Iran says the United States is undermining diplomatic efforts by sending contradictory messages, repeatedly changing its demands, and violating ceasefire agreements.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei told reporters on Wednesday that US military aggression against the country early Wednesday morning had inevitably affected the diplomatic process between Tehran and Washington.
“Recent conditions and developments must be carefully reviewed,” he added.
“Diplomatic processes do not take place in a vacuum,” Baghaei stated, adding that “a minimum level of conducive conditions is required to allow diplomacy to move forward.”
He said the Israeli regime was also damaging diplomatic efforts through repeated violations of the ceasefire in Lebanon.
“Any diplomatic process is harmed by the use of force and unlawful actions on the ground,” he added.
Baghaei reiterated that diplomacy and military deterrence go hand in hand in safeguarding Iran’s national interests and security. “Wherever necessary, the country’s Armed Forces “will respond to the enemy with strength.
The spokesman said that this morning's defensive operation against US bases and assets in the region once again demonstrated the readiness of Iranian forces to defend the country.
He stated that Iran’s leadership remains fully coordinated in confronting external threats, utilising both diplomatic and military means whenever necessary.
In an earlier statement, the foreign ministry said that the US carried out "savage attacks" on areas in southern Iran under the pretext that one of its Apache helicopters had crashed over the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday night.
In response to the aggression and the violation of Iran's national sovereignty and territorial integrity, the country's Armed Forces struck US bases and assets in the region from which the attacks had been launched.
The attacks, the foreign ministry said, have once again demonstrated the United States’ “criminal and warmongering nature."
LONDON – Iran's immediate response to Israel's strike on Dahiyeh, Hezbollah's stronghold in Beirut, came as a surprise to many observers. Through this action, Iran established a new deterrence equation in West Asia. The Israeli side subsequently sought to test the credibility of this equation through limited provocations, effectively "testing the waters" of Iran's declared policy.
For the first time in the history of the Islamic Revolution, Iran intervened directly in response to military strikes against its allies. This new doctrine holds that any aggression against Iran or its allies, or any violation of agreements involving them, will trigger an immediate response from Iran proportional to the scale of the aggression or breach.
The objective of the Israeli military operation in Beirut's southern suburbs was to test the credibility of Iran's new deterrence doctrine. Many believed that Iran would refrain from responding, as it had during an earlier phase. This assumption was rooted in the expectation of continuity—that Iran would maintain the same posture of strategic patience it had previously adopted to allow for preparation and readiness.
This occurred at a time when Israel had not yet displayed the degree of its brutality that later became a defining characteristic of its conduct following the October 7 incident.
After October 7, Israel appeared to operate under the assumption that it could dismantle the Axis of Resistance and eventually strike at its backbone in Iran. Following a series of Israeli actions—including the attack on Iran's consulate in Damascus, the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, and, most significantly, the assassination of Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut—Tehran concluded that Israel's escalation had reached unprecedented levels and that a punitive response had become necessary.
When Donald Trump returned to the White House, Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to believe that the time had come to settle scores with Tehran. In June 2025, Israel launched a surprise war against Iran with U.S. backing and direct Pentagon involvement. Iran's response forced Israel to seek a ceasefire.
However, on February 28, Israel and the United States jointly attacked Iran, apparently believing that such an operation could destabilize or even topple the Islamic Republic. The attack proved costly for Washington and Tel Aviv. Iran responded by taking the drastic step of closing the strategic Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a quarter of the world's oil and gas supplies pass.
After punishing Israel and humiliating the United States, Iran agreed to a conditional ceasefire on April 8. The agreement included all fronts, including a cessation of Israel's military operations in Lebanon. Yet Israel sought to manipulate the ceasefire by violating its terms.
Israeli leaders continued military operations in Lebanon while testing the credibility of Iran's warnings. They appeared to calculate that if violations went unanswered, further breaches could be undertaken and later presented as strategic achievements.
However, Iran reinforced its new deterrence equation by demonstrating that every violation would be met with an immediate response.
Likewise, what Tehran viewed as partial incursions against Iranian islands near the Strait of Hormuz were met with swift retaliation, reinforcing the message that both Israel and its principal ally, the United States, were confronted with a new reality on the ground.
