TEHRAN, June 10 -- The helicopter was down. The two pilots were safe. But the question Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi chose to answer Tuesday was not about the accident. It was about who had any right to be there in the first place.

A day after a U.S. Army AH-64 Apache went down near the Strait of Hormuz - an incident President Donald Trump blamed on Iranian action and vowed to answer with force - Araghchi posted a statement on X that reframed the entire sequence. Foreign forces operating in proximity to Iranian territory, he wrote, face "constant risk" not from Iranian hostility but from "their own human errors, plain accidents, or potentially being caught in crossfire." The remedy, he added, was simple: leave.

"To reduce risk...