“No hope that a change of party in the U.S. will make a difference” ... Iran’s Khamenei warns Democrats after their midterm landslide of “wide-ranging retaliation”

[Financial News] With the Democrats having won a landslide in the U.S. midterm elections, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei warned that the United States’ fundamental hostility toward Iran would not change regardless of which party was in power in the United States, saying, “If acts of aggression are repeated, we will retaliate on a far broader scale.”
According to Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency and other outlets on the 4th (local time), Supreme Leader Khamenei made the remarks in a written statement issued for the 47th anniversary of the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, observed as the “World Day Against Arrogance.”
Khamenei declared, “If there are people who entertain even the slightest hope that a partisan change within the U.S. ruling system will change its behavior, or imagine that making concessions to the United States can soften its hostility toward Iranians, that is a grave delusion.” In response to recent political realignments in the United States and the possibility of exploring an end to the war and a resumption of nuclear talks through mediating countries, he drew a clear line in favor of maintaining a hard-line stance toward the United States.
Khamenei, who referred to the United States as the “Great Satan,” stressed, “The United States wants the Iranian people to surrender unconditionally, and even the slightest sign of capitulation only emboldens the arrogant enemy and invites further attacks.” He added, “If acts of aggression recur, Iran’s retaliation will go far beyond the initial phase seen in the Strait of Hormuz and elsewhere.”
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) also backed Khamenei’s hard-line stance. Hamid Reza Moghadamfar, an adviser to the IRGC commander-in-chief, said, “From Iran’s perspective, there is fundamentally no difference whatsoever between the elephant (the Republican Party) and the donkey (the Democratic Party).” He warned that if the United States or Israel resumed attacks, “unlike in the past, [Iran] would not limit itself to striking the point from which the attack originated, but would mount a wide-ranging response unconstrained by geographical limits.”
Key figures in Iran viewed the election result, in which U.S. voters turned their backs on the Republican Party, to which President Donald Trump belongs, as an expression of “Americans’ fatigue with war.” Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei said emphatically on social media, “Americans were voicing opposition to war, and if the U.S. government ignores this, it will pay the price for a grave miscalculation.”
Meanwhile, large-scale rallies were held across Iran, including in the capital, Tehran, where thousands gathered, chanted anti-U.S. slogans and burned U.S. and Israeli flags. Protesters celebrated the U.S. election results, declaring, “Trump crossed the line on every front and lost,” while also agreeing, “Our hostility toward the United States will not end whether the Democrats or the Republicans win.”


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