Don't be fooled by Iran in English.

The Islamic Republic speaks one language to the West — while aggressively pursuing genocide, oppression, and tyranny for decades.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi giving in interview to CNN in February (photo: YouTube)

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In international politics, language is never just language. It is strategy. It is theater. It is persuasion. And sometimes, it is camouflage.

Few regimes have mastered this art more carefully than the Islamic Republic of Iran.

To Western audiences, Iran often sounds reasonable. Its officials speak about international law, sovereignty, peace, and diplomacy. They appear on Western television in measured tones. They write op-eds in English-language media outlets. They issue statements that sound almost indistinguishable from the vocabulary of Western diplomacy.

But this English-language messaging is not a transparent window into the Islamic Republic’s intentions; it is a carefully constructed performance, with the sole purpose of confusing Western audiences.

For decades, the Islamic Republic has operated in two parallel languages: one for Western ears, and another for its own region and ideological base. In English, the Iranian regime frequently presents itself as a misunderstood power defending its sovereignty against Western aggression. Its leaders speak about “regional stability,” “dialogue,” and “mutual respect.”

In Farsi and Arabic, the tone often shifts dramatically. There, the language becomes ideological, revolutionary, and explicitly hostile toward Israel, the United States, and the Western order. Clerics, commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and state broadcasters speak openly about resistance, martyrdom, and the long-term defeat of what they call Zionist and Western domination.

This dual messaging is not accidental. It is a deliberate political technology designed to exploit a vulnerability within Western societies: the tendency to take public language at face value. Western political culture assumes that official statements are meant to communicate intentions. In revolutionary regimes, statements are often designed to manipulate perception instead.

Of course, the Islamic Republic did not invent this tactic. The Middle East has seen many versions of it before. During the late 20th century, figures like mega-terrorist and Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat frequently delivered two very different messages depending on the audience. In English, their statements emphasized peace processes, negotiations, and coexistence. In Arabic, speeches often praised armed struggle and discussed long-term strategies aimed at the Jewish state’s destruction.

For example, after signing the Oslo peace agreements with Israel in 1993, Arafat publicly spoke in English about peace and reconciliation. But in 1994, in a speech at a mosque in Johannesburg, he compared the Oslo Accords to the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, a historical truce made by the Prophet Muhammad that was later broken once Muhammad’s forces were stronger.

Reasonable and peace-seeking in English, militant and even genocidal in Arabic.

The Iranian regime’s leadership absorbed this lesson well and refined it. Inside Iran and across allied media networks in the region, the Islamic Republic openly frames their mission as a civilizational struggle. State media regularly glorifies confrontation with Israel, the United States, and the West in general. Military officials speak about preparing for a future Middle East in which the “Zionist regime” no longer exists.

But when addressing Western journalists or diplomats, the language becomes softer and procedural. Iran becomes a nation seeking security guarantees. Its military programs become defensive. Its proxy militias become “partners” or “resistance movements.”

The vocabulary changes; the ideology does not.

Even Western journalism can become part of this performance. Just last week, the Associated Press readily published a quote, without any context or clarification, from Iran’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, who said: “Again they [the U.S. and Israel] attacked Iran’s peaceful safeguarded nuclear facilities yesterday. Their justification that Iran wants to develop nuclear weapons is simply a big lie.”

The key word in that sentence is peaceful. It is a word carefully chosen for English-speaking audiences, designed to evoke images of civilian energy programs, international safeguards, and unjustified aggression from abroad. It is also a word that sits uneasily beside decades of rhetoric and behavior from the very regime making the claim.

For decades, leaders of the Islamic Republic have spoken openly in other languages — Arabic, Farsi, and even Hebrew — about the elimination of Israel. Iranian officials and clerics have repeatedly invoked phrases about erasing the Zionist regime, wiping Israel off the face of the earth, and bringing about a future Middle East in which Israel no longer exists. These statements have appeared in sermons, military speeches, state broadcasts, and official publications. They are not fringe comments made in obscure corners of the political system; they are part of the ideological vocabulary of the regime itself.

Yet when the same government addresses Western media in English, the language shifts dramatically. The rhetoric of elimination disappears. In its place comes a vocabulary of “peaceful nuclear programs,” “defensive capabilities,” and “misunderstandings” with the international community.

The gap between those two languages becomes even harder to ignore when one considers the regime’s own boasts about its nuclear capabilities. Just weeks ago, according to reports from diplomatic channels, Iranian representatives bragged to U.S. negotiators that the country now possesses enough highly enriched uranium to build 11 nuclear weapons if it chose to do so. This was not a statement extracted under pressure; it was a remark delivered almost casually in negotiations, as if the mere capacity itself were meant to function as a strategic signal.

This is precisely how the Islamic Republic’s dual-language strategy works. In one language, it proclaims ideological goals and military capabilities to its domestic base and regional allies. In another, it offers reassuring words meant to soften Western scrutiny and complicate international responses.

CNN might be the worst culprit here. The American multinational news media company and its foreign correspondent, Frederik Pleitgen, frequently highlight their rare access to Tehran, portraying themselves as among the only Western reporters operating inside the Islamic Republic. CNN promises audiences that its mission is “asking the hard questions and bringing unique perspective from across the globe.”

But access granted by an authoritarian regime is never neutral; it is curated.

Pleitgen was permitted to report from inside Iran just weeks after conducting a striking interview with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. The conversation took place shortly after the regime had killed thousands of anti-government protesters during a brutal crackdown. Yet the interview passed without meaningful challenge on that subject, allowing the foreign minister to repeat the regime’s propaganda largely uninterrupted to Western audiences.

