Iran’s foreign minister has thrown Donald Trump’s own threat back at him. Hours after the US president warned that Washington could “soon finish the job” against Iran, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told him to try — and warned that Tehran has “unfinished jobs” of its own.
“Last time you wanted to ‘finish the job’, Iran emerged even stronger. Want to try your luck again? Be our guest. But be careful; we have unfinished jobs too,” Araghchi wrote on Sunday in a post on X that has since ricocheted across the region.
It was a direct answer to a Truth Social message Trump posted the same day, in which he gave Benjamin Netanyahu his “complete and total endorsement” nine days before Israel’s October 27 election. In that post, Trump declared that Iran had been “systematically destroyed, both Militarily and Financially,” and warned: “unless they change their ways, rapidly, we will soon finish the job.”
He tied the threat to the Israeli vote explicitly. “If Israel has the wrong Leader, which would be anyone other than Bibi,” Trump wrote, “America will have to do this work ourselves, and I am not inclined to do so.”
Araghchi’s response added a second charge aimed at the Israeli leader. “Netanyahu is driving America into another war to stay out of jail, whatever the consequences for Israel — let alone POTUS,” he wrote.
It is a reference to the corruption trials hanging over the Israeli prime minister, who faces charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three cases at home — and an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court over the war in Gaza. Netanyahu asked Israel’s President Isaac Herzog for a pardon late last year, a request the justice ministry’s pardons department recommended against. Trump has publicly pressed Herzog to grant it anyway.
Netanyahu answered Trump within hours. On X he thanked the president for “the tremendous support and the joint work,” adding: “Together we shall finish the job.” His Likud party cut the exchange into a 35-second campaign video almost immediately — the endorsement of a sitting US president, delivered into the final days of a race in which four recent polls show former military chief Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party running ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud, the two blocs virtually tied at around 51 seats each.
Behind the rhetoric, the war has ground on. The joint US-Israeli campaign against Iran that began in February has now stretched into its eighth month, and the fighting has sprawled across the region — to the Strait of Hormuz, where tankers have been hit in recent days, and to Yemen, where Saudi Arabia is pressing allies for help against escalating Houthi missile and drone attacks. Axios reported that a new operation against Iran had been discussed in Washington, but a decision was postponed. Trump told the outlet he had always planned to endorse Netanyahu: “I was always going to do that. I just didn’t want to do it too soon.”
Tehran, for its part, insists it does not seek nuclear weapons and says its program is strictly civilian. Araghchi also said on Sunday that Iran’s proposed seven-day plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz remains on the table, even as Iranian and American accounts of what is happening on the water continue to flatly contradict each other.
Why this matters beyond the region
Strip away the election-season theater and this is a public exchange of ultimatums between two governments already at war. Trump’s framing makes the next phase of that war conditional on the outcome of another country’s election — and Araghchi’s reply makes clear Tehran reads it exactly that way, and is preparing for both outcomes. The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway both sides are fighting over, is the channel through which a huge share of the world’s oil and gas shipments must pass; every round of threats moves prices and shipping insurance rates long before a shot is fired. A war that was supposed to be short is now redrawing alliances — Egypt’s top security body pledged support to Saudi Arabia over the weekend, and Russia’s diplomats are circling Tehran — and Sunday’s exchange suggests neither Washington nor Tehran is looking for an off-ramp.
