Tehran, Iran – A speech by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoking memories of ancient Persia has been met with coldness or disdain across the Iranian political spectrum amid Washington’s ongoing war on Iran. With the Acropolis in Athens as a backdrop, Rubio presented the United States, founded in the 18th century, as the inheritor of ancient Western civilisation running from Greece to Rome. During the speech, he argued that modern-day Western countries have lost their confidence, weakened their industries and militaries, and need renewed ambition and power in the future.
Referencing the ancient Greco-Persian Wars, he used the Persian destruction of Athens in 480 BC under King Xerxes I as an example of Western civilisation surviving an external enemy. He subsequently hailed the return of the Athenians and the construction of the Parthenon under Pericles. The top US diplomat also directed his rhetoric against Iran’s current leaders, who have been in power since a 1979 Islamic revolution, calling them “fanatics” who run a “death cult” that wields martyrdom as a tool to achieve their political objectives.
He boasted that the choice of President Donald Trump’s administration was the “unapologetic pursuit of national power”. The US and Iran have been at war since the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28. While fighting between the two sides has subsided, the US has continued a naval blockade on Iran while shipping through the vital Strait of Hormuz remains disrupted.
Iran’s security chief, Mohsen Rezaei, and parliament Speaker and chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf both responded by invoking the Roman Emperor Valerian, who was captured alive by Persian King Shapur I’s forces in battle in 260 AD. Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs accused Rubio of flattening Greek, Roman, Christian and modern history. It also accused the secretary of state of incorporating an “America First” narrative to legitimise a military escalation against Iran after a relative decrease in fighting since June when a now-defunct memorandum of understanding was agreed.
He added that Rubio was resorting to “anachronism”, rehashing long buried historical events for modern-day legitimacy. After the 2020 assassination of Qassem Soleimani, a commander in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Trump threatened to hit 52 Iranian sites “very hard”, including places “important to Iran & the Iranian culture”. Since February, the US has been criticised for damaging Iranian historical and cultural sites during its bombing of Iran.
Culture Minister Reza Salehi-Amiri urged Western politicians to speak about Iran with a “language of respect” since “it is not an enemy created in a political speech but a living civilisation, a great nation and a lasting reality in world history” that dates back millennia. Iranian historian Touraj Daryaei told local media on Friday that while Rubio’s account of the sack of Athens was true, he omitted an important fact cited by Greek historian Herodotus and others – a major motivation for the Persian attack was retaliation. In 498 BC, Athens’ forces burned Sardis, a provincial Persian capital in western Anatolia.
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