“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,” and he added, “Sometimes you have to ally temporarily with a bad guy in order to defeat another bad guy. It’s happened throughout American history.”

Woolsey reiterated his main point again in the interview, which is, 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.”