Another assumption held by Israel and its allies was that Iran would not jeopardize its own security for the sake of its allies. According to this line of thinking, if Iran failed to respond, further military pressure could be applied, particularly against Hezbollah, Tehran's closest ally in Lebanon.
Israeli leaders also sought to promote the perception that Iran was abandoning its allies. The objective was to weaken confidence in Tehran among resistance movements and regional partners.
The new equation established by Iran has altered the rules of the game. Israel has come to realize that Tehran is serious about defending its allies and that any breach of agreements or escalation on any front is likely to provoke a response.
Iran has called on Shanghai Cooperation Organization member states to take joint action to safeguard the country's scientific infrastructure after research centers, laboratories and strategic technology facilities were damaged in recent US-Israeli strikes.
In a letter to the SCO secretary-general and member states' science ministers Wednesday, Vice President for Science, Technology and Knowledge-Based Economy Hossein Afshin said the attacks have disrupted scientific projects and threatened the livelihoods of researchers and knowledge-based companies.
"Branches of research centers, laboratory infrastructure, data systems and strategic technology facilities have been damaged in these attacks," Afshin wrote in the letter.
"These damages have not only disrupted the execution of scientific projects but have also affected the livelihoods of researchers, the growth path of knowledge-based companies, youth employment opportunities and the confidence of the country's innovation community."
Afshin said the halting of startup activities, reduced investment and damage to the technology ecosystem were among the consequences whose effects would extend "far beyond the current situation."
"This action is a clear violation of fundamental principles of international law and an explicit assault on nations' right to scientific development," he wrote.
Iranian officials have previously reported that more than 20 public universities and several research institutes across the country have been targeted since the US-Israeli terrorist war began on February 28.
Among the damaged facilities is the Laser and Plasma Research Institute at Shahid Beheshti University, which lost nearly 90 percent of its equipment, as well as research centers at Sharif University of Technology, Iran University of Science and Technology, and the Pasteur Institute.
Afshin called on SCO member states to "strongly condemn" attacks on scientific and technological infrastructure and to take "serious and effective measures" to expand scientific and technological cooperation among the bloc's members.
"Science and technology are fundamental pillars of development and humanity's shared capital," Afshin wrote.
"Attacking scientific and technological infrastructure is an anti-development, immoral act that contradicts the principles of coexistence among nations."
The SCO, which counts Russia, China, India and Iran among its members, has recently taken steps to deepen scientific collaboration.
In May, SCO science ministers met in Bishkek to discuss multilateral research projects and the formation of a unified space for "green technologies."
Despite the scale of destruction, Iranian research institutions have moved to resume operations.
At Shahid Beheshti University's Laser and Plasma Research Institute – a civilian academic center for photonics, optics and plasma engineering – institute head Seyed Hassan Tavassoli said more than 80 percent of the institute's capabilities could be restored using domestically produced equipment.
"Our priority now is to rebuild the institute beyond what it was before," Tavassoli said.
Satellite images have revealed apparent damage at the Israeli military's Ramat David Airbase in northern Israeli occupied territories following an Iranian ballistic missile attack launched in retaliation for Israeli strikes on Beirut's southern suburbs.
Low-resolution images taken Monday by the European Commission's Sentinel-2 satellite showed a discolored patch where a hangar is located at the sprawling airbase southeast of Haifa, suggesting a strike during Iran's barrage of ballistic missiles fired Sunday night into Monday morning.
Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps confirmed it targeted the Ramat David facility – a strategic hub used by Israeli forces to stage attacks on Lebanon's capital – with Kheibar Shekan solid-fuel and Qadr liquid-fuel ballistic missiles.
The Kheibar Shekan, a newer-generation missile with improved maneuverability, is designed to evade missile defense systems and carries a 500-600 kilogram warhead.
"The attack came in response to Israeli aggression on the Dahieh district of Beirut and the regime's crossing of established red lines," the IRGC said in a statement, vowing that Israeli forces would face more "crushing and regret-inducing blows" if they expanded their military campaign.
Built by British forces in 1942 during their colonial mandate over Palestine, Ramat David was transferred to Israeli military control on May 26, 1948.
It now serves as the largest Israeli air facility in the northern command and one of three principal airbases in occupied territory.
