At an international conference in Paris on January 11, 2025, General Keith Kellogg, former National Security Advisor to Vice President Mike Pence, called for urgent and decisive global action against the Iranian regime. Highlighting its escalating vulnerabilities, General Kellogg described 2025 as a critical year for transformation in Iran, referring to it as “a year of hope, action, and change.”

He pointed to the regime’s weakening position caused by strategic overreach, regional setbacks, and growing domestic unrest, stressing the importance of leveraging this moment. “The window for meaningful change is narrow, and maximum pressure must be reinstated,” he declared, urging the implementation of coordinated economic, diplomatic, and military measures to further isolate the regime.

General Kellogg expressed strong support for the National Council of Resistance of Iran’s (NCRI) Ten-Point Plan, describing it as a well-defined roadmap toward a democratic, peaceful, and non-nuclear Iran. He emphasized that the international community must unite around the Iranian people’s aspirations for freedom and democracy, ensuring these principles shape global policy.

The full transcript of General Keith Kellogg’s speech follows below:

Mrs. Rajavi, excellencies, distinguished guests, and friends of NCRI, thank you for having me today. And for the members of Ashraf 3, thank you for being in the audience as well.

Our messages today are, in fact, quite similar, and they were not rehearsed beforehand, but the message is quite the same.

For Iran, these days, for the people of Iran, those that believe in her, and the promise of a brighter future, are the most promising since the 1979 revolution. I believe this year should be considered a year of hope, it should be considered a year of action, and it should be considered a year of change.

The regime in Iran is weaker and more vulnerable than it has been in decades. Much of that is because of strategic overreach by her current leaders, and also because select countries have demonstrated the inherent weakness of the current Iranian regime.

They should not be feared. They should be challenged, and change must occur, and it must occur now. Regime weakness has reopened what the future of Iran will look like. While it is in fact cautionary, time is moving towards a different and a freer Iran. The states for the world are enormous, not just for the region, but for the rest of the world.

Look at the positive that changes would occur in a change to Iran. We see that in Lebanon, in the destruction of Hezbollah. We saw what happened in Syria, with the regime being changed. We saw what happened in Gaza and the defeat of Hamas. We saw with the relations with Israel and the Saudis how they can be corrected, and we see the connection all to Russia as well.

The rest of the world, for a change to Iran, it is all for the good. The beginning of the end of Iran’s primacy began, ironically, a year ago, on 7 October. The principal backer of both Hamas in Gaza, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, was Iran. They would, unfortunately, for them, would reap the whirlwind of an Israel that was outraged, as was the world.

A day of deranged success by Hamas in the massacre of civilians ended what I believe to be the beginning, the start of the end to the Iranian regime. They just didn’t realize or know it.

The leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah in Syria are all gone, something that a year ago, most of the world would not have believed could have happened. Iranian influence has been greatly diminished. Many of you in this room helped to build the potential for a brighter future, and when the history of this is written, you will hold a page in history.

We know we know inside Iran that Iran’s leaders rule by coercion. Innocents have paid a terrible price. Outwardly, there were elections, sham elections, but they were not even remotely close to what we believed in the West to be elections at all. Ultimately, ultimate authority resides in the hands today of unelected clerics. Repression of the Iranian people is the standard.

Freedom for raid Iranians is fleeting, but that should change and will change in the coming weeks months ahead, and this must change. And I believe the window to this change is greater for the world than ever before.

On a dual path for America, our highest priority in the region is the expansion of the Iran’s nuclear energy program. They must not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. Their malfeasance in the region runs a second to that. I could not think of anything more destabilizing to the region, in fact, to the world, than of Iran developing a nuclear weapon.

We realize that to some of you in this room, Iranian malfeasance has been exposed. But for also from any of this room, not only was there a malfeasance exposed, but the threat of the nuclear engagement and growth was exposed.

I think all of you will ask the question, do you believe that if the Iranians develop a nuclear weapon, that other states in the Gulf would not follow similar paths, or others in the region as well? Of course, they would. But there are committees to create turmoil in the region, the Iranians must be reduced as well.

So we see a duality, a more democratic Iranian regime, and one that is not a regional or even a global threat, but a friend of the West and a friend of democracy. The opportunity is to change Iran for the better.

It is current, but it is but it is my experience that this opportunity will lap will not last forever. The good and immediate news is that the world will soon have an American president who truly understands change.

He is fearless in his pursuit and knows what we in America call the art of the deal, what is doable, and what is decisive for success. A president who will demand strange things to the world, but will follow through.

Remember, President Donald J Trump, in his first term, walked away from the Iran nuclear deal against incredible opposition both in the United States and the world as well. He was right.

While we have been consistently ignorant, we in the world, until I believe President Trump of Iranian leadership, intentions to our constant peril, which because we always seem to assume that Iranian leaders were in fact what we call in the United States of America Jeffersonian Democrats. This has been a fault of both Republican and Democratic administrations, and the blame is widespread.

I’m reminded of what the late Pulitzer Prize winning historian, a gentleman by the name of Will Durant, said when he wrote his famous 11 volume treatise on the story of civilization, when he said, quote, “We seem to be working on the assumption that if we are nice to other people, they will be nice to us. I can tell you in the last 4000 years, there has been no evidence to share that vision, and he’s right.”

During the 2016 president, during the 2016 presidential election, President Trump excoriated the nuclear the Iran nuclear deal. In May 2018, we began a campaign of maximum pressure on Iran’s leaders. The pressure, economically, for us began to work. For example, Iran’s oil imports dropped from more than 2 million barrels of oil a day to 400,000 a day. Foreign currency fell to just $ 4 billion, their lowest level in decades.

We believe we have the regime, which included the petroleum sector, on the run, because we believe that Iran’s petrochemical and petroleum sectors are the primary source of funding for the regime and for external terrorism.

This was backed by their knowledge we would deter any type of terrorist activity in the region, and eventually we confirmed that with the eventual elimination in Iran’s Quds Force leader, Qassem Soleimani. As an example of fortitude, the attacks that caused his demise started on the 1st of January that year. On the 3rd of January, Soleimani was dead.

We understand the global threat of an Iran, and especially the nuclear Iran. The question is, how do you achieve the objectives of a more democratic and a freer government and the one is less that that is less plea.

For the United States, a policy of maximum pressure must be reinstated, and it must be reinstated with the help of the rest of the globe, and that includes standing with the Iranian people and their aspirations for democracy.

These pressures are not just kinetic, just not military force, but they must be economic and diplomatic as well. The pressure should not be just from the US alone, and not just from the region alone, be it the Saudis or the Emirates, but it also must be from the globe.

This is where diplomacy for this administration, the incoming administration, and the world is divided.

The Ten-Point Plan for the future of Iran ensures a clear transitional plan path to a more friendly, stable, non-belligerent, and a non-nuclear Iran. That needs to be the near-term goal for all of us in this room. We must exploit the weakness we now see. The hope the hope is there, so much to be the action.

Thank you for having me today, and let’s put it around this year.