express their dissatisfaction with the American support for Israel. I think I know the answer to this question, but if you were Secretary of State and this was percolating up, how would you have dealt with it?
Mike Pompeo:
I probably would've had fewer Kumbaya sessions. The first question you asked was, "What was your immediate response?" Do you remember this administration's immediate response?
Mike Doran:
Yeah.
Mike Pompeo:
The immediate response was demand a ceasefire instantaneously from the Palestinian office from the United States Embassy in Jerusalem, which we of course eliminated, but which was recreated. The pro-Palestinian view inside the department state runs deep and wide. You've seen it, Mike. You've seen it in your time in service. This isn't new, would've existed when you were in government service. And by the way, I'm untroubled by different voices. Every company I ran, every organization I've run, I've always encouraged people to share their wisdom, their thoughts, their expertise. But we've allowed this to metastasize in a way that we don't have a unitary executive in the way that our founders wanted us to have it.
We had a handful of dissent cables during my time too. I'd get these dissent cables like, "Okay, that's great. You told me what you think, but are you on the team? That's fine. Tell me what you think, but that's just not what we're going to do and now I need to have confidence you're actually going to do what it is that the President of the United States is asking you to do." And I will say that this White House and State Department are much more willing to tolerate a much broader range of views. And I'm confident it has impacted their policy as well.
Mike Doran:
I wonder if the tolerance for dissent on this particular issue is much higher than the tolerance would be on other issues. In other words, when I saw they're having struggle sessions in the White House... If there's a group in the executive branch that is more in line with the president... There's no group in the executive branch that's more in line with the president than the White House. You don't have to let them express all of their discontent unless you want people outside to hear that there is such discontent.
Mike Pompeo:
Right. The other thing I'll say about this is it's unidirectional. It's a one-way ratchet. Anybody think that there is there a dissent cable at the State Department saying, "I think we should take stronger action with respect to Iran?" Maybe. We just haven't heard about it. I never witnessed that where I chose to compromise someplace and there was a dissent cable. It's really quite something to see that it comes from a progressive mindset that is buried deep inside of each of these institutions that is pervasive and continuous and does drag policy back in that direction, exists at the Pentagon as well. Certainly on the civilian side.
Mike Doran:
You've been kind enough to take a few questions, but before we get to the audience, let me just ask you a couple of specific things about the war. Israel has taken the north of the Gaza Strip. It's carrying out raids into the south. The President has said publicly, "Don't occupy the whole Strip." Would you put such restrictions on the Israelis or would you say, "Go, go, go! Dismantle this organization, kill all of the Hamas members from north to south," or would you make distinctions?
Mike Pompeo:
No restrictions. I would tell Israel they need to do what they believe is their duty to do to protect their own people in the same way that our president should do whatever he needs to do to protect the American people.
Mike Doran:
And now, what about Hezbollah in the north? The attacks by Hezbollah in the north, they have led to Israel evacuating the population along the northern border. Israelis are telling me, "You guys don't understand. This is intolerable. We've evacuated the population in the south. We are not going to repopulate the south until we convince all Israelis that Hamas is gone. We're going to have the same problem in the north." Would you be inclined to support the Israelis if they were to decide that this war needs to expand to Hezbollah?
Mike Pompeo:
Yes.
Mike Doran:
So in other words, as you see it, their definition of what victory is for them should be the American definition of what victory is?
Mike Pompeo:
When you begin with a central thesis that these are all just Iranian tools that are designed to both not only wipe the rightful Jewish homeland off the face of the earth, but are coming after us as well, if Israel thought this was the thing that they needed to do, I'd say, "Go do it." And you should know it would be applauded in lots of places all across the world, places that you wouldn't expect. Certainly the good people of Lebanon would welcome the disarming of Hezbollah. It's not an easy task by any measure. You saw this in 2006. It is a very difficult undertaking. They are highly capable. The American role there is also very clear. You remember, you'd be in your high school and there'd be a fight in the hallways where the lockers were all around and you had a couple options. Everybody could pile in or somebody could go stand back and let them go at it for a while. We should stand back and demand that everyone else stand...