The sprawling 10.5-square-kilometer base houses multiple fighter squadrons operating F-15 and F-16 aircraft, which Israeli forces have used to conduct strikes across Lebanon.
Hezbollah's military media previously released footage in July 2024 showing the base's vulnerabilities, including Iron Dome batteries, ammunition depots, fuel storage facilities, and hangars.
The base has been a repeated target of regional resistance groups. Hezbollah struck Ramat David with Fadi-1 and Fadi-2 missiles in September 2024, and the Islamic Resistance in Iraq launched drone attacks against the facility in April and July of that year.
The Israeli military had claimed that all missiles fired Sunday night were either intercepted or landed in open areas, and that no Israeli personnel were harmed.
Military censors generally prohibit publication of exact impact locations at sensitive sites, citing concerns over aiding enemy targeting capabilities.
The strike represented a direct response to Israeli forces' use of Ramat David as a launch point for bombing civilian neighborhoods in Beirut's Dahieh district – an act Iran had previously designated a "red line."
The base's strategic significance dates to 1981, when squadrons operating from Ramat David destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq. It has since been central to Israeli military operations against Syria, Lebanon, and the Gaza Strip.
The Iranian attack marked the first direct missile strikes on Israeli territory since an April ceasefire, triggered by intensifying Israeli airstrikes across Lebanon that Lebanese health authorities said killed multiple civilians in recent days.
Yemen also fired two ballistic missiles at Israeli territory Monday morning, underscoring the expanding regional confrontation as Israel's military aggression widens.
Tehran has warned Israeli forces that any response to the strikes would be met with a "stronger and more crushing" retaliation, as tensions across West Asia continue to escalate.
The death of Marjane Satrapi in Paris marks the passing of a purveyor of anti-Iranian propaganda who spent decades constructing a fictionalized, grotesque caricature of her homeland to satisfy Western prejudices and justify imperial ambitions.
Satrapi was merely one figure in a long list of Iranian-born so-called "artists" and "intellectuals" who discovered a simple yet very profitable formula: the West loves to amplify any voice that helps demonize Iran as both a country and a civilization.
Born into an opulent, Westernized family with a deeply problematic political lineage, Satrapi chose the easy road of selling humiliation as art and self-hatred as intellectual courage.
Her most famous work, the comic book and film “Persepolis,” presented itself as an innocent autobiography but was, in fact, a calculated exercise in neo-Orientalist distortion.
Alongside other so-called native informants, she portrayed everything related to Iran as dark, miserable, backward, and shameful, while presenting the West as the only realm of freedom, enlightenment, and human decency.
Satrapi, whose real name was Marjaneh Ebrahimi, did not emerge from a political vacuum. An examination of her family background reveals a consistent pattern of anti-Iranian activity spanning at least three generations.
Her paternal great-uncle, Fereydoun Ebrahimi, was known as the Butcher of Azerbaijan and was a member of Jafar Pishevari's pro-Soviet separatist movement that sought to divide Iran.
He was sentenced to death for his crimes, a fact that Satrapi chose to obscure by adopting the stage name Satrapi and dramatically rewriting her family history in her works.
Rather than portraying him and his brother Anoushiravan as the Stalinist mercenaries and separatists they truly were, she transformed the latter into a pro-Iranian hero who was supposedly "executed by the mullahs" only for his political views.
This pattern of distorting reality for ideological convenience would become the hallmark of her entire professional career. The political influence on Satrapi came most directly from her father and her fictionalized great-uncle.
Analysts in their obituaries have noted that, despite presenting herself as free-thinking, independent, rebellious, and liberated, Satrapi actually operated from a deeply patriarchal worldview in which paternal authority is never questioned.
She fiercely embraced her father's ideology without critical examination, and she unapologetically idealized her uncle – a Soviet agent – as a heroic figure.
Most of her distortions of Iranian historical events are not personal testimonies at all, but rather fictions constructed to fit into an outdated Soviet propaganda framework passed down through her family.
Her rants across decades of interviews testify to a fundamental inability to understand politics or social processes, revealing a clear lack of the intellectual rigor required to analyze the events she claimed to witness.
