Bolton: 'Level of dissatisfaction across Iran is really pretty incredible'

Former national security adviser John Bolton said Sunday he thinks the Iranian government could fall, pointing to what he described as a high “level of dissatisfaction” throughout the nation.

“The level of dissatisfaction across Iran is really pretty incredible on many different levels,” Bolton said in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

"Since 2018 and 2019 — when there were riots over economic conditions that were brutally put down — the economy has not materially improved since then. The dissatisfaction is still there,” he continued.

Bolton said, similarly, most Iranians are under 30 years old, and they “know they could have a different way of life."

"They can see it across the Gulf, in Dubai and Abu Dhabi and Doha.”

He added that large ethnic groups in the country already don’t support Iran's leadership, and he pointed to the unrest that followed the death of Jina Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish woman who died in state custody after protesting the religious dress code.

Bolton said her death “brought young people and women out all over the country against the regime — a fundamental challenge to the regime‘s legitimacy — not just to complain about having to wear the hijab, but saying the ayatollahs do not speak the word of God, which threatens the regime.”

“All of that still exists,” Bolton continued. “And now they see their terrorist proxies in ashes.”

Bolton, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in the mid-2000s, said he thinks this moment is unique in Iranian history.

“I think the people of Iran are as dissatisfied with the current government as they've ever been since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and hopefully these strikes on the nuclear program — along with everything else that Israel has been doing for the past week — is sufficiently destabilizing that we'll see fragmentation at the top of the regime,” Bolton said.

Bolton has expressed support for the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites and said in the CNN interview that the “next step … is regime change.”

“Fragmentation at the top — if you break the control of the government, it may lead to a very, very difficult situation,” Bolton said. “But I think the government could fall.”

“Maybe it will have to wait until the Ayatollah Khamenei dies. He's only the second supreme leader in Iranian history. He's 85-plus years old. He's sick, and he's been in power for 36 years. They have no clear succession mechanism,” he continued. “This is a very unstable, unpopular regime.”