Discussing in December 2025 how badly Americans understand the countries they sanction, John Kiriakou described being argued out of his own priors by evidence he could see.
The videos
He has a very close friend, he says, who goes to Iran with regularity, once or twice a year. She would always come back and tell him how great things are there and how smoothly things are operating — and he would think, okay, yeah, sure. Then she started taking videos of just everyday normal life, and showing him other people’s videos on YouTube. And she’s right, he concluded. [1]
What he concluded
There is no US involvement inside Iran, he says, and there has not been since 1979: no embassy there, no diplomatic presence, no business presence, nothing. And they lack for nothing. They want for nothing. They have great relations with China and with Russia; they get all the spare parts they need; they have healthy trade relationships with all of the region’s powers and larger economies. [1] [2]
The same friend, four months later
He gave the account again in April 2026, in the middle of the war, when the framing had shifted from sanctions to survival. Putting it to Richard D. Wolff that the mainstream media seemed surprised the Iranians had held up as well as they had, Kiriakou returned to the same witness — “I have a very dear friend who travels to Iran regularly” — and to the one recurring theme of her trips. This time he stated the conclusion as a mechanism rather than an impression: with crippling, punishing sanctions in place over so many years, “the Iranians have become utterly self-sufficient. If they need something that they can’t import from Russia or China or India, they manufacture it themselves.”[3]
Wolff’s answer added a qualification Kiriakou did not dispute: resourcefulness is not the whole of it, because Iran is “a well-industrialized country” with a long-standing commitment to an industrial economy — “it’s not like what Vietnam was or Afghanistan was or Iraq was.” On that basis he expected Iran could carry on for quite a while.[4] What the sanctions could not close is treated under China as economic threat: the Caspian coastline Iran shares with Russia, across which anything bombed can be replaced by boat in a day and a half.[5]
The comparison
The point of the observation is the contrast that follows it. Then you look at something like Iraq, he says, which is right next door and has a very heavy American presence — and we’ve wrecked that country. When his interviewer added that wrecking it was the plan, Kiriakou did not dispute it. [6]
The rule he draws from it
The passage introduces one of the sharpest formulations Kiriakou endorses about American foreign policy, offered to him by his interviewer and immediately affirmed: that wherever the United States goes it creates instability, and that the second rule is that it refuses to accept rule number one. Kiriakou’s answer was that this is exactly right, and that the United States does not accept responsibility. [7]
His own visits to Iran are treated separately in Kiriakou’s Iran trips.