Days after joint U.S.–Israeli strikes targeted Iranian military infrastructure, Tehran again allowed Pleitgen to report from inside the country — even as the regime imposed a sweeping domestic information blackout. This is not transparency; it is choreography.

The Islamic Republic of Iran consistently ranks among the worst places for press freedom, ranking fifth-worst out of 180 countries in the 2025 Reporters Without Borders index. Iranian law allows authorities to suspend or shut down outlets that “endanger the Islamic Republic,” “offend the clergy and the Supreme Leader,” or “spread false information.” In practice, those categories can include almost any form of independent reporting.

Foreign journalists themselves have paid the price. In 2009, American reporter Roxana Saberi was imprisoned for 101 days on espionage charges. That same year, Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari of Newsweek was jailed and tortured for 118 days.

Access inside authoritarian states can provide valuable insight, but it always comes with a price. Foreign correspondents are valuable precisely because they reveal what governments would rather conceal. When a regime decides which cameras are allowed in and which questions are allowed to be asked, the result is not journalism; it is stagecraft. CNN is not providing “unprecedented access.” It is being manipulated to control the narrative that the outside world is permitted to see.

Meanwhile, behind the English-language messaging about diplomacy and stability, the regime’s actions tell a different story. During the current war, the Iranian regime has launched more than 400 ballistic missiles toward Israel’s population centers. According to the IDF’s Home Front Command, roughly half of those missiles have carried cluster munitions — weapons designed to disperse dozens of smaller explosives across a wide area.

Cluster bombs are not universally banned, but their use in populated areas can constitute a war crime because of their indiscriminate nature. A single missile carrying cluster munitions can scatter dozens of eight-kilogram submunitions across roughly 10 square kilometers (four square miles), turning entire neighborhoods into lethal minefields.

Iran has also reportedly begun laying naval mines in the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s crude oil supply travels. Such a cynical move not only endangers civilian shipping crews and energy workers; it threatens the stability of the global economy — a blunt attempt to manipulate world markets through chaos.

In a statement that sounded less like diplomacy and more like geopolitical blackmail, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declared that any Arab or European country that expels the ambassadors of the United States and Israel would be granted free passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Countries that refuse, the implication was clear, would face the consequences of Iranian disruption. In other words, the Islamic Republic is attempting to leverage one of the world’s most vital shipping lanes to force other nations to sever diplomatic relations with its adversaries.

These are not the actions of a government seeking “regional stability.” They are the actions of a regime that wages war through proxies, disruption, and intimidation — while speaking the language of diplomacy in English.

No one embodies this linguistic duality more clearly than Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, currently the regime’s primary English-speaking messenger to the West. He holds a Ph.D. in political thought from the University of Kent, where his dissertation examined how modern Islamic political theory attempts to reconcile divine sovereignty with elements of Western democratic participation.

On paper, he looks like the ideal diplomat for Western audiences: highly educated, fluent in English, steeped in the language of political theory. But his biography tells another story as well. As a teenager, Araghchi took part in the 1979 Islamic Revolution that established the current regime. He later joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (a widely recognized terrorist organization) and served for nearly a decade, fighting in the Iran–Iraq War from 1980 to 1988, during which Iran used untrained volunteers and children to clear minefields, executed civilians and political prisoners, utilized chemical weapons, and burned bodies of Iraqi POWs.

Today, Araghchi speaks in the careful language of international law. “Iran is solely exercising its right to self-defense under the UN Charter,” he recently declared. “Iran will not sit idly by as the United States attacks our people.” This would be easier to take seriously if the regime he represents were not indiscriminately launching missiles at civilian population centers in Israel, Oman, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, and other countries.

The rhetoric of self-defense rings hollow when the same government exports violence far beyond its own borders.

At the United Nations last week, the contrast became visible in a rare moment of diplomatic confrontation. Iran’s ambassador lectured the American delegation during an emergency session, declaring, “I advise the representative of the United States to be polite. It will be better for yourself and the country you represent.” This from the guy who works for one of the modern era’s most oppressive and tyrannical regimes, yet still expects to be treated like the offended party.

Behind the polite English statements lies a far harsher reality. Iranian leaders frequently claim that their quarrel is not with ordinary Americans. Araghchi himself recently wrote on social media that “our enmity is not with the American people, who are being lied to yet again.”

Yet the regime he represents lies most consistently to its own people. In recent months alone, Iranian authorities reportedly killed tens of thousands of protesters demanding political freedoms. Dissidents are routinely jailed, tortured, or forced into exile. Women are beaten or imprisoned for refusing compulsory dress codes. Political opposition is crushed. Journalists disappear into prisons. Iranian law, a derivative of Islam, still allows the marriage of underage girls. Activists who campaign against such practices risk prosecution. Religious minorities face systemic discrimination. Entire communities live under constant surveillance by the state.

Araghchi recently complained that American foreign policy is “Israel First,” which supposedly means “America Last.” At the same time, Iran’s leadership has spent decades pouring billions of dollars into regional proxy militias and armed groups instead of investing those resources within Iran’s own borders and into Iran’s own people.

And then there is the regime’s “sense of humor.” On Wednesday, Araghchi mocked the recent U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iranian military targets, calling them “Operation Epic Mistake — a misadventure engineered by Israel and paid for by ordinary Americans.” For a government that, since 1979, has been aggressively funding proxy wars, threatening global shipping lanes, suppressing its own population, and launching indiscriminate attacks across the Middle East, this is an impressive level of irony.

If there is an “epic mistake” in this story, it is not the belief that Iran’s regime should face consequences. The epic mistake is believing that the Islamic Republic’s English-language messaging reflects its true intentions. It does not, and it never has.

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