Iran Hails Midterm Results as a Vote Against the War, but Its Supreme Leader Expects No Shift

Iran's leaders greeted the Democratic sweep of the U.S. midterm elections with a mix of celebration and warning on Wednesday, as the country's supreme leader said anyone hoping the vote would soften Washington's stance toward Tehran was deluding themselves.

Mojtaba Khamenei, who took over as supreme leader after his father, Ali Khamenei, was killed in the U.S. and Israeli strikes that opened the war on Feb. 28, has made no public appearance since. In a written statement released Wednesday, he said people who still believed that American hostility toward Iran could be ended by a change of parties in Washington, or by concessions from Tehran, were "gravely mistaken." The conflict, he warned, would take on "much wider dimensions" if the United States attacked again.

Wednesday also marked 47 years since Iranian students took over the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979, and the authorities staged rallies in the capital to mark it.

A more conciliatory note came from Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament, who also serves as Iran's chief negotiator with the United States. Writing on social media after the results came in, he said, "Conscience or the cost of living, Americans said NO TO WAR, and we endorse this message." He added a threat in the same post: "If the US [government] betrays their public will to serve international paymasters and blackmailers, it will learn our NO comes with a Nightmare."

In Washington, the president offered a split verdict on what had happened. In a televised interview on Tuesday night, President Donald Trump acknowledged that the war had played some part in his party's losses, and said voters who backed his approach had balked at paying more for gasoline. "People agree with what I'm doing on Iran, but they really probably weren't willing to do the short-term consequences of paying more for gasoline," he said.

On Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance was blunter, writing that "the reason we lost is the war." Trump, speaking at the White House later in the day, said he had no regrets about going to war, telling reporters that Iran could not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. He has said the conflict will end "when I say it ends."

Trump has also kept the door open to more force. Before the vote, he said U.S. forces were "locked and loaded" if needed, while suggesting another round of strikes might not be necessary. On Monday, explosions hit Iran's Qeshm Island and nearby, in what U.S. officials described as a limited American strike.

The two governments are still trading messages through go-betweens, with Qatar playing the main role, but the indirect talks have stalled for months. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said Tuesday that his government was trying to settle the conflict through dialogue and that the supreme leader had given it broader authority to negotiate. Other Iranian officials have held firm on a list of seven conditions they want met before the Strait of Hormuz is reopened.

Before the war, roughly 20 percent of the world's oil and gas trade moved through the strait. Since February it has been largely shut, squeezed by Iranian attacks on merchant ships and an American naval blockade of Iranian ports. A preliminary deal reached in June to end the fighting and reopen the waterway fell apart within weeks.

On Wednesday, Iranian state media and the Revolutionary Guard said mines in the strait had set four oil tankers ablaze as they used routes Tehran considers off-limits. That claim could not be independently confirmed.

The war has weighed heavily on American voters, largely through the price of fuel. Democrats will run the House and the Senate starting in January, and Iranian officials have made clear they see the result as a rebuke of the military campaign.