After the worldwide collapse of her family ideology in the 1990s and the collapse of her marriage, she moved to France in disappointment and never returned to Iran.
In her works, she claims that she went at the insistence of her parents, suggesting to readers that she was too modern for “regressive” Iran. In reality, her family persuaded her because of their own bad reputation, realizing that the dream of Iran as a Soviet puppet had been dashed.
Western anti-Iranian propaganda industry: dozens of books branded as "true stories", with fake autobiographies and covers falsely suggesting that women cover faces
Persepolis and the Neo-Orientalist industry
Persepolis, originally published in French in four volumes between 2000 and 2003, arrived at a particularly convenient moment for Western imperial interests.
In the tumultuous post-September 11 era, there was enormous demand for works that could confirm Western stereotypes about Iran and the broader Islamic world.
These so-called native informants – always women, always presenting alleged personal testimonies – produced a flood of memoirs that followed the same template: a miserable childhood in a repressive Eastern society, an escape to the freedom of the West, and a narrative constructed entirely around confirming archaic stereotypes about the backward, violent, irrational East.
Satrapi's work fits perfectly into this genre. She presents herself as a truth-teller, but expert reviews have conclusively refuted her "autobiography" as a collection of lies, misrepresentations, and distorted interpretations of political and social circumstances.
The Western world embraced these works precisely because they served a strategic purpose: they justified military interventionism around the globe by painting Eastern societies as barbaric places from which enlightened individuals must flee.
The mass media amplified these voices while ignoring the vast majority of Iranians who reject such caricatures. Satrapi was not courageous but convenient.
Beyond Persepolis, Satrapi produced other works, including Embroideries and Chicken with Plums, as well as the film adaptation of her comic.
But the underlying message remained consistent: Iran is a place of repression, irrationality, and misery, while the West is the only land of freedom and dignity. This binary opposition is the essence of neo-Orientalism, and Satrapi mastered it completely.
Distorted interpretations of Iranian history
Satrapi's mangling of historical reality extends across multiple domains. Perhaps most egregious is her depiction of the “Sacred Defense,” which saw millions of Iranians voluntarily defend their country against Saddam Hussein's aggression, backed by Western powers.
In Persepolis, she portrays young Iranian soldiers not as patriotic defenders of their homeland but as gullible, impoverished, simple-minded teenagers tricked into going to the front lines by promises of a plastic golden key that would admit them to a paradise filled with women and material pleasures.
This depiction is not merely inaccurate but an insult to the memory of hundreds of thousands of Iranian martyrs. Iran's war literature tells a completely different story.
The collected oral memories of martyrs and veterans, including works such as Moon in the Fog, Salute to Ebrahim, and A Room of the Size of a Hand and Four Fingers, document the profound faith, patriotism, and conscious sacrifice of young Iranians who understood exactly what they were doing when they defended their country.
Men like Iraj Rostami, a father of two young daughters who left his family despite severe injuries to his knee; Ebrahim Hadi, an unmarried young man from a poor family who was offered titles and medals but refused them; and Azim Haggi, who endured unimaginable torments in Iraqi captivity.
These figures are celebrated as heroes in Iran, but Satrapi reduced their sacrifice to a crude caricature of desperation and intellectual vacuity.
Satrapi also distorted the Islamic Revolution itself. She portrayed the massive popular movement that overthrew the US-backed Pahlavi dictatorship as something incomprehensible, violent, and fundamentally illegitimate.
She ignored the democratic will of the Iranian people expressed in the historic 1979 referendum and even claimed that the result was false, even though no professional historian worldwide questions it.
Instead, she presented the Islamic Revolution as an imposition by religious fanatics on a modern, Westernized population, a perspective that reflects her own tiny urban elite, disconnected upbringing, rather than the reality of a nation that had suffered under decades of dictatorship and foreign domination.
Trying to present herself and her family as supposedly rational and enlightened, she boasted in her comics that they prefer to listen to and trust the BBC news rather than the Iranian national broadcaster, even dismissing Iranian reports as inherently false.
This is deeply ironic because the BBC, as an instrument of British state propaganda from a country traditionally hostile to Iran, has enjoyed a reputation among Iranian intellectual elites since the 1950s as one of the most manipulative and unreliable media outlets.
