House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Tuesday said the U.S. should not be involved in nation-building in Iran, claiming “we are the good guys” one day after President Donald Trump called his deadly ongoing war there “the beginning of building a new country.”
Johnson was asked during a fireside chat in Doral, Florida, by NBC News reporter Scott Wong, less than two weeks after joint U.S.-Israeli strikes killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, if he thinks nation-building is something “we should be involved in.”
“I don’t think it’s our role,” Johnson said Tuesday.
He also argued the U.S. has “a very important role to play in the world,” citing support from his “colleagues at the G7, the G20” forums and members of parliament in Western nations as purported proof that “everyone around the world” agrees with America’s role.
Johnson said, “And we have held this position since World War II. [Former President] Ronald Reagan used to quote [Pope] Pius, I think the 12th, who said the leadership of the free world was placed upon the shoulders of the United States of America after World War II.”
“It is not a position that we sought or asked for, but that’s how it developed,” he continued. “And we emerged as a superpower, and we are the good guys. We are the defenders of freedom and liberty, and freedom-loving people all around the world benefit from a strong America.”
The Iran War has already cost at least seven U.S. military service members and more than 1,200 Iranians their lives. Among them were 175 people who were killed in an airstrike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh school in Minab, most of them schoolgirls under the age of 12.
Critics were appalled that Johnson so leisurely deemed his administration “the good guys.”
“Why do I have the feeling that the mothers of the kids killed at the Minab school would strongly disagree with that,” wrote one user on X, with another person commenting: “No one in the history of history who has said ‘We are the good guys’ is actually the good guys.”
Others pointed to new polls showing many voters feel the war makes America “less safe.”
One Quinnipac survey conducted March 6-8 showed 55% of the 1,002 registered voters who were polled do not believe Iran posed the “imminent threat” that the White House has maintained, and that 74% opposed sending U.S. troops into Iran.
Trump has yet to rule out doing so, and while he initially claimed major combat operations would only take weeks, he later said, “Wars can be fought ‘forever.’” Johnson said Tuesday that regime change would be “great,” but that it’s up to the besieged Iranians to accomplish it.
“They need to rise up, as the president has tried to encourage, and they need to take that opportunity and secure that for themselves,” he added. “I am sure that there [are] friends and allies around the world who will help in some ways, but it is not America’s responsibility to do that.”
