Fresh from having his resignation request rejected by Iran’s president after both government figures and—to some astonishment—top officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) made it clear that he was too valuable to lose, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has declared that global power shifts have all but brought about the end of US global hegemony.

Centrist, pragmatic politician and veteran of diplomacy Zarif was quoted by Iran’s Fars News Agency—which is close to the IRGC—as back in full flow speaking at a conference on March 4, saying: "The US president said that ‘we [the US] must travel to Iraq with the [plane] lights off even though we have spent $7tn on the country’ and the reason for that is nothing short of the end of US hegemony over the world."

Zarif was last week not invited to a meeting with Syrian President Basher Al-Assad who was on a rare visit to Tehran. Shortly after, Zarif announced that he wanted to quit his post and, during the Assad visit, he made a point of meeting US female rights group Code Pink instead. Officials later claimed the non-invitation to the Assad meeting was the result of a bureaucratic mix-up, but observers speculated that it was related to policy rows between Zarif and the hardliners that run the Iranian theocracy that vets all essential government moves.

 "The centres of power in the world have multiplied and the important decisions are not merely made in the West," Zarif reportedly added.

He went on to defend the independent standpoints Tehran takes against other countries in its foreign policy and said that the Islamic Republic does not depend on others.