Her ideological acquisitiveness goes to the point that in the comic, she begins to blame the Iranian political system for the death of her friend in the bombing of Tehran.
Not the Iraqi Ba’athist aggressors who dropped the bombs and launched the devastating war of aggression, nor the foreign sponsors of that regime, including her family's beloved Soviet Union. Only the Islamic Republic is to blame.
Caricatures of Iranian culture
Throughout her works, Satrapi systematically demeaned Iranian culture, religion, traditions and customs. The practice of veiling, or mandatory Islamic hijab, is presented not as a social and religious practice with multiple significant and sacred meanings but as a simple, brutal imposition that strips women of their individuality and humanity.
In the very first chapter of Persepolis, she depicts ten-year-old girls playing with their scarves as if they were toys, monsters, or horse bridles. She presents hijab as an incomprehensible burden forced on children who have no understanding of it.
What she omits entirely is the historical context that mandatory hijab and single-sex schools in the 1980s actually opened up educational opportunities for girls from traditional families, allowing them to leave the confines of their homes and enter public life for the first time.
She also ignored that unveiling came to Iran through brutal enforcement in the 1930s, with the suppression of uprisings that left numerous women and protesters dead, which caused the people to harbor enormous animosity toward the Western dress code.
Satrapi also mocks Iranian religious practices and beliefs. The namaz, or daily prayers, is trivialized; religious leaders are called stupid; martyrs are made fun of; and the streets named after martyrs are described as so unsettling that she had to hurry home to avoid them.
She compares the murals representing martyrs to advertisements for sausages in Austria, a comparison so grotesque that it reveals not a critical observer but a vile propagandist.
Even the simple act of naming streets after martyrs becomes, in her telling, evidence of Iran's sordid and cemetery-like atmosphere. She cannot comprehend why a society might honor those who gave their lives defending their country.
This reveals not sophistication but a profound shallowness and a willingness to dismiss any cultural expression that does not conform to her Westernized sensibilities.
Satrapi's dehumanizing, caricatured depiction of Iranian society and history
Manipulation of women’s rights discourse
Satrapi has been branded in the Western world as a heroine of women's rights, but this reputation is entirely undeserved. Her depiction of Iranian women is one of the most unrealistic and insulting pictures she offers to her Western audience.
In Persepolis, Iranian women are shown either as passive, unconcerned citizens or as gossiping, backbiting individuals. Her mother, despite being presented as politically active, blithely accepts war casualties with a philosophy of resignation.
The only extended depiction of women interacting in her work shows them insulting war refugees from southern provinces rather than helping them.
What Satrapi omits entirely is the indispensable role of Iranian women in the Sacred Defense. Iranian women participated in the imposed war in multiple capacities.
They carried guns, went on surveillance missions, cared for the injured, guarded ammunition depots, organized food drives, voluntarily donated their material possessions, and – most significantly – encouraged the men in their lives to fight to the bitter end.
Women on the frontlines worked in cemeteries washing corpses, learned premedical skills to help the injured, and buried their own fathers and brothers with their own hands.
The memoir Da (meaning mother in Kurdish), by Seyyedeh Zahra Hosseini, documents exactly this kind of heroism. Satrapi has nothing to say about these women because they do not fit her narrative of Iranian women as helpless victims.
The hypocrisy of Satrapi's supposed commitment to women's rights was exposed during the recent American-Israeli military aggression against Iran and its people.
Despite decades of being celebrated in Western media as a heroine of women's rights, Satrapi remained completely silent during the war. She refused to condemn the crimes against Iranian women and children, including the Minab massacre.
Her silence and indifference indicated that she hoped for the collapse of the Iranian political system, which would ostensibly confirm the correctness of her ideological views and her long-standing announcement of the Islamic Republic's demise.
She was never interested in the welfare of Iranian women, but was only interested in using them as props for her anti-Iranian campaign.
Satrapi's political statements over the years reveal a profound amateurism combined with a consistent alignment with Zionist and American imperialist positions.
In one interview, she claimed that Iran is waging war in five countries – Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen – and that the entire state treasury is being poured into these wars.
According to political analysts, this is Israeli regime propaganda designed to distance the Iranian public from supporting resistance groups.
