Politics & Power Quote by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric is doing two jobs at once: demanding respect from Washington while laundering Iran’s hard power into something palatable, even admirable. “Must recognize” is the tell. It’s not an invitation to dialogue; it’s an insistence on status. In the mid-2000s, with Iran’s nuclear program escalating and U.S. forces bogged down next door in Iraq, the line reads like a bid to renegotiate the region’s hierarchy: treat Iran as a peer, not a problem to be managed.

The cleverness is in the pivot from “big power” to “human force and a cultural power.” That’s soft-power language deployed as armor. By foregrounding culture and “friendship,” he tries to reroute the conversation away from centrifuges, sanctions, and proxy conflicts and toward a civilizational self-portrait. It’s a familiar diplomatic maneuver: claim moral legitimacy to blunt material accusations. The phrase “having said that” acts like a verbal reset button, as if acknowledging geopolitical muscle can be immediately redeemed by invoking humanistic intention.

The final claim - “We have never sought to dominate others” - isn’t meant to persuade skeptics so much as to reverse the burden of proof. It invites the audience to compare Iran’s behavior with U.S. interventions, casting American power as coercive and Iranian power as merely defensive, even benevolent. The subtext: recognition is overdue, containment is hypocrisy, and Iran’s regional reach should be read as rightful influence rather than expansion.