Mike Pompeo’s Message from Berlin was Blunt: What is Happening in Iran Today is a Revolution

Mike Pompeo’s message from Berlin was blunt: what is happening in Iran today is not another protest cycle—it is a revolution, a hinge point in the country’s history. The Iranian people, he said, are done with a “murderous, corrupt, and incompetent” government that cannot meet basic needs. The regime’s blood-soaked crackdown in recent weeks is not a sign of strength but a sign of political death: a dictatorship with no popular legitimacy and only one remaining tool—fear—and that tool will fail because Iranians will prove fearless.

Pompeo argued that the regime’s collapse is 100% inevitable—today, tomorrow, or years from now. The real question is what replaces it. In repeated uprisings, he said, Iranians have made their choice clear: no theocracy, no autocracy, and no return to the Shah—but a free, democratic republic accountable to its citizens.

He attacked appeasement as strategic and moral failure, calling past policy “appeasement on steroids,” and insisted the regime is incapable of reform because terror and cruelty are embedded in its DNA. He defended maximum pressure as the correct course to cut off the regime’s lifelines, accelerate its demise, and sustain sanctions—especially on oil and revenue streams that fuel repression and regional proxy warfare.

Pompeo also warned Western governments against any deal that leaves the regime in place, saying such deals erase the aspirations of millions of Iranians and reinforce the regime’s propaganda that the world must tolerate brutality because the alternative is chaos. That claim, he said, is false: there is an alternative—an organized democratic resistance and a transition roadmap featuring swift free elections, separation of religion and state, gender equality, and a non-nuclear Iran that does not threaten neighbors. Crucially, he emphasized that this path does not require foreign troops or outside money—only recognition of the Iranian people’s right to end the regime and the resistance’s right to confront its repressive forces, especially the IRGC.