President Donald Trump said on Sunday that Iran‘s next leader ‘is not going to last long’ without his approval.
Trump’s comments came about one week after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s former supreme leader, was killed in a targeted air strike at his compound on February 28.
The strike, which was conducted by Israel, took advantage of sophisticated intelligence gathering by the US and Israel over several months and wiped out dozens of other top officials in the Iranian regime.
In an interview with ABC News, Trump said whoever the Iranians pick as Khamenei’s successor is ‘going to have to get approval from us.’
‘If he doesn’t get approval from us he’s not going to last long. We want to make sure that we don’t have to go back every 10 years, when you don’t have a president like me that’s not going to do it,’ the president said.
Alluding to the US’s repeated interventions in Iran over the past few decades, Trump added: ‘I don’t want people to have to go back in five years and have to do the same thing again or worse let them have a nuclear weapon.’
President Donald Trump said on Sunday that Iran’s next leader ‘is not going to last long’ without his approval
ABC News asked Trump if he would consider approving a successor with ties to the old regime, similarly to the way he approved Delcy Rodríguez as the acting president of Venezuela after Nicolas Maduro’s capture. Rodríguez was Maduro’s vice president.
Trump replied: ‘I would, in order to choose a good leader I would, yeah, I would. There are numerous people that could qualify.’
The president went on to say that Iran was planning to take over the entire Middle East, and his administration’s actions have essentially stopped that from happening.
Trump said that Iran is now ‘a paper tiger,’ before adding, ‘They weren’t a paper tiger a week ago, I’ll tell you. And they were going to attack.
‘Their plan was to attack the entire Middle East, to take over the entire Middle East.’
This is a breaking news story. More to follow.