Responding to an article by former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, Ahmad Meydari, Iran’s Minister of Cooperatives, Labor and Social Welfare, asked: How did America’s image change in the eyes of Iranians?
Robert Reich is a retired professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration and was also a member of the Economic Transition Advisory Board in the Obama administration.
Time magazine named him one of the 10 most influential cabinet secretaries in modern American history. In his article in The Guardian, he describes Trump as a threat to human civilization.
Ahmad Meydari, Iran’s Minister of Cooperatives, Labor and Social Welfare, wrote a letter in response to Reich’s article. The text of the letter was published today, Friday, Esfand 1, 1404 (February 20, 2026), in the weekly Newsweek.
The full text of Meydari’s letter follows:
Honorable Professor Mr. Robert Reich,
Greetings,
I fully agree with the message of your warning article, “Trump Is a Threat to Civilization,” published in The Guardian on January 6. It is the duty of a civilized society to defend the oppressed against the oppressor. In religious literature this is presented as a command: “Kunu lil-mazlum awnan” — be helpers of the oppressed.
The America that the Iranian people knew before World War II was a civilized society. After the Constitutional Revolution (1905), Iran’s first treasurer was an American, William Morgan Shuster III (February 23, 1877 – May 26, 1960), who was hired by the Iranian government in 1911 as treasurer of the country. Another American was Arthur Millspaugh (March 23, 1883 – 1955), an American lawyer and financial expert who was employed by the Iranian government from 1922–1927 and 1942–1945 to reform public finances. You know that a treasurer is entrusted with a country’s most confidential affairs, which reflects the level of trust Iranians had in Americans of that period.
Among the enduring works of the Constitutional Revolution is a lamentation poem recited during the days of Ashura, especially in southern Iran: “Three Hundred Red Flowers and One Christian Flower.” This poem was composed in memory of three hundred Iranians and one American who stood against tyranny in Tabriz and were killed.
In this elegy, mourners of Imam Hussein chant in a sorrowful melody:
“Three hundred red flowers and one Christian flower
Why do you try to frighten us?
If we feared severed heads,
We would not dance in the gathering of lovers.”
The “Christian flower” was a man named Howard Conklin Baskerville (April 10, 1885 – April 19, 1909), an American teacher at Tabriz Memorial School who was killed during the Constitutional Movement while attempting to break the siege of Tabriz. He was given the title “Teacher-Commander,” and three thousand people attended his funeral.
The image that the Iranian people had of America before World War II and before the 1953 coup was shaped in their minds by intellectual figures such as Shuster and Baskerville.
But for nearly eighty years, Iranians and many people around the world have come to know a different America. Iran is not the only country in which the United States intervened through a coup; the number of such countries is around twenty-five. Interventions and wars such as Vietnam, the killing of children in Gaza, and today the attack on Venezuela, along with plans drawn up for Greenland, Colombia, Mexico, the Gaza Strip, and even Canada, have turned America into an oppressive country and, in the commonly used expression in Iran, a predatory global power.
NOURNEWS