Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sat down with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins for “This Week on Capitol Hill” to talk about a range of topics from the Iran War and Saudi Arabia’s nuclear potential to international religious freedom and the rise of socialism in America. Here is their conversation.

TONY PERKINS: When you left office six years ago as Secretary of State, did you believe the United States and Iran would eventually find themselves in this direct military conflict that we see today?

MIKE POMPEO: I did. I believed it was inevitable that we would have to go in and eliminate their capacity to have a nuclear weapon or be a nuclear-capable country. We’d worked on this tirelessly. We got out of the crazy deal that President Obama had put the country in, called the JCPOA, the nuclear deal, which had created a pathway for a nuclear weapon. Our method in the first term was to use maximum economic pressure, and we’d been pretty successful at draining the Iranian regime’s funding sources and money. But President Biden turned it back on and gave them money. And so, I did believe that, in the end, this is what it was going to take. Not because the United States ever wants war, but because [of] this Islamist regime. These are radical Islamists. These are terrorists who have been threatening the United States since 1979 and Israel for the same time. It was going to take someone to go in and rip these nuclear weapons out of their cold hands.

PERKINS: Now, when you were CIA director, obviously you had a better understanding than most of what was happening in the world. And you made your first speech … in Cairo as Secretary of State. And in that speech, you articulated your worldview, if I can use that term — you didn’t use that term — but you said you were a Christian. That understanding, I think, helps you and helped the State Department better understand the long-term threat of Iran and the regime that was there. … [W]ith that understanding, is there a diplomatic solution?

POMPEO: The answer to that is — these things almost always end with some form of arrangement. But it all depends on how much leverage the other side has. And so long as the Iranians have the capacity to threaten Israel, to threaten [their Muslim neighbors]. 

PERKINS: But behind that is ideology.

POMPEO: … This is why capitulation — forced capitulation — is likely the only outcome that will get the American people what they need, the security and peace and stability in the Middle East that benefits the United States of America. And I think your point is really well taken. When you think of the United States as a Judeo-Christian nation, we sometimes can’t understand these folks. We sometimes think, ‘Oh, there’s a deal to be done. They’re rational people. The pain level must be high. Ninety million people [are] suffering in Iran. Surely the government’s not going to let that happen.’ We’re Christians. We believe that people are rational and decent and care about their fellow human beings. That is not the case for the Islamic Republic of Iran’s leadership.

PERKINS: There’s also a deeper understanding of the Judeo-Christian biblical viewpoint that there is good and evil, and there are evil forces at work in our society, and they’re manifesting themselves. And oftentimes, it is in regimes like this that [are] deadly…

POMPEO: I talk about this all the time. When folks ask me, ‘Mike, we don’t like war.’ I remind them that from biblical times, from nearly the beginning, there was evil in the world. And that evil requires good people to do the necessary to protect from that evil. Goodness requires — indeed, I think the Lord requires — us to do the necessary to push back against this evil. … The governments have a responsibility to protect their people from this evil. You see it with Vladimir Putin today. You see it with Xi Jinping in China, and you see it with the ayatollah in Iran. They want the United States … to live in a country that is very different than the one that we know and love and appreciate.

PERKINS: … Is the world today safer [or] more dangerous than it was when you were at the Department of State?

POMPEO: Oh, goodness. It’s never a safe place. These things go on forever. The good news is President Trump’s decision to go after the Iranian regime’s nuclear program made us all safer. There’s still more work to do.

PERKINS: …We’re seeing relationships, conversations taking place between Israel and Lebanon. Israel, I think, is in a much stronger place now than they were four years ago, even though they’ve gone through really the refining fire. Your thoughts?

POMPEO: I think Israel is absolutely in a stronger place than it was. And they are determined. October 7 changed things for them. We’re never going back to an October 6 world in the Middle East, and I think we all need to take that on board. As we think about [it], how is it that you get peace and stability? I think what they’re doing in Lebanon is fantastic. The fact that the Israelis and the Lebanese, the Lebanese leadership, President [Joseph] Aoun is the only Christian leader in the region.

PERKINS: And he met this week with the president.

POMPEO: He was with President Trump this past week working on trying to figure out how … you get the Iranians out of Lebanon. How do you get Hezbollah out of Lebanon? How can … the United States, Israel, and Lebanon achieve that? I’m very hopeful that the president and Prime Minister Netanyahu can achieve that. Note, too, this past week, lots of missiles landed in the Middle East. None of them in Israel. I think the Iranians have learned a great deal about if you provoke this powerful military, that this will end badly for you. And so, the oddity of the fact that in Tehran, they are now firing at Muslims, not Jews. They’re now firing their missiles at Muslims, not Christians. They’re firing their missiles at their own religionists, I think, is very telling about the evil nature of the regime itself and desperation, fear, and a deep commitment to continuing the power of the regime. So, I think what you can clearly see now is they have put all their chips on the table. They’re going to try and stay in power, and it’s going to require an effort not just from the United States, but Israel and our Gulf Arab partners, to make sure that that regime no longer has the power that it’s had for 25 years.

