Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on Saturday accused the United States of trying to impose a failed regional order based on Arab dependence on American military support, warning that it would not last.
“This failed model, where Arab states are told they can’t survive ten days without US support, is being imposed again,” Khamenei said. “But it will collapse, and America will leave this region.”
Khamenei said Washington was promoting a security structure that keeps regional countries reliant on foreign protection. “The US wants these countries unable to function without it — that’s the message in their behavior and their proposals,” he said.
He also accused the United States of fueling instability and violence. “The US has used its power to massacre in Gaza, to stoke war wherever possible, and to arm its mercenaries,” he said, describing Israel as “a malignant cancer that must and will be uprooted.”
Khamenei says Trump’s rhetoric ‘shames America’
Khamenei also condemned US President Donald Trump’s remarks during his recent visit to the region.
“Some of what the US president said during this trip doesn’t even merit a reply,” he said in a meeting with teachers in Tehran. “The level of discourse is so low it brings shame to the speaker and to the American nation.”
Trump, during a regional tour that included Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, called for a tougher nuclear agreement with Iran and accused its leadership of spreading instability.
Speaking Tuesday in Riyadh, he said, “The biggest and most destructive of these forces is the regime in Iran, which has caused unthinkable suffering in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Yemen and beyond.”
Trump also mocked Iran’s economic and environmental problems, contrasting its decline with the development of its Persian Gulf neighbors.
“While you have been constructing the world's tallest skyscrapers in Jeddah and Dubai, Tehran's 1979 landmarks are collapsing into rubble,” he said. “[Iran’s] corrupt water mafia… causes droughts and empty riverbeds. They get rich.”
