Leadership Quote by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

It is a small sentence engineered to do two big jobs: puncture an American official’s authority and recast U.S. power as performance. Rafsanjani’s line hinges on a distinction between “talks tough” and “be tough,” implying that Condoleezza Rice’s hardline rhetoric is theater delivered from a safe distance, not the embodied resilience he claims real toughness requires. The target is ostensibly Rice; the real audience is everyone watching Washington’s posture toward Iran.

The gendered subtext is hard to miss. By insisting she “cannot be tough herself,” Rafsanjani isn’t merely disputing policy competence; he’s leveraging a cultural script in which toughness is coded male, physical, and proven through confrontation. Rice becomes a symbol of U.S. bravado rather than a strategist with agency. It’s a classic move in patriarchal politics: degrade the messenger to discredit the message, while flattering the home audience’s assumptions about strength and legitimacy.

Context matters: Rafsanjani was a veteran power broker in the Islamic Republic, speaking during years when Rice, as National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State, was associated with the Bush administration’s assertive foreign policy and the “axis of evil” worldview. Iran lived under the shadow of U.S. military campaigns in the region and escalating pressure over its nuclear program. Calling Rice not “tough” is a way to frame American threats as hollow, to domestically fortify Iranian resolve, and to internationalize skepticism about U.S. credibility. The economy of the insult is the point: it’s propaganda in a single breath, converting a geopolitical contest into a contest of character.