PERKINS: Clearly, they’ve been degraded but not neutralized.

POMPEO: That’s right. That’s exactly right. [They still have the] capacity to threaten the Strait of Hormuz and, frankly, to threaten their Gulf Arab partners as well.

PERKINS: Time is on their side, not ours. And they know that that has historically been how they negotiate. They drag things out knowing that the political will of the West is sometimes a lot weaker.

POMPEO: We’ve seen this in history before, Tony. Western societies are difficult to manage conflicts, right? It’s difficult to do. [It’s] much easier in an authoritarian regime, because you don’t have to respond to the will of the people. They’re trying to figure out how to get through the last two years of this administration. They’re trying to convince The New York Times to continue to write pieces about how Israel and the United States are the problem, not the Iranians. All of those things [are] trying to undermine the will of the American people and run the clock.

PERKINS: Does that necessitate strike first, strike hard?

POMPEO: Yeah. My view is we’ve made a mistake too. We took a 60-day pause and let them rearm a bit and most importantly, get some money.

PERKINS: But we didn’t strengthen in that. We only weakened because, as you said, managing public opinion on this is not moving in the right direction.

POMPEO: We have an end, [a] stated goal, that President Trump has laid out very clearly. We should maximize and compress the time period by which we achieve that goal.

PERKINS: Let me switch gears to another topic in the Middle East — Saudi Arabia. The administration [and] the president [are] suggesting this is not formalized yet, but that there might be room to allow the enrichment of uranium in Saudi Arabia, allowing them to establish nuclear power, supposedly for civilian purposes. But the enrichment of uranium is something that’s been very closely guarded. Is this a good idea?

POMPEO: You know, I always think the fewer nations that have the capacity to enrich uranium, the [safer] the American people are. We’ve all seen the concept of mutual assured destruction. It gets really complicated when 30 nations have the ability to enrich uranium. So, we always had countries that were coming asking us for this. We would put in place what was called the gold standard — one, two, three rules. I haven’t seen the shape of this agreement. It sounds like it’s American companies that are doing it. That gives me more confidence, but man, less nuclear enrichment.

PERKINS: I’m going to be very candid about [this]. When I look at this internationally, having served as chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, I look at those countries that embrace religious freedom as the most stable, peaceful countries that allow for prosperity. That’s what the facts show. Saudi Arabia is one of the most closed societies in the world. I mean, there are no churches in Saudi Arabia.

POMPEO: Yeah. Look, we’ve been trying to convince the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords in the same way that the Emiratis did. Right now, there are Christian churches inside the United Arab Emirates.

PERKINS: There are a lot of them, and they’re very welcoming.

POMPEO: … I hope the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and, frankly, every Muslim nation, whether that’s Indonesia or Malaysia, wherever in Pakistan, I hope they will all come to see that their country will be better off with more religious freedom. And the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is certainly a nation that needs to continue to move down that path in a way that is serious and reflects an understanding, which is exactly your point. The world is safer when nations accept the fact that people are going to practice the faith to which they believe.

PERKINS: I want to bring this home for our last two minutes. One of the projects you did when you were secretary of State was looking at first principles, looking at the foundation of the United States’ religious freedom here. And it was a project you took on that was highly criticized even back then. But when you look at this rise of socialism within the Democratic Party, which is an anathema to those founding principles, you were onto something. Our institutions have been hollowed out with this secularism. And if we don’t return to those first principles, I think we lose our country.

POMPEO: I believe this with all my heart. And Tony, by the way, you were an important part of helping me achieve that. Family Research Council was an important part of that. We worked on what became known as the Ministerial for Religious Freedom, and we built a chaplain’s corps at the CIA. These are the core institutions of America being imbued with the central idea of America as a Judeo-Christian-founded country. If we walk away from that, if we are just a secular society, we will look much more like parts of Europe which are falling away. They’re not protecting the unborn. They’re not building families. They’re not doing the things that have been the central guarantor of freedom and liberty in the United States of America. I pray that we will continue to get that back. The Democrat[ic] Party today is not going to move [in] that direction. We need a political movement that’s going to do that.

PERKINS: A political movement anchored in a moral and transcendent truth with a transcendent truth anchor.

POMPEO: Amen. Basic principles.

PERKINS: Because without it, we just have two competing parties with two different ideologies that ultimately lead to the same place. One gets there faster than the other.

POMPEO: That’s absolutely true.

PERKINS: Mr. Secretary, I want to thank you for joining us. Always great to see you.