By Abdulrahman Al-Rashed

A recently circulated clip of Mohsen Rezaei talking about kidnapping 1,000 U.S. soldiers is authentic but from 2015. Al-Rashed’s question: does that mindset still run Tehran now that Rezaei is the new supreme leader’s right hand? After a year of fighting, he says Iran has taken no prisoners, sunk no U.S. ship, and U.S. deaths are historically low.

The charge is inflated power: years of “America won’t dare / if it does, it loses,” the same Saddam-by-the-pool delusion, a proxy belt (Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Yemen, Iraq) sold as a shield against Israel, 30 underground missile cities, drones for Russia, tunnels for missiles. A hammer, he writes, made every problem look like a nail. The war showed they could not close the strait or match the U.S. and Israel.

Outcome, in this telling: airspace open, top leadership and much of the strike force gone, siege tighter—yet the regime still calls endurance victory. Ideological states, Al-Rashed argues, protect the image first and rarely learn; they get more defiant, not more realistic.

In a recently surfaced video, Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, speaks about kidnapping 1,000 US soldiers and bargaining over them. While the video is authentic, the statement is old, dating back to 2015.

Today, Rezaei serves as the right-hand man to the new supreme leader. Does Iran still view war through this same mindset? The confrontation has been continuing for a year, yet they have been unable to arrest anyone or destroy a single battleship, and US casualties are the lowest in the history of its wars.

Iran’s enemy is its inflated sense of power, which makes notions such as continuing an asymmetrical war, closing straits, choking the global economy, and bombing neighbors appear........

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