Iran cheered Trump’s midterm loss. It misread who still holds the wheel

On Nov. 4, the 47th anniversary of the U.S. Embassy seizure in Tehran, the city’s mayor, Alireza Zakani, told demonstrators about “the decisive defeat of the United States and the Zionist regime in recent developments and elections.”Iran’s parliament speaker and chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, posted on X: “Americans said NO TO WAR, and we endorse this message.” If the U.S. government “betrays their public will to serve international paymasters and blackmailers,” he warned, “it will learn our NO comes with a Nightmare.”Tehran had company. In Madrid, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced: “It happened in Brazil. It just happened in the US. And it will soon happen in Spain.” In Pretoria, President Cyril Ramaphosa saw “a new era in world relations.” In Tbilisi, the opposition channels I follow every day had President Donald Trump impeached by breakfast and in prison by lunch. The defeat is real. NBC News projects that Democrats gained at least 28 House seats and flipped seven Senate seats, Texas among them. Nobody in Washington pretends otherwise.But the capitals raising their glasses are making a mistake I spent a decade in counterintelligence learning to spot in others. We call it mirror-imaging: reading the other side through your own system, your own fears, and your own wishes. The midterm elections changed Congress. They did not change who holds the wheel.Since 1946, the president’s party has lost House seats in 19 of 21 midterms, this one included. Ronald Reagan lost 26 in 1982 and carried 49 states in 1984. Barack Obama lost 63 in 2010 and won again in 2012.A midterm is a thermometer. It is not a verdict. It is certainly not a transfer of the presidency.The new Congress gains real tools: The power of the purse, subpoenas, sanctions written into law, and Senate confirmations. Those are brakes and speed bumps.The president keeps the wheel. He remains commander in chief. He negotiates. He imposes and lifts most sanctions by executive order under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. And he holds the veto, which Congress can override only with two-thirds of both chambers. That means Republican votes.Removal is harder still. Conviction after impeachment requires two-thirds of the senators present, 67 if all 100 attend. Even if Democrats win every race still uncalled, they would need at least 11 Republicans.Tehran, of all capitals, should know better. Ghalibaf’s parliament answers to the Guardian Council, and the final word on foreign policy belongs to an unelected supreme leader.That leader made the point for him. In a letter released the same day in his name, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei wrote that anyone counting on “partisan and factional shifts” in Washington is “gravely mistaken.” On the narrow point, he is right. The speaker raised a toast. The supreme leader took away the glass.Trump, meanwhile, told the Wall Street Journal: “I did the right thing. I would have done it again.” On election eve, U.S. forces struck Iran’s Qeshm Island in what an official called defensive strikes. As I wrote in these pages on Nov. 2, this is an operational pause: The big operation on hold, the defensive hand free, the door to a settlement open.The danger is not that Tehran celebrates. It is that Tehran believes its own celebration and tests a president who just said he would do it again.In Madrid, Sánchez faces a snap election on Nov. 29. He called NATO’s 5% target “unreasonable,” and in March barred U.S. forces from using the bases at Rota and Morón against Iran under the slogan “No to war,” Ghalibaf’s three words. In January, South Africa hosted Chinese and Russian warships.A state sponsor of terrorism. A NATO member that refuses the alliance’s spending target. A BRICS partner of Moscow and Tehran. Their applause is a map. It shows where Trump’s foreign policy imposes costs.The most precise reading came from the Kremlin. “President Trump continues to exercise his powers,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Nov. 4. “We sincerely count on him continuing his peacemaking efforts.”Moscow knows what those powers mean: Sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil; a September law authorizing 100% tariffs on the biggest buyers of Russian energy, suspended in October but restorable at will; and a diesel license expiring next April 7. As I wrote here last month, Putin got a diesel order. Trump got the calendar.In Kyiv, Volodymyr Zelensky thanked the Republicans, and the analyst Vladyslav Faraponov put it plainly: “The main levers are still with the administration.” A country at war does not burn bridges.Georgia offers the cleanest example of mirror-imaging, because it is a parliamentary republic: whoever loses parliament loses the government. The opposition reads Washington the same way, and it has spent two years cursing the one American office that holds the levers it needs.On election night, the same channels that toasted the Republicans’ defeat cheered two Republicans: Rep. Joe Wilson, author of the MEGOBARI Act, a Georgia sanctions bill, and his son Alan, elected governor of South Carolina. Republicans are heroes in Tbilisi as long as they attack Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire behind the ruling Georgian Dream party. That is opportunism and a double standard: cheer the congressman, curse the president.The opposition’s best-known figure, Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s imprisoned former president, is its clearest weathervane. The day after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, he told Nika Gvaramia’s opposition channel, Mtavari, that Trump “thought he had gotten America as a dowry.” On Gvaramia’s program, he said: “Everyone knows that Ivanishvili financed Trump, financed him through his son-in-law, through Kushner. Now there will definitely be an investigation into this in America.” Gvaramia supplied the verdict: “For four years, the one who ruled America was a Russian project.” No such investigation has been announced. In July 2025, Saakashvili wrote that, were he free, he would be in Oslo nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.On Nov. 2, he wrote on Facebook that Obama “colluded with Putin” in Georgia’s 2012 elections. On Nov. 4, he wrote that the midterm result had “greatly upset the Russians and Putin personally” and that the Democrats were the party that had sanctioned Ivanishvili. The facts did not change in two days. The wind did. Yet the same post conceded what matters most: Trump “retains full control over foreign policy even after these elections.”Consider the sanctions he credited to the Democrats. They rest on an executive order, not an act of Congress. The Biden Treasury Department imposed them in December 2024 and, the same day, issued General License 116, which lets Americans keep doing business with Ivanishvili’s companies, as I wrote here in August. Unless Congress writes them into law, their fate will be decided at the White House. The opposition that wants Ivanishvili gone is celebrating the setback of the only man who can sign the order.YES, JD VANCE: LOSING THE MIDTERMS WAS ‘WORTH IT’ TO PREVENT A NUCLEAR IRANThe new Congress convenes on Jan. 3. Until Jan. 20, 2029, the wheel stays where the Constitution put it.In Tehran, Madrid, Pretoria, and Tbilisi, they raised their glasses on Nov. 4. The glasses were empty. They will find that out on Trump’s calendar, not Congress’s.Emzari Gelashvili is a San Francisco–based geopolitical analyst and columnist who monitors Russian-language media. From 1996 to 2008, he held senior positions in Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, with a counterintelligence career focused on Russian and Iranian intelligence operations, and he was a member of the Georgian Parliament from 2008 to 2012. His work appears in Newsweek, the Hill, the Washington Examiner, RealClearDefense, RealClearWorld, and at emzargelashvili.substack.com.