She ignored the fact that resistance groups are primarily financed by donations to charitable trusts, that Iran has earned tens of billions of dollars from exports to Iraq, and that without allied resistance groups, Iraq would be under the control of Daesh terrorists, Saddam Hussein, or some US puppet, making bilateral trade and commerce impossible.
She also ignored the strategic depth provided by these relationships, which proved critically important during the recent US-Israeli wars of aggression.
In yet another interview in 2024, she said a "democratic Iran would be good for the whole world, delivering a mortal blow to Russia and Hamas."
These platitudes were hypocritical because she idealized Soviet totalitarianism while denying the democratic will of the Iranian people in 1979. It is clear that her use of "democratic Iran" was simply a euphemism for a desired Western puppet regime in Tehran.
MADRID - Brett McGurk's recent remarks at a press conference — McGurk served as the White House coordinator for the Middle East under the Biden administration — illuminate one of the most durable political fictions in American foreign policy: that there exists any substantive difference between a Democratic and a Republican administration when it comes to Iran.
McGurk stated that the United States has been "at war with Iran since 1979," and that Iranian ideology, which he described as very much alive, consists of expelling the United States from the Middle East and eliminating Israel.
The statement is remarkable not for its content, which is entirely predictable, but for its candour. It articulates directly what both parties have shared since 1979: that Iran constitutes a fundamental obstacle to the order Washington requires to maintain.
Iran remains in the Western political imaginary as a spectral presence that refuses to disappear. Attempts to neutralize it have proved fruitless. After forty days of war, Iran not only survived but returned with a force that the West has found itself unable to administer. Despite decades of governmentality designed to deny its political autonomy, Iran preserves that autonomy expressed in an Islamic grammar that produces, precisely for that reason, a particular intolerance in Western capitals. What Iran represents through its theological-political persistence calls into question the foundations of Western modernity: the supposed inevitability of secularization, the universality of certain forms of government, the idea that history moves inexorably toward a liberal destination.
Given that this analysis is shared across both American parties, the question becomes unavoidable: how to account for the surface difference between an Obama administration that signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015 and the current Trump administration, which dismantled that agreement and launched a forty-day war? The answer requires a shift from the ontic level to the ontological. At the ontic level — that of specific political facts, particular decisions, concrete approaches — clear differences exist. Obama employed multilateral diplomacy, selective sanctions and negotiation.
Trump resorted to the abandonment of agreements, maximum pressure and open warfare. But these differences remain circumscribed to methodology, emphasis and rhetoric. They do not touch the deep structure that organizes how both administrations understand Iran.
In both cases the same epistemic order persists: Iran must be known, administered, disciplined. Iran is an object that requires intervention. Iran represents a misalignment that must be corrected. Obama believed Iran could be integrated through agreements that demonstrated the benefits of cooperation.
Trump believed it could be neutralized through coercive pressure until capitulation. But both presuppose that a solution exists within the terms Washington establishes. Both assume that Iran can be guided, persuaded or broken toward acceptable behavior. Both, in other words, inhabit a common order of intelligibility: one in which Iran appears as a problem to be solved.
The deep structure: Family resemblances in American foreign policy
Ludwig Wittgenstein developed the notion of family resemblances to explain how concepts we share operate without requiring a single common trait. Members of a family resemble one another without all sharing the same eyes, the same mouth, the same profile. There is an overlapping network of similarities that only becomes visible from within that structure.
Applied to American foreign policy, this logic reveals something fundamental: what unites Republicans and Democrats is not a shared identity but a set of epistemic traits that produce Iran as a problem.
Consider a family photo album. In some pictures the men wear suits and ties; in others, jeans and shirts. Some poses are solemn; others, relaxed. The visual differences are evident. But any family member recognizes something that recurs beneath those variations: a particular way of smiling, a manner of looking, a gesture at the dinner table. In Washington,
Republicans and Democrats differ in rhetoric, method and emphasis. Republicans are louder, openly hostile, decisively interventionist. Democrats employ more diplomatic language, prefer sanctions to bombardments, invoke multilateral partnerships. But in every photograph of American foreign policy the same expression appears: Iran as an object to be monitored, controlled, kept within acceptable limits.
