Again, Ahmadinejad, with his charming sense of understatement, has these grandiose ambitions. When UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was giving his farewell tour around the world and stopped in Tehran, The New York Times reported on the meeting that he held with Ahmadinejad, in which Ahmadinejad complained that the structures of the United Nations were too much based on the results of World War II and that the world had changed. Ahmadinejad went on to add that “Britain and America may have won the last world war, but we intend to win the next world war”. Kofi Annan was rather taken aback by that comment.
More realistically, I think that Iran's nuclear program is in many ways a dire national security threat to the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf, which seem convinced that Iran would like to press them to take Iran's leadership in the area. Many of the countries in the region have expressed interest in starting their own nuclear programs in response to Iran's advances, and I'm sorry to report that the countries in the region have ordered more than a hundred billion dollars' worth of arms in the last three years, in what is a very destabilizing and disturbing arms race. This is not good for all of us, given that it's an area where so much of the world's oil is found.
So Iran's threats to its neighbours are quite realistic. Iran's world ambitions are exaggerated.