Ali Akbar Velayati, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, says that the stability of Gulf Arab states “is indebted to Iran’s century-long management of the Strait of Hormuz”, adding that “the West has brought nothing to the region but plunder and violence,” according to Al Jazeera.

In a post on X, Velayati writes, “These political minors of the periphery should not be comforted by commissioned statements; know this, your survival feeds off the scraps of this table.

“In the great realignment, peripheral minor players have no seat at the table,” he adds. “They are eliminated, and their strategic survival is at the mercy of Tehran’s tolerance.”