Mike Pompeo:
We should stand back and demand that everyone else stand back and let them go at it for a while because we have to establish. You have to get this deterrence back. It's not tolerable. The last thing I'd say is we've been talking about this at the tactical and operational and maybe strategic level. Don't forget, the real challenge that confronts the Middle East is an Iran with a nuclear weapon. And to the extent the Iranian regime has tools like Hezbollah and like the Houthis that can continue to push us that say, "Don't do too much or we'll unleash these folks on you." So give us the capacity to spend more centrifuges, to continue to train nuclear physicists and scientists inside of our country. To the extent we are fearful that they'll have a tactical and operational leverage on us, they'll gain a strategic advantage. And in Iran with the nuclear weapon is really bad news for the entire world.
Mike Doran:
That's another thing.
Mike Pompeo:
And we shouldn't think about them in isolation. And the only country that can police this is us.
Mike Doran:
That's another thing that when you frame it as a bilateral Hamas Israel issue, that dimension, the Iranian goals of provoking this conflict, they fall by the wayside. A lot of people have said, "Hamas was concerned about Saudi Israeli normalization." I'm sure that was one of the Iranian goals, but having Israel mired in this conflict weakens Israel, and Israel, which is the only power in the region who has the capabilities and the inclination to actually prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. So they are by doing this, paving the way to their nuclear programs. It's what you just said. But the Iranians are clearing the way to a nuclear weapon. But that hasn't been stated a lot in the press. I've seen very few people present it that way.
Mike Pompeo:
Even in this setting, in an unclassified setting, I can say with great deal of confidence that the Iranians think about this as a package. These tactical efforts, these proxy efforts are designed to create not only this crescent that runs from Sana'a to Baghdad through Damascus and into Beirut, not only create that Shia Crescent, but also enables them to have the leverage in the moment when they're prepared to complete their program, their nuclear weapons program, that will be the tool that they use to convince the world that we ought to just accept them as a nuclear nation on the world stage.
Mike Doran:
One of the most amazing things about this is that by precipitating this conflict, they have moved so much opinion in the Muslim world toward the position that they're taking, not necessarily toward them, but into a position that benefits them. I'm talking about Tehran, of course, but also so many people on our own streets and in our own universities. I'm actually surprised. I'm a refugee from academia and I left the place because I thought it was a cesspool. But even I, who hold it in very low regard, I am surprised at what I'm seeing.
Mike Pompeo:
Yeah. This is shirts and skins time. Right? I think these problems, to your point, I think these things have been there sitting on our university campuses and some of our elite institutions-
Mike Doran:
I'm not taking my shirt off.
Mike Pompeo:
Yeah, I'm not either. This is not good. I think this is simply unmasked and gave them space to go out and do what is their natural inclination. It's heartbreaking. For 50 years, the left has taken over our universities in these elite institutions, and those of us who believe in the foundational ideas of America need to spend the next, I hope it's not 50 years, but the next years taking them back.
Mike Doran:
It's going to be a long time.
Mike Pompeo:
It's a long march back.
Mike Doran:
Yeah.
Mike Pompeo:
It's a lot of work.
Mike Doran:
Okay, we will take a couple of questions if there are any. Yes, sir.
Mike Doran:
Hi. Mike Iarosis, former DOD. I spent a lot of time in Israel. I know it's a very small country. They have a nuclear bomb. At what point for the salvation of Israel, do you think they would utilize their nuclear capabilities, and would it be against Iran?
Mike Pompeo:
Oh goodness. I can't answer that question. I mean, it's unanswerable. I am convinced that the Israeli leadership, I say that intentional, it's not just Prime Minister Netanyahu, the Israeli leadership will take all the actions they need to protect themselves. I don't think it's going to come to them having to use weapons of mass destruction in a serious way. I'll stop there. I am hopeful that the United States will not stop Israel from doing what it believes it needs to do in its own national interest. That would be a tragedy, certainly for the Jewish people, but it would be a tragedy for the United States and the Gulf as well.
George Nicholson:
Sir. George Nicholson, the Washington rep for the Global Special Operations Forces Foundation. First, let me say thank you for everything that you did as a Secretary of State, but before that, wearing your other hat as Director of the CIA, everything you did to support SAC and SOCOM.
A question about... General Keen has said basically he's got a concern that going against empty warehouses, that's not going to solve the problem. You've got to make a cost to the Iranians and saying, "Okay, we're going to go against leadership targets. We're going to go against key things." Unless you do that, that's not going to be serious.
The other quick question is basically in terms of wearing your previous hat as a CIA director. What's going to happen? Why with the capabilities we've got with NRO, with NSA, with all the capabilities we've got, didn't we have better indicators of what was happening?
