Except for the "evil" part, isn't that exactly what's happening?

I mean, the "growing strength" part and the "cause of any problems" part would be pretty farfetched in any serious conversation. Iran has been on its back foot ever since Obama left the picture because US policy got far more hawkish, and the fact that Iran shot down a passenger plane and tried to lie about it was a self-own. The Iranian people don't seem to blame foreign governments, they blame the Islamic regime. Oil prices have bumped back up but their crash was damaging to Iran's revenue expectations. The country was hit very hard by the virus and it's hard to blame the West for something that came from Wuhan.

The government there doesn't choose its narrative based on what's true or believable. When you think of it as a mafia that controls the country and presents a caricature of representative government while stealing and killing, things start to make more sense.

Yep.

And "evil" is entirely subjective, one can easily say that Israel is evil for human rights and international law violations, and a similar argument can easily be made against the US, Turkey, UK, France, Saudi Arabia Iran as well.