Mike Pompeo has a hostile obsession with Iran. From his earliest days as CIA director in 2017, he advocated for a "leadership decapitation strategy" against Iran, reportedly telling his underlings not to worry whether that act of war would be constitutional, because "that's a question for the lawyers." Pompeo also reportedly told friends that he "will not retire from public service until [Iranian Gen. Qassem] Soleimani is off the battlefield." He got his wish in 2020, successfully pushing President Donald Trump to assassinate the general.
After Pompeo became Secretary of State in 2018, his State Department sent out a weekly newsletter titled This Week in Iran Policy, showing off the "maximum pressure" campaign he unleashed. (There was no similar newsletter for China or Russia.) Since leaving office, Pompeo has spoken at pro–regime change conferences, promising that the collapse of the Islamic Republic is just around the corner and arguing that U.S. policy must be "increasing pressure on the regime until it falls."
It's a hard sell in today's Republican Party. Although vice presidential candidate Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) is no dove, he has rejected "regime change" policies abroad, especially in the Middle East. Trump himself says he wants a deal with Iran. And Pompeo's policy is a failure on its own terms. The Islamic Republic withstood years of maximum pressure, entrenching its power despite protests and making steady progress on its nuclear program. Because maximum pressure didn't work, the United States has few other cards to play, short of a full-on war.
But Pompeo has a new sales pitch: a good, old-fashioned stab-in-the-back myth. Rather than failing to live up to his promises, Pompeo was betrayed by Democrats in cahoots with Iranian Islamists, the story goes. He and other Republicans repeated this line at the Republican National Convention (RNC) last week. Republicans are becoming convinced that there's a magic button, which Biden refuses to press, to achieve regime change without war.
"When we walked out in January of 2021, the Iranian regime was afraid, and the people of Israel were strong and secure, and we treated them like the friend and ally that they need to be," Pompeo said at the RNC. "And what about Iran today? When Joe Biden eased up on President Trump's maximum pressure campaign, we gave money to the Ayatollah, so he could cut more checks to the genocidal maniacs who conducted attacks, barbaric attacks, in Israel," he added.
Pompeo is relying on the fact that most people don't know much about economic sanctions and the international banking system. Because oil is bought and sold in dollars, Iran has a lot of money in foreign bank accounts, mostly in South Korea and Japan. Both Biden and Trump (as well as Barack Obama before them) were able to use the powers of the U.S. Treasury to trap Iran's oil money abroad.
That was the central pillar of the maximum pressure campaign, which did serious damage to the Iranian economy and kicked off years of unrest inside the country. Maximum pressure nearly led to war in the summer of 2019, when Iran began retaliating against other countries' oil industries. The following year, Trump upped the ante by outright seizing Iranian oil tankers, and Iran began seizing oil tankers in return. Biden has continued all of these policies.
The sanctions have gotten less effective over time. The Iranian economy has begun to recover from the initial shock of losing export revenue, and Iranian leaders are trying to sanctions-proof the economy by doing more trade outside the American financial system. China in particular has been expanding its purchases of Iranian oil. While Iran is still not in a great position, it's no longer on the verge of total societal collapse.
Last year, Biden used some of his built-up economic leverage to get concessions from Iran. In exchange for Iran releasing five Americans held on trumped-up charges, the United States agreed to allow Iran to use $6 billion of its own money to buy food and medicine. The Iranian oil money, which had been frozen in South Korea, was moved to a Qatari bank account overseen by U.S. Treasury officials, who can veto any Iranian purchase.
Pompeo hated the deal. "If someone paid your healthcare costs and paid for all your food, you'd have money left over to spend on whatever you wanted," he complained on WABC radio at the time. "The Iranians have money that's left over and they'll spend it on their nuclear program and conducting terror and attacking Americans."
That wasn't exactly the line Pompeo took while he was in government. Facing accusations that maximum pressure was making it harder to fight back against the coronavirus pandemic—a claim that the U.S. military privately agreed with—Pompeo's State Department had insisted that U.S. sanctions would not block Iran from buying food and medicine. Pompeo also tried to create a "humanitarian channel," an arrangement that would allow Iran to pay for food and medicine through Swiss banks, much like the Qatari arrangement that Biden agreed to.
In October 2023, the Palestinian armed group Hamas attacked Israel. Because Hamas is backed by Iran, many Republicans began blaming Biden's hostage deal. None of the Iranian money released to Qatar could have possibly been used in the attack—the bank account hadn't even been touched yet—but Republican hawks left people with the impression that Biden was paying for Hamas rockets. Some even claimed that, rather than Iran's own money, it was American taxpayer dollars being moved.
"Sadly, American taxpayer dollars helped fund these attacks, which many reports are saying came from the Biden administration," Trump himself said on October 7.
Although politicians will always attack their opponents as weak, the confusion around Iran matters beyond partisan politics. Pompeo's stab-in-the-back myth is muddying the waters in a Republican Party that is otherwise fed up with establishment foreign policy. Like other RNC speakers, he sold the road to war as a path to peace, and successful deal making with other countries as treason. Pompeo doesn't have to make an affirmative case for regime change—he just has to tear down the alternatives.
Trump, after all, consistently said that maximum pressure would be a way to get a "better deal" from Iran. Yet his own cabinet, led by Pompeo, consistently blocked any attempts to do something with Trump's bargaining chips. Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton even prepared to resign if Trump talked to the Iranian foreign minister. Instead of negotiating with the leverage they were supposedly building, the Trump administration continued to ratchet up the tensions—hoping that Iran would collapse before a war started.
Other clocks are ticking too. Iran has accumulated enough nuclear material to build a bomb on short notice, an outcome that U.S. presidents have promised to go to war to stop. And the Iranian-Israeli conflict looks like it will only heat up from here, with Israel likely to ask for more U.S. support in places like Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon. If the next administration wants to prevent war, it will have to cut deals with Iran over important issues, scale back U.S. commitments to Middle Eastern partners like Israel, or both.
Thanks to the myth of Biden's backstabbing, Republicans are uninterested in either of those things. The United States, they believe, still has cards that it is mysteriously refusing to play.
"If you want to check Iran, the way to do it is to, one, withdraw their oil money, which of course Joe Biden's been bad about, but you also have got to enable the Israelis and the Sunni Arab states to work together and actually provide a counterbalance," Vance said at an interview on the sidelines of the RNC. "You have the infrastructure there, sitting there, to weaken Iran, to strengthen our ally Israel. Joe Biden has done nothing with it. Donald Trump will reinvigorate it."
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