Former CIA Director James Woolsey, who served under former President Bill Clinton, says President-elect Donald Trump should make weakening Iran a focal point of his foreign policy plan as president.
Woolsey said Sunday that despite the U.S. having a few shared interests with Iran — namely to defeat the Islamic State — Trump should make the "tactical" decision of working to dismantle Iran's power in the Middle East.
Speaking on CNN, Woolsey said that sometimes leaders must temporarily become friends with one enemy to defeat another.
"These are tactical decisions," he said. "We had a tactical decision in 1941 whether to sign on with Stalin against Hitler and we did. And it was good that we did."
"Sometimes you have to ally temporarily with a bad guy in order to defeat another bad guy," Woolsey added. "It's happened throughout American history."
Later in the interview, Woolsey reiterated his main point: that aside from fighting the Islamic State, Trump's number one foreign policy goal in the Middle East should be to weaken Iran.
"I think Iran is our main problem in that part of the world and I think that it’s going to be for some time," he explained, "because it’s a theocratic totalitarian set of revolutionaries and, I’d say, imperialists. They want to build an empire."
Woolsey served as the chief U.S. spy from 1993-1995.
Watch his comments below:
Chris Enloe
Staff Writer
