TEHRAN – The United States’ problem, according to Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, is not with the Islamic Republic, but with Iran itself. He articulated this view in one of the dozens of speeches he delivered throughout 2025, explaining the foundation of nearly five decades of U.S. hostility toward the nation.

His statements were delivered against a backdrop of countless instances of U.S. aggression and pressure. Washington had just ended a 12-day war against Iran, which it began in the midst of nuclear negotiations. A few years earlier, it had torn up a nuclear deal Iranians had spent years negotiating with the West. Years prior, Iran was forced to fight an eight-year war against U.S.-backed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Throughout the years since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iranians have also grappled with waves of Western-funded terrorism and crippling sanctions.

The 47 years of pressure were not because of “human rights,” as Western politicians shamelessly claim, nor because, as they assert, Iran is a “threat” to the region or the world, Ayatollah Khamenei added. Iran has not attacked any country in the past 300 years, and no genuinely concerned party regarding human rights would harm an entire nation of 90 million people through sanctions, war, and terrorism.

The reason was the same as in 1953, he said, when the U.S. and the U.K. toppled the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh through a coup and re-installed the murderous and despotic Shah. Mosaddegh had just nationalized Iran’s oil, which posed a threat to the imperial interests of the Americans and British who had looted Iranian oil since it was first discovered.

Today, in March 2026, Ayatollah Khamenei is no longer among us. He was brutally assassinated, alongside several family members, in his Tehran office on February 28th. Ayatollah Khamenei’s martyrdom proved what he had said months earlier: that if the U.S. truly had a problem with the Islamic Republic’s “behavior,” it could have used the ongoing negotiations instead of attacking Iran for the second time in eight months.

American politicians claimed this new war was waged because Iran was “a week away” from building nuclear weapons. If this were the genuine concern, a deal could have been reached with the Iranians to ensure they would never pursue nuclear weapons. 

But that was not what U.S. President Donald Trump wanted, because the Pentagon itself told U.S. congress that it had not detected any “immediate threat” from Iran.

Trump, like every U.S. president that came before him, seeks Iran’s resources and aims to prepare the ground for further Israeli expansionism in the region. Trump cannot destroy Iran’s military capabilities through airstrikes, but he can destroy the will to use them if he manages to topple the central government—the Islamic Republic. After that, he can freely steal Iranian oil, and Israel can more easily swallow the regional countries when there is no powerful Iran to aid its allies.

This understanding is precisely why the Iranian armed forces and the Iranian people have focused only on fighting Israel and the U.S. over the past four days. They know they have no choice but to endure and fight. They know they are “sentenced to victory,” as Ayatollah Khamenei stated to a group of soldiers during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. 

They have also seen that any ceasefire the U.S. and Israel signed in Lebanon and Gaza over the past three years has been violated time and time again. Meanwhile, these two regimes have not dared attack Yemen again since fighting on that front stopped, because they cannot afford punishment by the Ansarullah at the Red Sea. This is what Iranians understand: The Leader is gone, but Iran is still here, and for the sake of Iran, this country must make the enemy back off once and for all.