During a press conference today, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent delivered a direct message to ordinary Iranian soldiers, saying:
“As your salaries stop or are increasingly delayed, ask your leaders: Are they leading your country toward victory or toward destruction?”
Bessent invoked the fall of the Berlin Wall, recalling that it:
“fell when ordinary soldiers decided not to fire on their own people,”
in what appeared to be a call for Iranian soldiers to disobey or rebel against orders from the Iranian government.
5️⃣ Bessent’s comparison between Iran and East Germany is not entirely accurate.
In 1989, on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Berlin was not under external attack. East German border guards were facing their own citizens. Moreover, the East German leadership did not want to bear responsibility for using firearms. As a result, the order that the border guards might have refused to carry out was never actually issued.
Today, however, the appeal directed at Iran’s armed forces is coming from a hostile state whose military bombed our country on February 28, 2026, and committed widespread crimes. In addition, U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies intervened and actively and directly participated in the terrorist and quasi-coup events of December last year.
Today, the convergence of external aggression, the resistance narrative, and the possibility of renewed terrorist operations amid a state of threat and instability makes calculations of loyalty within the military structure far more complex and leaves little room for this kind of propagandistic wordplay.