Few Iranian officials embody the regime’s contempt for facts as brazenly as Aliakbar Velayati. His rhetoric recalls the early days of Ayatollah Khomeini, when mythmaking and paternalistic posturing were presented as historical destiny. Velayati—longtime adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader—does not merely distort reality; he delivers these distortions with the tone of a self‑appointed custodian of the region, a man who believes he can issue certificates of legitimacy to neighboring states.
Months ago, he claimed—without a hint of embarrassment—that Iran had always enjoyed “friendly relations” with the Arab Gulf sheikhdoms, and that Tehran was responsible for “liberating Muscat from Portuguese occupation.” This week he went further, declaring that the stability of Arab states along the Gulf is owed to Iran’s “centuries‑long management” of the Strait of Hormuz. He then dismissed these states as “neighbours and their little politicians,” whose survival, he said, depends on “crumbs falling from this table.”
This is not mere rhetorical insolence. It is the distilled ideology of a political project that treats geography as private property, history as erasable ink, and neighboring nations as minor details in a grand design of regional dominance. Velayati’s falsehoods are not accidental; they are deliberate acts of appropriation. When he claims Iran “liberated” Muscat, he is not offering an alternative reading of history—he is attempting to seize ownership of another nation’s memory.
When he speaks of the Strait of Hormuz as if it were a Revolutionary Guard checkpoint, he is not describing reality—he is asserting guardianship over an international waterway.
Velayati’s language reveals the worldview behind it. To call Gulf states “neighbors and their little politicians” is to deny their sovereignty altogether. In his framing, these are not nations but populations living near Iran’s borders, awaiting a custodian to guarantee their survival. The relationship he imagines is not one of mutual recognition but of hierarchy: a “great power” at the center, and lesser entities orbiting around it. Such rhetoric does not come from confidence; it comes from a regime unsettled by the Gulf’s evolution—economies diversifying, societies opening, and states engaging the world in ways Tehran cannot control.
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Velayati practices abroad what the Islamic Republic perfected at home: the political utility of falsehood. Domestically, untruths justify repression and economic failure under the banner of “resistance.” Externally, they justify expansionism under the guise of “historic responsibility.” Thus the Gulf’s stability becomes, in his telling, an Iranian gift; its security a by‑product of Iranian stewardship; its political existence dependent on Iranian benevolence. This is not analysis—it is an attempt to rewrite consciousness itself. If Iran is the liberator, the manager, the guarantor, then Iran must also be the rightful arbiter of who stays and who disappears.
What, then, is Velayati afraid of? He fears the Strait of Hormuz becoming an international matter rather than an Iranian instrument. He fears a Gulf that acts as a partner, not a subordinate. He fears a world that sees regional stability not as a favor from Tehran but as the outcome of global and local interests that leave no room for Iranian tutelage. He fears, above all, the collapse of the narrative that sustains his political universe—the myth of a “historic role” that exists only in the speeches of the Supreme Leader and his entourage.
To dissect Velayati’s rhetoric is to expose a project that recognises no truth unless it serves its ambitions, and no neighbor unless that neighbor bows. A project that treats the Gulf as a margin, Arabs as minor characters, and history as raw material to be reshaped at will.
His insolence is not a slip of the tongue; it is the doctrine of a state that believes facts are obstacles, neighbors are props, and even the sea can be claimed as private domain.
If Velayati wishes to lecture the Gulf on “survival,” history offers its own reply. The Gulf has never been anyone’s banquet table. It has always been an open sea—one that exposes every attempt to turn it into a bargaining chip or a stage for cheap political theatrics. And if Velayati imagines that history can be managed like a committee meeting in the Supreme Leader’s office, he will find that history is far less obedient. The Gulf did not wait for Iran to name it; its stability was never a gift from Tehran; and its states were not built on anyone’s crumbs.
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The arrogance in Velayati’s tone is not strength. It is the desperation of a regime that, after four decades of revolutionary rhetoric, has failed to produce a single model worth emulating—neither in governance, nor in economic management, nor in political legitimacy. It turns to fabricated history, monopolized geography, and disdain for its neighbors because it has little else to offer. Unless, of course, one considers sectarian lamentation a national brand. When Velayati visited Iraq in 1990, he insisted on entering a shrine in Baghdad crawling on his hands and knees—a spectacle that has since become a hallmark of Iran’s populist rituals, where political theater and religious kitsch merge in the mud.
If Velayati wants to teach the Gulf a lesson in endurance, he should look instead to states that build, innovate, and engage the world as equals—not as dependents, as Iraq has tragically become. Those who live on manufactured illusions eventually discover, too late, that the table they imagined was never theirs, and the crumbs they spoke of existed only in their own rhetoric.
History is unforgiving to those who cling to falsehoods. Seas do not recognise those who try to stamp their names on international waters. And the Gulf is not waiting for a new guardian. Velayati will remain the perfect example of a politician who mistakes insolence for strategy and arrogance for foreign policy. But insolence, no matter how loudly it is delivered, is still only noise—and noise builds no influence, writes no history, and sustains no state.
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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
