The President of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, has openly dismissed American pleas for negotiation, hours before new sanctions against Iran were to be imposed.
The decision to impose new sanctions on Iran follows US President Donald Trump’s decision to exit a 2015 regarding Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Regarding the sanctions, Washington says that only by agreeing to negotiations to scale back nuclear programs would they be averted.
In an address on Iranian state television, Mr Rouhani said there would be no negotiation as long as the USA was reneging on the nuclear deal. Mr Rouhani then compared the US’s actions to stabbing Iran with a knife and that to begin talking they must “remove the knife”.
He said that Iran was “always in favour of diplomacy” but that Trump’s calls for talks were only an attempt to appease Americans and to “create chaos in Iran”.
The United States’ European allies tried and failed to convince Mr Trump not to abandon the 2015 nuclear agreement , under which Iran would curb its nuclear weapons program in return for a lessening of international sanctions.
The Iranian President went on to say that the USA “will regret” the new sanctions and that they were “isolated in the world”, citing the disapproval of its allies.
The news of potential sanctions has already had a net negative effect on the Iranian economy, lowering the value of its currency and causing the Government to crackdown on civil unrest.
Mr Rouhani has called on his nation to unite behind him in face of the difficulty.
Donald Trump’s administration has argued that the 2015 nuclear deal did not go far enough in curbing Iran’s nuclear program and wants to renegotiate. Iran believes that because it abandoned the 2015 deal, the USA cannot be trusted to negotiate in good faith.