Politics & Power Quote by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

It lands like a shrug that’s been sharpened into policy: if trouble shows up, Rafsanjani implies, you already know whose fingerprints are on the doorframe. The line is deliberately plain, almost bureaucratic, and that’s the point. By avoiding grand ideology, it frames hostility with Washington not as a choice but as a recurring condition - a weather system Iran must plan around.

The specific intent is twofold. Outwardly, it consolidates legitimacy by locating “problems” outside the regime’s control, a classic move for governments under pressure: economic pain, diplomatic isolation, internal unrest can be narrated as consequences of foreign interference rather than domestic mismanagement. Inwardly, it polices the boundaries of acceptable dissent. If the U.S. is the default culprit, critics who focus too much on Iranian governance can be cast as naive at best, disloyal at worst.

The subtext is less about America as a country than the American state as a permanent adversary. “Government of the United States” is a careful phrasing that separates people from power while also suggesting a machine that outlasts administrations. It invites Iranian audiences to treat any U.S. outreach as tactical, not transformative.

Context matters: Rafsanjani was a pragmatic operator, often associated with reconstruction and selective engagement, yet he spoke inside a political system built after a revolution defined in opposition to U.S. influence, with memories of the 1953 coup, hostage crisis fallout, sanctions, and regional brinkmanship never far away. The line keeps the ideological engine running while leaving room, paradoxically, for negotiations - because if the problem is “their government,” then diplomacy becomes another front in the same fight, not a betrayal of it.