Washington's political family does not debate whether Iran must fit within its order of intelligibility. It debates how to make it do so. Whether through dialogue and incentives or through coercion and isolation. Whether through negotiated agreements or maximum pressure. These are tactical differences, not differences about what Iran fundamentally is.
So long as that structure persists, any debate between Democrats and Republicans remains internal to the same family, constituting no real challenge to its constitutive logic.
McGurk formulates this continuity with involuntary precision. The war "since 1979" is not Trump's war but Washington's war. It has been waged through different means by different administrations but persists as a fundamental category of American politics. Obama understood it as such: even while negotiating the JCPOA, he continued sanctions, maintained the regional military presence and financed Washington's allies against Iranian positions. The agreement sought not peace but containment: keeping Iran within a framework of economic dependence and political isolation.
What distinguishes this analysis from more conventional liberal critiques is that it does not appeal to the incompetence or extremism of one administration or another. Such critiques maintain the fiction that different governments could produce radically different policies toward Iran. But both administrations operate from the premise that Iran constitutes a challenge to the international order, that its defensive capabilities represent a systemic danger, that its political autonomy requires correction.
Saidiya Hartman showed in her analysis of slave emancipation in the United States how abolition produced not freedom but the reconfiguration of control. Both the South and the North, enemies in the Civil War, adopted similar means of politicization to keep the liberated population under domination. Something analogous operates in American policy toward Iran. One administration offers negotiation within acceptable limits; another offers pressure until capitulation.
Both presuppose that Iran must accept the terms Washington establishes. The choice remains circumscribed to a horizon in which Iran's genuine autonomy never appears as a possibility.
The real difference between American administrations with respect to Iran would be one that abandoned the shared presupposition: one that acknowledged Iran as a sovereign state whose foreign policy, however disagreeable to Washington, does not constitute a problem requiring a solution. That Iran has the right to develop defensive capabilities. That Iran has the right to regional alliances Washington rejects. That Iranian autonomy may be uncomfortable for the American-led order without thereby requiring neutralization. Such an administration has not existed and will likely never exist, because both parties share something deeper than any electoral difference: a vision of the world in which the West, and the United States in particular, possesses the right to structure the international order, and political entities that refuse that structuring constitute problems to be resolved.
From the Iranian perspective, both American parties share the same vision of Iran as an entity that must fit within their frameworks of intelligibility. The genuine rupture would only occur if someone broke Washington's family album: if Iran, speaking from its own political logic, were permitted to cease being an object of intervention and become a subject of its own history. That would require abandoning not only specific policies but the shared presupposition that structures American foreign policy. It would require admitting that Iran is not a problem to be solved but a political actor whose autonomy may be uncomfortable, even threatening, but requires no solution. That it will continue to exist according to its own logic, regardless of which party controls the White House.
MADRID - The Iranian strike against Israel on the night of Sunday, June 7, is qualitatively different from anything that has come before. For the first time, Iran attacked Israel directly without any prior Israeli action against Iranian territory or assets to justify it. The lines of confrontation have shifted since the 40-day war, and what that shift reveals deserves more sustained attention than the immediate news cycle can give it.
For years, analysts characterized Iranian deterrence doctrine as fundamentally reactive: Tehran absorbed the blow, calculated the response, and acted at a time and place of its own choosing. That characterization described a pattern of behavior without asking what conditions sustained it, or what conditions might change it. What Sunday's events make plain is that Iran has rewritten the terms of its own strategic calculus. It no longer considers itself obliged to wait for a direct attack on its territory before responding. Deterrence had been re-established in the narrow sense that Israel knew any strike on Iran would be met proportionally. But Tehran has now added a new dimension: it will also respond to Israeli attacks on Lebanon.
The immediate question is what makes this shift possible. States rewrite the rules of the game when they judge that the regional balance of power, their own internal capabilities, and the broader regional landscape allow them to take the initiative. What the Sunday night's strike signals is a level of strategic confidence that is difficult to dissociate from the outcome of the 40-day war. Despite two successive military campaigns against Iran, the Islamic Republic is anything but weakened. Iranian officials project the conviction that no credible threat, from Israel or the United States, currently exists that could force any substantial change in their policy. Iran now sees itself as being in a position to impose new rules on its adversaries rather than operating within a framework others have set for it. That perception carries its own autonomous political weight, shaping the behavior of every actor involved regardless of what outside observers make of its material foundations.
