Updated Feb. 28, 2026, 9:43 a.m. ET
Two days before the United States attacked Iran, former Secretary of State John Kerry issued a warning from a stage in West Palm Beach.
“If you push them too hard into a corner — if you drop the bombs before there’s a decision to be made — it is entirely possible these folks, who are masters of asymmetrical warfare, may just say: ‘To hell with them,’ ” Kerry said, speaking to a crowd of 320 people at Palm Beach Atlantic University.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo disagreed. He said he’d sat in the Situation Room when the intelligence community briefed the president on the strike that would kill Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani. The room predicted catastrophe, World War III, thousands of Americans dead and retaliatory strikes on U.S. bases across the region.
None of it happened, Pompeo said. He added that maybe they were lucky, but they had done the work to make the worst outcomes less likely, and “even more work has been done since.”
“I’m confident that with our Israeli partners, we can go a long ways to taking down Iran,” he said.
Thirty-six hours later, the United States and Israel launched a major coordinated attack on Iran, targeting sites across Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz and Tabriz — including what appeared to be the compound of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose whereabouts were unknown.
John Kerry, Mike Pompeo debated Iran bombing days earlier
President Donald Trump posted a video urging Iranians to shelter during the strikes and then take over their government when they ended. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the operation would “create the conditions for the brave Iranian people to take their fate into their own hands.”
Iran retaliated within hours, launching missiles and drones at Israel and striking U.S. military installations in Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar.
Kerry and Pompeo had debated that very scenario on Thursday, Feb. 26, in a bipartisan foreign policy discussion moderated by former U.S. Sen. George LeMieux.
LeMieux prefaced each question with a brief and often bleak summary of affairs. He began with Iran, which, hours earlier, had completed its third round of nuclear talks under the shadow of a growing U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf.
Addressing Kerry, he asked: Are we going to war?
That would be chaos, said Kerry, who negotiated the 2015 Iran nuclear deal under President Barack Obama.
He called Iran “as ugly a regime as exists” on the planet and said that bombing it before diplomacy had run its course could be a catastrophic mistake. He negotiated with its envoys for three years, he said, and came to know a pride among the Iranians that was out of sync with the realities they were facing.
“If that pride is what they make a decision on, it could be a disaster,” he said.
Kerry added that just hours earlier, Iran’s foreign minister took to social media to say the country would not pursue a nuclear weapon and is prepared to prove it, a sign that pressure may be working.
Pompeo took a harder line. He said he doesn’t put much stock in what Iranian officials say, and that maximum pressure remains the right strategy. And the question of whether America was going to war with Iran was, in his view, already answered.
“Folks, we’re at war with the Iranian regime today,” he said. “They’ve got American blood on their hands.”
Hannah Phillips is a journalist covering public safety and criminal justice at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at hphillips@pbpost.com.