TEHRAN -- Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) head General Hussein Salami says Iran today has embraced a strategic outlook that is in contrast to U.S. decline.
He said while the U.S. had global power decades ago, it no longer has the domination and influence it once did.
“Today, a powerful Islamic Iran is a rival to the United States. This battle is going on in all fields, and the mobilization has played a fundamental and decisive role in this competition and the neutralization of Western ideas from society,” he said.
He praised the Iranian youth and the revolutionary spirit that guides Iran today, saying the revolution has borne fruit and is growing.
He said that many years ago Iran was in darkness, dominated by foreign colonialists. This created intellectual stagnation, “the freezing of thought in the ice of consciousness, in the darkness of ignorance.”
Western models of thought, he said, had harmed the country and ruined its Islamic and national identity. “Where there is strategic thinking - in today’s sense of strategic thinking - the nation rules its own destiny,” he said.
General Salami said Iran previously had only tactical-level thought but it has now become a strategic player in the world.
“There is an intermediary level that receives the strategic level of thought and translates it into the tactical level, and is called the intermediate and operational level,” he said, adding that “Iran lacked a strategic level of thinking.”
The West had confused Iran, which was in some ways caught in the gravity of power and influence that America had in the region, the general said. It was not independent but rather part of a pillar of U.S. foreign policy. “It was Iran that, because of its geographical location, size and economic power, could act as a regional carrier to advance U.S. policies.”
But Iran freed itself from the U.S. and now can act strategically, General Salami said. He also said Islam “came to break the shackles of captivity from Iran’s hands and feet; Islam came in the form of the Islamic Revolution.”
Then came the war. Iran fought off Iraq in the 1980s and since then it has engaged in other conflicts. These 43 years have been full of the history of a continuous, uninterrupted world war, but overall, Iran has worn down the Americans, he said.
“The America you see today is far from the one you saw before,” he said. “At that time, 40% of the world economy and world wealth was in U.S. hands. Its nuclear bombs had exploded in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and all of Western Europe was under its political control. It controlled all the strategic positions of the world and dominated all political institutions.
“This dominance exists today, but to a lesser extent; America today is much weaker than it was 43 years ago, and in the relative position of us and it, this inequality is gradually becoming equal.”