IRGC Supreme Leader's representative warned that Iran knows the enemy's vulnerabilities and would deliver a more devastating response than before if attacked again

• Adds that Iran's resistance has strengthened and the country will never cooperate with its enemies.

Retaliatory rhetoric of this kind is a standard fixture of the Iranian escalation cycle, and the relevant precedent is that most iterations of it never translate into action; the market's task has historically been to separate declaratory noise from genuine posture shifts. Statements attributed to the Supreme Leader's representative carry institutional weight but sit below the Supreme Leader himself and below operational commanders in the signalling hierarchy, and past rounds of this genre have tended to cluster around anniversaries, strikes, or negotiations rather than preceding kinetic events on their own. The distinction that matters is between rhetoric alone and rhetoric accompanied by observable changes: missile and proxy force movements, naval activity around the Strait of Hormuz, airspace notices, or a hardening of the nuclear posture. Where tension has genuinely fed through to markets, the transmission has run through crude, via the risk premium on Gulf supply and on tanker freight and insurance through the strait, with gold and front-end rates following the crude move rather than leading it. The tells worth monitoring are whether parallel messaging emerges from other power centres in Tehran, whether back-channel or mediated talks are reported to stall, and any change in the tempo of proxy activity, since escalation in past episodes has typically come through proxies rather than direct state-on-state exchange. As a single rhetorical statement without an accompanying trigger, this reads as maintenance of deterrence rather than a step change.