Juan Cole Informed Comment
Maj. Gen. Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, posted on X on Wednesday, “The Iranian nation handed Trump a strategic defeat on the battlefield and in Hormuz, and a political defeat in Washington. Meanwhile, Americans got stuck with the bill for his war. Anyone who takes on Iran will pay the price, from the battlefield to their own doorstep.”
Israel’s outgoing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convinced Trump to mount a decapitation campaign against the Iranian government on February 28, 2026, in which they murdered several dozen high officials, many of them civilians and all of them unarmed at the time, including the country’s clerical leader, Ali Khamenei. Khamenei had been the chief opponent of any Iranian nuclear weapons program, for which reason none has existed in recent decades. His successors may not feel the same way about remaining in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Pragmatists such as Ali Larijani, the former speaker of parliament, were whacked. In their place there emerged a clique of veterans of the brutal Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, fought in the trenches, WW I-style.
Grizzled figures like Mohsen Rezaei took the helm. He became a central policy-maker. Maj. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, who had headed the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) intelligence during the Iran-Iraq War, took over leadership of the IRGC. Maj. Gen. Ali Abdollahi, who was appointed army chief of staff last summer, was also a veteran of the 1980s war. The head of the foreign special operations branch of the Revolutionary Guards, the Jerusalem Brigades or Qods Force, Ali Qaani, has also rattled sabers.
Some observers have argued that these hardliners whose guerrilla tactics were honed in the 1980s deliberately kept tensions high between Tehran and Washington to ensure that gasoline and diesel prices in the United States would remain elevated. They knew that food prices are also sensitive to fuel costs. In short, they did to Trump what the youth guerrilla groups of the 1970s did to Jimmy Carter in 1979-1980 when they took US embassy personnel hostage in Tehran. They made the president look weak and not in control of the international situation, and they made the public mad at him every time they filled up their tank at the pump.
I do not know if this theory is correct, but it is certainly the case that the hardliners have been in no hurry to settle the conflict, and they seem to welcome the erratic actions and pronouncements of the clearly unbalanced US president.
BBC Monitoring usefully rounded up official Iranian reactions to the drubbing Donald Trump took in the US midterms.
File photo of US patrol boat in Strait of Hormuz. US Army Photo by Evens Milcette Jr. Public Domain. Via Picryl
Qods Force commander Qaani warned Trump against resuming his bombing of Iran, saying that it would be a “gross miscalculation” in view of the unity of Iran and its allies. He was referring to the Iraqi Shiite militias, some of whom briefly took out the East-West oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia earlier this fall, as well as to the Ansarullah or Houthis in Yemen, who have repeatedly attacked Saudi refineries, airports and ships attempting to transit the Bab al-Mandab or Strait of Tears that links the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and thence the Indian Ocean. He warned that both the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandab can be targeted further. He was threatening an even more severe global energy crisis if Iran is attacked. He said that the “narcissistic president of the United States,” fooled by Netanyahu’s deception, had initiated a gamble with Iran, resulting in the loss of 250 years of US prestige.
The Iranian leadership is well aware that Trump’s presidency has been mortally wounded by his Iranian misadventure. Even Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, admitted as much and threw Trump under the bus, attempting to distance himself from the decision to launch that war so as to prepare for his own 2028 presidential run.
Tehran has put forward a 7-point plan for the end of hostilities, which Trump has treated as a joke. The danger is that the longer this conflict continues, the more likely it is that either or both sides will escalate. That would not be good for human beings who like to transport things and eat food. Trump will be forced to negotiate, but his hand is weaker than it has ever been.
Juan Cole’s Informed Comment delivers independent, expert analysis of war, the Middle East, climate change, and U.S. foreign policy. Help sustain this work
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