Iran's Khamenei Says US Hostility Will Persist No Matter Which Party Holds Power

Iran's Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, said on Wednesday that Washington's hostility toward Tehran will not change through partisan shifts in the United States or through any concessions to Washington, and that anyone who believes otherwise is "greatly mistaken," Reuters reported. The written statement, published on his website, came hours after Republicans lost both chambers of Congress in the midterm elections held on Tuesday, November 3, 2026.

"Those who still harbour even the slightest hope that the behaviour of 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 in the statement, The Times reported. Reuters carried the same passage with the closing words rendered as "greatly mistaken."

A warning of a wider war

Khamenei warned that Iran's response to any renewed United States aggression would be on a much greater scale, Reuters reported. "Should such aggressions be repeated, its scope will become much wider," he said, in The Times account of the statement. He pointed to Tehran's destruction of United States bases in the region and its management of the Strait of Hormuz as part of a campaign against United States hegemony, Reuters reported. "The US sees the end of its hegemony as distant; we see it as near," he said.

The message marked the National Day of the Fight Against Global Arrogance, the Mehr news agency reported, in coverage carried by LaPresse. In that account, Khamenei said the aim of the United States, which he called the Great Satan, is the unconditional surrender of the Iranian nation, and that the slightest inclination to surrender would waste what Iran gained through the blood of its martyrs and encourage the enemy to wage still bolder wars.

Tehran reads the result as a vote against the war

Iran's parliament speaker, Mohammad Ghalibaf, welcomed the American result in a post on X. "Americans said no to war, and we endorse this message," Ghalibaf wrote, The Times reported.

In Washington, President Donald Trump acknowledged that the war in Iran had weighed on Republican candidates. "I think a part of it was Iran, but at the same time people understood the importance of what I've done with Iran," Trump told Fox News, Reuters reported. The Times reported that fuel prices were hovering about 40 percent higher than a year earlier when Americans voted on Tuesday, partly because of the war. Trump also said Democrats would send legislation he called insane to his desk and that he would veto it, Reuters reported.

A leader who has not been seen in public

Khamenei has yet to appear in public since he took office in March, The Times reported. He became supreme leader after his father, Ali Khamenei, was killed on the opening day of the war that the United States and Israel began in February. His statements reach the public in writing, through his website and state media.

The statement landed six days before a diplomatic test. Russia confirmed on Tuesday that peace talks with Ukraine and the United States will go ahead in Abu Dhabi on November 10 and 11, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov naming Vladimir Medinsky as Moscow's chief negotiator, Reuters reported. Khamenei's words set out Tehran's position before those talks: a change of party control in Washington, on its own, changes nothing for Iran.