Iran has succeeded in “eroding” the power the United States enjoys in the Middle East to a fraction of what it once was, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Hossein Salami has said.
“We have worn out America’s power, don’t think that this is the same America of 20-30 years ago. This America has become small and weak, it has gradually lost its power due to friction and erosion caused by [Iran’s] Islamic Revolution, and is suffering from osteoporosis. Maybe America still appears formidable, but it is weak inside,” Salami said in a speech in Mashhad, northeastern Iran on Monday.
The failure of US-led efforts to crush the Islamic Republic via sanctions in recent years demonstrates that “the world is much bigger than the US and that the US is much smaller than the world,” Salami said, citing the example of the 2019 tit-for-tat seizures of commercial vessels, which made Western nations “regret what they had done” after Tehran demonstrated that it had the will and the muscle to fight back. “If you are strong, you will overcome isolation,” he said.
“They wanted to isolate us in the world, to leave us alone and without connections to any country or government. The economic embargo was a global reality. They kept hitting our ships until we got close to them. One of our tasks was to calm the enemy down. They wanted to steal our oil…They seized our ships in Gibraltar, we seized their ships here. The embargo was broken with our power…Today, can anyone consider Iran isolated in the world when it is connected with all the powers of the world except America and the Zionist regime?” Salami said.
The IRGC top commander also pointed to Iran’s growing capacity to retaliate to military provocations, including the 2020 US assassination of IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, which led to Iranian precision missile strikes on American bases in Iraq.
“When you attack a base, it means attacking the entirety of [the adversary’s] power, it means disregarding that power, it means understanding that you are victorious in the field and are not afraid of anything,” Salami said.
Commenting on the recent presidential elections in Iran, Salami suggested that Iranians had disrupted enemy calculations, pressure and expectations by increasing voter turnout between the first and second rounds of voting.
Masoud Pezeshkian has already disappointed Western observers hoping for an easing of Iranian pressure on Israel in the region, saying in a statement Monday that his administration would “continue” to support regional resistance movements “with strength,” in accordance with the policies outlined by late Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini, and his successor, Ali Khamenei.
“I am sure that the resistance movements in the region will not allow [Israel] to continue its warmongering and criminal policies against the oppressed people of Palestine and other nations of the region,” Pezeshkian said in a message to Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah.
Pezeshkian is expected to take office in August.
Iran has steadily built up its regional political clout and military and economic power in recent decades thanks in part to a string of disastrous US foreign policy decisions, including the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which led Baghdad, which had been a staunch Iranian adversary, to become a key partner of Tehran. In Syria, Iran responded to a CIA-backed dirty war against President Bashar Assad by providing weapons and military advisory assistance to Damascus, scuttling a US-led effort to turn the Arab nation into a failed state.
On the diplomatic front, Iran and Saudi Arabia patched up their differences in a landmark, China-brokered normalization deal last year, and Tehran has gone on to join BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Militarily, Tehran has shown repeatedly that it will not allow direct aggression targeting its territory or officials to go unanswered, shooting down a US drone violating its airspace in June 2019, hitting US bases in Iraq after Soleimani’s killing in January 2020, and targeting Israeli military bases in a non-lethal show of force in mid-April in response to an Israeli airstrike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus.