Mike Pompeo: We Don’t Need a Fake Deal With Iran

American isolationists on the right, and their allies in Obama-aligned think tanks in Washington, suggest there are only two options: war or a deal. Nonsense.

Stop Iran Now - By Mike Pompeo Via the Free Press

April 18, 2025

In early April, President Trump reportedly “waved off” an Israeli plan to strike nuclear facilities in Iran. When asked, Trump did not deny it but rather said he preferred to try diplomacy because he thinks “that Iran has a chance to have a great country and to live happily without death.”

The thousands of victims of Iran’s terror machine know all too well that “living happily without death” is impossible under the current regime. And a fake deal focused solely on nuclear enrichment will result in far less happiness and more death, not the reverse—not only for the Iranian people but for human beings all across the world.

Consider the Iranian citizens murdered by the regime, the Americans murdered in the attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut, or those of us, including President Trump, threatened with assassination by Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran. This regime has shown no intention of becoming a normal country but rather daily evinces depravity.

President Trump is pursuing a deal with Iran while it is at its weakest strategic point in decades. Its proxies—Hamas and Hezbollah—have been decimated by Israel. Sunni states, like Saudi Arabia, are readying for normalization with the Jewish state—and are opposed to a nuclear Iran.

The president’s hand could not be stronger.

But as hope springs eternal, President Trump, like at least five presidents before him, wants to make an agreement. To that end, he’s sent negotiators to Rome this weekend to reach a deal. And he wants it to be a “good deal.” Sign me up. Here’s what a “good deal” looks like.

From first principles, a deal that allows the regime to continue on its current trajectory is not a deal worth making. The truth is that today, the regime is weak. As Secretary of State in the first Trump administration, I laid out 12 conditions for an Iran deal. All of those conditions still apply, but they can be condensed into three key areas.

First, Iran must fully and verifiably dismantle all uranium enrichment sites and destroy all equipment and components connected to enrichment activities. This will require Americans on the ground to do the work and require complete, unqualified access for the International Atomic Energy Agency to any site, anywhere in Iran, unannounced, forever. An important technical component of this destruction is a full account of Iran’s previous nuclear weapons research and development efforts. Iran must commit to never enriching uranium or processing plutonium again.

Second, Iran must cease financial, military, and political support to its proxy forces around the region and turn over to the United States the senior leadership of al-Qaeda, which lives comfortably in Iran. No deal made with the regime that leaves its terror proxies intact is to be trusted.

Third, Iran should make peace with its Gulf Arab neighbors and cease threatening them and Israel by dismantling the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) external terror network it has built to wreak havoc in the region.

President Trump has made clear that there is another option in the event there is no deal to be made: a military attack on Iran. I agree that this is the alternative. With Iran at its weakest point since the 1979 storming of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, such an attack could set back the Iranian nuclear program for a significant period, and Israel, Gulf allies, Europe, and the United States could carry this attack out in a manner that reduces the risk of a major Iranian response.

Iran’s closest allies—the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin—are not likely to come to Iran’s aid following such an attack, reducing risk still further. That Iran might use all of its proxies to respond to such an attack is indeed a risk. But what’s more likely is that so long as the strikes only target military and nuclear sites, Ayatollah Khamenei will not risk escalation.

It is worth recalling what happened when President Trump, in his first term, struck IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani. Many condemned the strike, suggesting that it would lead to World War III. Indeed, I was present when many career diplomats and servicemen said the Soleimani strike would result in a massive Iranian regional and global response.

But that’s not what happened. For the most part, Iran folded.

Why? Because the ayatollahs know President Trump would end the regime if a massive response from Iran was so much as tried.

American isolationists on the right, and their allies in Obama-aligned think tanks in Washington, suggest there are only two options—“war or a deal.” This weakens our position and wanders blindly into the false dichotomy the Iranians want us to believe.

This “war or deal” narrative is being peddled by many of the “populist” Tucker Carlson-esque isolationists who have burrowed inside President Trump’s orbit. They repeat this mantra, exactly as President Barack Obama and Secretary John Kerry repeated endlessly—and wrongly.

This is propaganda. It is a false choice propagated by those who would prefer to coddle the regime in Tehran and cut a deal that will ensure that Iran obtains a full-on nuclear weapons program over time. Ironically, this outcome makes war more, not less, likely.

There are a range of options other than war or surrender.

As CIA director and secretary of state, I observed the United States’s wide array of tools to achieve important outcomes. I can tell you it’s not “war or a deal.” Breathless bleating from Carlson’s camp about “war or a deal” is not only wrong, it uses the same failed logic as from the deep-state careerists I would hear from at the State Department who attempted to thwart President Trump’s agenda.

Just as President Trump did for the last 18 months of his first term, we can apply maximum pressure and deter Iran by denying it the resources it needs to foment terror, rebuild the Shia Crescent, and obtain weapons of mass destruction. Our chokehold on the Iranian regime’s wealth in the first Trump term was effective. Iran was all but broke after less than two years of maximum pressure. The Ayatollah would have faced a massive resource shortfall had President Biden and his team not provided succor to the Iranian regime before Trump’s second term.

Israel, too, sees the opportunity and may well go back to the Begin Doctrine, when then-Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin struck Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak, without the blessing of the American president at the time, Ronald Reagan. In essence: Act with U.S. support if possible, but alone when necessary, to prevent a nuclear neighbor from arising.

I’m confident that President Trump understands the range of options and knows that, as he had said of the Obama-Kerry nuclear deal, a bad deal is much worse than no deal. Equally, I assign low probability to the ayatollah signing a satisfactory deal. I hope my skepticism is wrong.

In trying to make a deal, we must not lose sight of the only acceptable outcome: the elimination of Iranian nuclear enrichment, the cessation of its financial and political support for terror proxies, and, ultimately, peace with its neighbors.

About the Author

Mike Pompeo was Secretary of State from 2018-2021 and Director of the CIA from 2017-2018.

He graduated first in his class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1986 and served as a cavalry officer patrolling the Iron Curtain before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

He also served with the 2nd Squadron, 7th Cavalry in the US Army’s Fourth Infantry Division.

After leaving active duty, Mr. Pompeo graduated from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Immediately following law school, Mr. Pompeo worked as

an attorney at Williams & Connolly.

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Note: STOP IRAN NOW agrees with Former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

 We urge President Trump not to fall for the false war or a deal dichotomy.

This same scare tactic was presented by those who endorsed the JCPOA (which paved Iran's path to nuclear weapons). We must not be fooled again.

We encourage all of our Ambassadors to call the White House and urge President Trump not to make a foolish deal with the devil which will render futile his previous commendable policies of strength and moral clarity.

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