Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman has unleashed a masterful literary broadside against Washington’s latest brazen act of economic piracy, wielding William Shakespeare’s pen to strip bare the hollow arrogance of a superpower caught red-handed stealing Iranian assets.
In a post on X on Monday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei quoted directly from British playwright William Shakespeare’s Macbeth to eviscerate US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s shameless boast that Washington had seized roughly one billion dollars in Iranian cryptocurrency holdings.
“Now does he feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe / Upon a dwarfish thief,” Baghaei wrote.
The Foreign Ministry spokesman paired Shakespeare’s immortal lines with video footage of Bessent openly crowing at the Reagan National Economic Forum, “We seized about a billion dollars of their crypto and just outright seize it… Just outright grab the wallets.”
The metaphor is drawn from the tragic fall of a usurper king whose stolen crown and robes no longer fit. It lays bare the ugly truth of a declining American empire, reduced to the role of a common thief, desperately clutching ill-gotten gains that belong to the Iranian people.
This fresh provocation unfolds against the backdrop of ongoing indirect talks between Tehran and Washington, mediated by Pakistan.
Iranian officials have repeatedly stressed that these negotiations are deliberately sabotaged by America’s shifting positions and outright refusal to fulfill even the most basic commitments regarding sanctions relief.
Tehran has made its red line crystal clear that any genuine agreement must include the immediate and unconditional return of billions of dollars in Iranian funds unlawfully frozen in foreign banks, money that is the rightful property of the Iranian nation, not war booty for Washington or a slush fund for its Zionist allies.
Senior Iranian officials have firmly rejected any framing of this lawful restitution as a “concession,” insisting that at least half of the frozen assets must be released to Iran without delay upon any memorandum of understanding.
As Baghaei and other officials have repeatedly emphasized, Tehran places “no value” whatsoever on the illegal and fraudulent sanctions imposed by the US and its European partners. These sanctions only expose Washington’s moral bankruptcy and deepening political desperation.
By shamelessly admitting to the outright theft of Iranian crypto assets and then flaunting it on camera, the United States has once again proven it is no defender of any “rules-based order,” but the very embodiment of Shakespeare’s “dwarfish thief” -- a fading power clumsily draped in the oversized robes of global hegemony it has long since forfeited.
Press TV’s website