Iran Press/ Iran news: In an interview with USA TODAY in Antalya, Turkey, on Monday 5 November, Zarif was asked whether Iran was ready for another round of US sanctions.
He replied: "Well, the question is, is the international community ready for it because the current U.S. administration is essentially asking all members of the international community to violate international law. The U.S. is not, itself, only violating, it’s asking others to violate, too, because you know when we agreed [to] the nuclear deal it was enshrined in a United Nations Security Council resolution. And the Security Council resolution, which was actually not only voted for by the United States, but sponsored by the United States, by the previous administration. The U.S. government called on all countries to help implement the resolution and not to do anything that would prevent its implementation."
"Now the United States, itself, is preventing the deal’s implementation and asking other countries not to engage in economic transactions with us, which means preventing the implementation of the resolution, because the objective of the resolution was to normalize Iran’s business relations with the rest of the world. So the United States is, in fact, punishing people and countries for observing international law and rewarding them for violating international law. Iran is used to U.S. sanctions. We’ve had them for almost 39 years. We haven’t had an easy history with the United States, but it did not start on November 4, 1979, [with the Iran hostage crisis]. It started long before that in 1953 [with a CIA -orchestrated plot that removed Iran’s democratically elected prime minister]. Nevertheless, we are used to measures that were never legal, but this time they are exceptionally illegal."
Commenting on America's economic sanctions Zarif said: "Nobody claims economic sanctions don’t hurt. Economic sanctions always hurt, but they don’t achieve the policy objectives they intend to achieve. Sometimes, they achieve exactly the opposite."
He elaborated further by saying: "What I would say to the average Iranian is that for us, talking to the United States was a taboo. We broke that taboo, we spoke to the United States, we had the longest negotiations with the United States. We reached an agreement with the United States, not a two-page agreement, but a 150-page agreement. And the United States decided to walk away from it. It wasn’t our fault that the United States is not a reliable negotiating partner. It’s a problem that the international community is facing. And the U.S. has not just walked away from the Iran deal: It walked away from the Paris climate-change deal [in June 2017]. It walked away from an arms-control agreement with Russia [the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, or INF, in October]. It walked away from NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement, re-branded as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, in September]. It walked away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership [a 12-nation trade deal, in January 2017]. It walked away from UNESCO [United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, in October 2017). It walked away from the Human Rights Council [a UN body, in June.] Basically, there are rare exceptions where it hasn’t walked away."
Zarif poignantly added: "So this is the type of U.S. administration that we're dealing with and I'm sure the Iranian community, the Iranian population, while I understand that they are unhappy with the situation right now, can also understand that it's not the fault of the government, but it is because we have a rogue regime in Washington that doesn't live by any principle of international law."
