Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei has sharply rebuked British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband for branding Iran the “aggressor.”

In a post on X on Thursday, Baghaei described the claim as a grotesque distortion of reality following two rounds of unlawful US-Israeli military aggression against the Islamic Republic in just nine months, attacks that came even as Tehran was engaged in negotiations.

Baghaei stated that the chaos engulfing West Asia is the direct consequence of unlawful interventions, including those backed or contributed to by the United Kingdom.

He noted that portraying Iran as the aggressor after it was subjected to repeated acts of aggression, while it pursued diplomatic channels, marks yet another low in London’s long record of hostile campaigns against Iran.

“It is as absurd as portraying Nazi Germany as a ‘defender of peace’ while casting the UK and its allies in WWII as the aggressors,” Baghaei wrote.

The two rounds of aggression referenced by Baghaei are the 12-day US-Israeli war of June 2025 and the subsequent 40-day offensive that began on February 28, 2026. In both cases, Iran exercised its inherent right to self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter, carrying out proportionate retaliatory operations that ultimately compelled the aggressors to accept ceasefires.

Civilian casualties and destruction of infrastructure in Iran were extensive. Iranian officials stated that systematic attacks on schools, hospitals, and residential areas amount to genocide.

Iran has repeatedly highlighted Britain’s enabling role in these aggressions. London authorized the United States to use British military facilities, including RAF Fairford and Diego Garcia, for operations framed as “defensive,” a characterization Tehran and independent observers have dismissed as a legal fig leaf for participation in an unprovoked war of aggression. Iranian officials have warned that such facilitation constitutes complicity under international law.

Tehran has long pointed to the 1953 Anglo-American coup against the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh as the foundational act of hostility, followed by decades of support for the Israeli regime’s crimes in Gaza, participation in sanctions regimes.

While Britain and its allies continue to reverse the roles of aggressor and victim, Iran has maintained that its defensive capabilities are non-negotiable and that regional stability cannot be achieved through further unlawful interventions.

Tehran has stressed that it has greater interest than any external power in preserving security in West Asia and has repeatedly called on London to abandon its confrontational approach.