Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says the United States has failed on every path it has taken against Iran.
President Rouhani told a large crowd of people in the northeastern city of Shirvan, in North Khorasan Province, on Sunday that whatever Washington had tried against Iran, including “the harshest of sanctions” — had wound up in failure.
“It’s been 14 months that the world’s largest economic and military power has been imposing the harshest of sanctions against the Iranian nation, sanctions that would have taken any other nation down,” the Iranian president said. “But the heroic, vigilant, and resistant nation of Islamic Iran has firmly withstood those sanctions over this period.”
“Whatever path the Americans took — be it social, political, and legal — led to failure,” President Rouhani said.
He cited recent meetings of the United Nations (UN) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), where the US failed to advance its agenda against Iran.
Last year, US President Donald Trump unilaterally pulled his country out of a 2015 multilateral nuclear deal with Iran and imposed what he called the “toughest ever” sanctions against Tehran, notably targeting its energy sector.
Those sanctions have hurt the Iranian economy, but all of the other parties to the Iran deal, which have stayed in the agreement, have been holding meetings with Tehran to discuss how they can make the pact properly work for the Iranian side as well.
Tehran has said it would potentially scrap the deal if its partners failed to do enough for Iran to achieve the economic benefits that it is promised under the agreement.