Former CIA Director James Woolsey said Sunday that despite the United States’ shared interest with Iran in defeating the Islamic State in Iraq & Syria (ISIS), America’s strategy should be to weaken Tehran.

“These are tactical decisions. 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,” Woolsey told CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS.”

“Sometimes you have to ally temporarily with a bad guy in order to defeat another bad guy,” he added.

Zakaria had previously noted that President-elect Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE appears to be “just fine” with Iran’s role in fighting ISIS.

Woolsey, a prominent critic of Iran who served as the director of the CIA from 1993-1995, reiterated that the overall strategy should be focused on 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 because it’s a theocratic totalitarian set of revolutionaries and, I’d say, imperialists. They want to build an empire,” he said.