Iran’s President Rouhani rejects US claims for talks with Iran as “mere lies”
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has rejected the US call for talks with the Islamic Republic as mere lie and stressed the country’s perseverance against the pressures imposed by Washington.
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“They say ‘we are ready to negotiate.’ They are saying something strange. What does ‘we’re ready to negotiate’ mean? Who left the negotiating table? Who broke the negotiating table? Who set fire to the negotiating room? It was them (Americans),” Rouhani said in a meeting with Iranian governors from across the country in Tehran on Tuesday.
He added that Iran has been acting on the basis of rationale, logic, morality, and international commitments but the Americans have, on the contrary, violated all of those principles and “are telling lies every day.”
The president emphasized that the Iranian nation resisted and countered the American lies, saying, “Our people are doing a great job. Our people are putting up resistance against a superpower that is acting in a brutal way.”
“It is clear to the entire world today that we will never surrender under sanctions and pressure,” Rouhani pointed out.
He noted that the US president imagined he could bring the Iranians to the negotiating table within three months by exerting pressure on the country, “but he later realized that he had been mistaken and had made a miscalculation.”
Tensions between Iran and the United States have been high since President Donald Trump decided in 2018 to unilaterally withdraw the US from the international nuclear agreement — officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — and reinstated the sanctions that the agreement had lifted, in defiance of the fact that the accord has been endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2231.
Under Washington’s pressure, the three European signatories to the JCPOA, France, Britain and Germany, have so far failed to fulfill their contractual obligation to protect Tehran’s business interests against the sanctions.
In a tweet in early June, US President Donald Trump called on Tehran to make a new deal with Washington.
On Saturday, Trump repeated his call for a new deal with Iran, hypothesizing that Tehran was waiting to see him lose the election.
“But when I win, you’re going to pay a much higher price than if you made a deal now,” he was quoted as saying in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The US is currently working to extend a UN-imposed arms embargo due to expire in October under Tehran’s nuclear deal.
As signatories of the nuclear deal, the Europeans have said since the US has already withdrawn from the agreement with Iran, it can’t now use its former membership of the pact to try to impose a permanent arms embargo on the Islamic Republic.
