Chief Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Hossein Salami mocked US President Joe Biden and laid into the “dwindling” ability of the US to carry out acts of imperialism in a wide-ranging speech delivered during a panel Sunday with other high-ranking IRGC officials.
Salami said that efforts to set up pro-US regimes are falling “like dominos” as “America’s political territory is… witnessing failure.” Cases like Afghanistan, Syria, and Egypt, the high-ranking said, “are signs that herald… the [total] defeat of the US,” Press TV reported.
Biden’s recent trip to Israel and Jeddah wasn’t spared in Salami’s criticism either. Salami noted with apparent approval that “Biden visited the region to say that the Middle East and the Islamic world are still the priority of his foreign policy, but he returned to America empty-handed,” before delivering a brief lesson in geopolitical history:
“When the [Islamic] revolution won, America had a terrible and strange political control over more than half of the world, it also had important, economic and strategic parts of the world, it dominated the economic resources of the world, in the region of the Islamic world, all the oil-rich countries were part of its political geography.” But now, he says the US has become isolated to a level previously unseen.
“Saudi Arabia, which used to help America with money, has lost its ability to solve its own economic problems today” and “America has become so weak that it is practically not seen” in the Middle East, said Salami.
Since Iran’s successful overthrow of the US-appointed Shah in 1979, Salami explained, “the task of the [Iranian] revolution was to overcome the strongest empire in the history of mankind.” In that time, the US’ share of the “economic power of the world” has plummeted from 40% to 20%, while its possession of “half of the world's military power” remains constant to this day.
The IRGC commander wasn’t the only one in Tehran with fierce criticism of the US’ conduct in the region – Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi reportedly expressed similar outrage during what Fars News described as an “hour-long” chat Saturday when he told Chinese President Xi Jinping that US “unilateralism” has now become a “threat to global peace and security.”