US Political Influence Fast Declining: Iranian Commander

Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami, commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), told a conference Sunday of the IRGC’s top political directors that US political influence around the world was declining, the semiofficial Fars News Agency reports.

US efforts to prop up friendly leaders around the MENA region are failing “in a domino fashion,” Salami claimed in his speech on Sunday, citing Washington’s withdrawal from Afghanistan as a prime example. “These are all the signs heralding a major event, which is the US failure,” he said.

The Iranian commander also opined that US President Joe Biden’s recent Mideast tour ended without achievements and that the president went home empty-handed.

That by itself is hardly a unique view; observers in the West – among them, members of the foreign policy establishment in Washington – have noted the same trend, as The Media Line’s Mohammad al-Kassim reported yesterday.

But Salami didn’t rise to the top of the IRGC for his sober, thoughtful analysis of geopolitical trends. The 62-year-old commander, known for his fiery speeches, said in 2019 that Iran was at war “on the global level” and had “plans to defeat the world powers.” In 2020, he speculated that the COVID-19 pandemic “may be the product of American biological warfare.”