Iran shrugs off US midterms and says Washington has not changed

Iran's leadership has looked at the US midterm results and shrugged. In a statement after the vote, Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei said anyone who thinks America can be coaxed into dropping its hostility toward Iran through concessions or a shift in partisan politics is badly mistaken. He also warned that Tehran would answer any future US military action with more force.

The vote landed after months of military confrontation between Tehran and Washington, according to DW, a standoff that rattled global energy markets and stoked fears of a wider regional war. Against that backdrop, Iranian officials and outlets spent the days after the election arguing over what, if anything, the Republican losses actually mean for them.

Iran-based journalist Mohammad Sadegh Javadi Hesar, a member of the reformist Etemad-e Melli party, told DW that the outcome won't move Iran's calculations. In his reading, the decisions that matter on ending the conflict will be made in Washington, while Tehran keeps pressing its existing demands — a full stop to hostilities, including in Lebanon, and an end to the US naval blockade.

Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf took the sunnier view. On X, he argued that American voters had delivered their verdict on the Iran conflict, writing that Americans said no to war, while conceding that the rising cost of living also cost Donald Trump's party at the ballot box. He also needled Vice President JD Vance, who had acknowledged the war was why Republicans lost, telling him to skip the TED talk and say it to his boss instead.

Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said Iran had pushed back on the battlefield and in the Strait of Hormuz and still handed Washington a political setback at home. Iranian outlets ran with the theme: Etelaat Online joked that the long-promised regime change had finally happened, just not in Iran, while the state-affiliated Mehr News Agency likened Trump's troubles to Jimmy Carter's, recalling the failed 1980 hostage rescue mission that ended in a deadly desert crash and Carter's election loss that year. Tasnim News Agency, close to the Revolutionary Guards, wasn't buying any of it, dismissing the idea of a meaningful gap between the parties with a Persian proverb: the yellow dog is the brother of the jackal.

Veteran diplomat Hossein Alizadeh, who spent 22 years in Iran's diplomatic corps before resigning in 2010 over the post-election crackdown, told DW the fallout is hard to call — but US politics ripples everywhere, from Mexico and Canada to the EU, China and the Middle East. Now based in Finland, he sees another large-scale US escalation as unlikely, noting that Democrats, though also opponents of the Islamic Republic, went for a diplomatic deal in 2015 that put Iranian nuclear work under IAEA oversight, and that Washington's allies weren't keen on attacking Iran either. The damage such a war would do, he said, is already plain.