What makes Sunday’s attack particularly significant is that it does not occur in a vacuum, but against the backdrop of an accumulated regional transformation. The 40-day war consolidated an interpretation of the regional balance that positioned Iran as the nodal power in the regional order. Within that framework, Sunday’s strike reflects a strategic assessment: that the moment is favorable, that adversaries lack sufficient military means to alter the current status quo, and that taking the initiative now produces effects that a reactive response would not. The strategic confidence reflected in Iran’s decision is therefore not an improvisation.
Humiliation and its registers
Now, the position of the Trump administration deserves careful attention. Iran, which survived 40 days of intensive bombardment, retains control of the Strait of Hormuz, and has just demonstrated its willingness to act offensively, is operating from a position of sustained initiative. Israel, which has fought across the region without achieving any of its declared objectives, is carrying a burden of attrition that no amount of public statement can conceal. Trump, who needs a way out of the conflict, does not control the terms on which that exit might occur. This constellation is not the result of a tactical error or a single administration's bad judgment. It is the accumulated result of decades of systematic underestimation of actors whose political logic Washington has consistently preferred not to understand. The American humiliation emerging from these events operates on two inseparable levels. At the material level, Iran resisted coercion and responded in ways that have altered the assumptions underpinning unquestioned U.S. dominance in the region. 40 days of bombing did not produce capitulation; it produced an Iran that on Sunday night struck Israel directly from a position its adversaries had not anticipated. At the discursive level, something more fundamental is at stake: the capacity of the United States to name, classify, and define political reality has been challenged with an effectiveness that no previous administration had to confront with this degree of clarity. For decades, Washington constructed an order of intelligibility in which Iran appeared as a problem to be solved, an actor to be disciplined until it accepted the terms of the liberal order. What this weekend's events demonstrate is that this framework does not correspond to the reality it claims to describe. Iran was not disciplined. And that sustained resistance carries an eloquence that conventional analysis cannot absorb without revising its premises.
The Lebanese equation
Iran's decision to explicitly link its response to Israeli attacks on Lebanon dismantles, with some precision, two narratives that have circulated for years with remarkably little critical scrutiny. The first is the proxy label routinely applied to Hezbollah, which presupposes a relationship of unilateral instrumentalization in which Tehran uses the organization as a tool of its regional policy, an organization with no agency of its own and no interests beyond those of its supposed patron. The second is the narrative according to which Hezbollah dragged Lebanon into someone else's war, as if Lebanon were a passive bystander in a conflict foreign to its own interests and political history. Both narratives serve the same function: to delegitimize Lebanese resistance by recasting it as the effect of external manipulation rather than as the expression of an autonomous political position with its own historical roots.
What the security umbrella Iran has extended over Lebanon reveals — as the Lebanese political scientist Amal Saad has argued — goes beyond the inseparability of both actors' strategic interests and the depth of their ideological and religious ties, though those ties exist and are politically significant. What it reveals is a conception of sovereignty as regional self-determination: a substantive and lived sovereignty that must be continually exercised and defended through struggle and solidarity, as against the formal sovereignty externally conferred that the Lebanese government embodies, and which, as that government has demonstrated, can be denied or surrendered in practice while its formal designation remains unchanged. This distinction determines who can act on behalf of a community when that community is under attack, and who can only invoke an authority it no longer controls.
Iran acts from a logic in which the political autonomy of a community, its capacity to set its own terms of security and to resist external pressure, constitutes the fundamental political value. It is a logic that conventional international relations analysis has been unable to capture, because it insists on reading Iranian decisions as responses to external stimuli rather than as expressions of Iran's own strategic assessment. At least since the 40-day war, Iran has demonstrated the inadequacy of that framework. Sunday night confirmed it in a manner that leaves little room for alternative interpretation.
What this suggests is that Tehran has left behind the strictly reactive deterrence doctrine by which direct action against Israel was framed as a response to prior escalation. If that reading holds, the rules of the regional game have changed in ways that are not easily reversed.
