Iran's Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei said on Wednesday that anyone expecting a change in United States policy toward his country is "seriously mistaken", hours after midterm elections dealt a heavy blow to President Donald Trump, with Democrats winning control of both chambers of Congress.
In a written statement published on his website, Khamenei said those who still harbour hope that what he called the hegemonic system might change through partisan or factional shifts, "or who imagine that making concessions to the United States can dissuade it from hostility towards the Iranian nation, are seriously mistaken".
Khamenei said Iran's control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which one fifth of the world's oil and gas passed before the war, had shattered the "myth of America's invincibility". He described the management of the waterway, and what he called the elimination of US military bases in regional countries, as a response to American "aggression and crimes" during the conflict, and warned that any renewed US attack would draw a far broader response. "In the event of repeated transgressions, it will take on much wider dimensions," he said.
His message marked the National Day of the Fight Against Global Arrogance, observed each year on November 4, the anniversary of the 1979 seizure of the US embassy in Tehran. Khamenei said the confrontation with Washington had reached a point where "every day and every hour" had become a time of resistance against "the Great Satan".
Trump himself has acknowledged that the US-Israel war on Iran, which began in February, likely contributed to his Republican Party's poor performance, saying voters were probably not ready "for the short-term consequence of paying more for gasoline".
Al Jazeera's Resul Serdar Atas, reporting from Tehran, said the supreme leader struck a cautious note that contrasted with a more celebratory mood among other Iranian officials. "Conscience or the cost of living, Americans said NO TO WAR, and we endorse this message," wrote Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran's parliament speaker and chief negotiator with Washington, on X. He added that if the US government "betrays their public will to serve international paymasters and blackmailers, it will learn our NO comes with a Nightmare".
Mohammad Mokhber, an adviser and assistant to the supreme leader, said Trump had been "slapped in the face by his own people" and that "the true winner in this arena was Iran, which transferred the cost of the war into the United States". Judiciary chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei wrote on Telegram that "Trump was defeated both in war and in politics", promising further defeats, calling November 4 a historic day of defeat for the Americans and honouring "the dear martyred students of Minab". Mehdi Tabatabaei, deputy head of communications at the president's office, said Israel's genocidal war on Gaza, "blind adherence" to Israel's interests and the "futile war" with Iran had handed the Republicans their biggest defeat.
Atas said many Iranians believe a Democratic-controlled Congress could restrain Trump and make him "less reckless" over the war, with some Republicans already wary ahead of the 2028 elections. But some in Tehran fear that because officials have framed the result as a defeat imposed by Iran, Trump could "personalise the matter" and launch a new round of war "in an act of revenge". The US has warned it could carry out a short but intensive military campaign against Iran after the midterms.
Separately, Hamidreza Moghadamfar, an adviser to the commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, told a rally in the southern port city of Bandar Abbas that Iran would strike targets beyond US bases if Gulf states allowed Washington to launch attacks from their territory. He named the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and said Iran would respond with a "new doctrine and new technology".