Mike Pompeo:
It's a fair question, and I don't know the answer to that. These are hard problems. Maybe I'm a little defensive because I held a job for a bit in the intelligence world, but I always wanted to say... Because we had days where we were surprised on things, too. Nothing of this magnitude on our watch. Maybe we were good, maybe we were lucky, maybe the Lord was smiling. Maybe some combination thereof. But we'd miss things, too. And I always remind people like, "Yeah, but we got the other 42,000, right?" And yeah, it was bad. We got this one wrong.
I can tell you that Shin Bet, Mossad, all of the American Intelligence Collection, our Department of Defense brothers and sisters do really good work. I don't know what happened here. It is often the case that for things like this, you need people inside on the ground. I can't speak to why they didn't have those human assets that were sitting there warning them.
The other thing I will pause at, and I don't know how this will play out when the tale is ultimately told, it is often the case that you get confirmation bias, not just in the intelligence and its collection, but in its analysis. I believe that the Biden administration, the Israeli government, Qatar had kind of had an arrangement in the staff that they believe was a workable solution. They bought the storyline. It wasn't the storyline that Hamas were good folks. It was a storyline that Hamas was happy to be kleptocratic thugs, right? And they were just happy to have their nice cars and their nice homes and be able to travel the world, and that was sufficient for them. And they missed the fact that this is ideological, that for them, this is both existential for them to continue to put pressure on Israel.
And second, that they are really working at the behest of the big boss in Tehran. When you think you've got it and you've got these problems in Hezbollah in the north, you've got a complicated situation taking place in Syria. Remember the Israelis have been flying missions in Syria for years, right? Continuous. It doesn't get talked about very much, but taking out Iranian targets in Syria for years and years and years. I think there was this idea that somehow we have this one... We understand the risks from Hamas and we're going to focus and put our resources elsewhere. I suspect you'll see some of that when this is all unpacked.
Mike Doran:
Okay. We have time for-
Mike Pompeo:
U.S. Intelligence didn't pick it up either, as best I can tell. So look on us, too.
Mike Doran:
We've got time for one more laser-like one. It has To be laser-like. Oh wait, you got to wait for the... A yes or no answer.
Mike Pompeo:
That's on me.
Tom Duesterberg:
Tom Duesterberg here at Hudson.
Mike Pompeo:
Yes, sir.
Tom Duesterberg:
Next week, purportedly Biden's going to meet President Xi. Chinese are probably helping the Iranians in their various activities. What would you recommend to President Biden to tell or to discuss with Mr. Xi next week?
Mike Doran:
A great question.
Mike Pompeo:
Well, It's a very good question in that we know they're helping them at the very least by delivering them wads of Renminbi every day, purchasing their crude oil. So I would start, if I was there and I got to be in charge, I would tell him that he had purchased his last ounce of Iranian crude oil, like this morning. When you walked in here, General Secretary, that's it. You're done, and we are effectively going to sanction your financial institutions until you stop buying. We have the capacity. You probably can't get it to zero, but you can get effectively to zero. So there you go. There's my opener. Good morning. How are you? Stop buying Iranian crude oil.
And from there, I would expand it to reminding them that if the Houthis mine the Bab-el-Mandeb or the Persian Gulf is shuttered for a while, it'll impact them a lot more than it impacts the United States of America, and that his actions should be consistent with that. That will go off in the mist, but just remind them it's not in China's best interest to watch this thing really escalate either. It's nice that they can tie down the Americans and cause us to spend resources and create internal angst inside the United States, but the Chinese economy is already in a hot mess. And if it were the case that even for a handful of weeks there was a closure for whatever reason, that'd be really bad for his continued leadership in China as well. It'd just be worth reminding him. He'll discount it.
Mike Doran:
When you give him that statement, I'm just curious about the body language. Do you see it apologetically, "Listen, I'm sorry. We're going to enforce the sanctions. If you need a little bit of time, we can help you there and so on. But this has to happen."
Mike Pompeo:
Oh, I would absolutely invite him to North Dakota and say, "You can buy all the LNG you want from North Dakota." Yeah, I'd be happy to sell him. That's how I would approach it. I'd say, "I got a deal for you.' Right. In other words, we understand you need this product-
Mike Doran:
And we are here to help.
Mike Pompeo:
And we have an answer for you. Yes, with great joy.
Mike Doran:
Oh, okay. All right. Well listen, thank you very much.
Mike Pompeo:
Thank you Mike.
Mike Doran:
We really appreciate this. Thanks all of you for coming.