Ayatollah Khamenei said that Iran “had its own tools” to respond to such threats and that it would use them “if necessary,” the semiofficial Mehr news agency reported.

“The threat of war would disfavor the United States itself,” he said, adding that war with Iran “would be 10 times worse for the interests of the United States” than it would be for Iran, he said.

“Americans say all options are on the table, even the option of military strike,” he said, according to a Reuters translation of his televised remarks. “Such threats show that they have no sufficient discourse against Iran’s logic and discourse.”

The United States and the European Union have accused Iran of seeking to develop a nuclear weapon and adopted strong new sanctions targeting Iran’s oil industry and banking system last month. Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

The sanctions have done damage to Iran’s economy, but Ayatollah Khameni said they were “beneficial” because they have made Iran more determined to stay the course on its nuclear program. “Iran will not change its nuclear course because of sanctions,” he said.

The supreme leader delivered the latest bellicose volleys in the increasingly tense standoff during Friday prayers marking the anniversary of the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran has tried to draw a straight line from the revolution that overthrew the Shah’s government 33 years ago and the Arab Spring movement, which toppled repressive government across the Middle East over the past year, branding it an “Islamic Awakening.”

Those efforts appeared to falter during a conference in Tehran this week as hundreds of young activists argued over Iran’s support for the government in Syria, which has mounted a violent military campaign to stamp out an 11-month-old uprising there. Syria was not among the countries included in the timeline of Arab revolutions shown at the conference, which led from Tehran to Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain. For its part, the government of Bahrain has accused Iran of meddling in its affairs and lending support to the small but continuing protest movement there.

Ayatollah Khamenei in his speech on Friday rejected those charges, asserting that Iran had no hand in the uprising that swelled last year in Bahrain among its majority Shiite population before a crackdown by the Sunni-led government halted its momentum. “Had we interfered in the country’s affairs, the situation would have been vice versa,” he said, the official IRNA news agency reported.