Iranian President Hassan Rouhani accused President Trump of inventing problems with the Iran nuclear agreement on Friday, and rejected Trump’s attempt to reshape it unilaterally.
“Mr. Trump’s remarks on Iran… contained nothing but expletives and a pile of delusional allegations against the Iranian nation,” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Friday, according to state media.
Rouhani’s team negotiated the pact with former President Obama and other major world powers throughout Obama’s second term. On Friday, he rejected Trump’s call for new talks to impose additional restrictions on Iran’s military programs.
“He apparently does not know that this is not a bilateral document between Iran and the U.S. for him to act in any way he wishes,” Rouhani said.
Trump declared the Iran deal inconsistent with U.S. national security, based on Iran’ s aggression since the deal was struck and the difficulty monitoring certain military sites for illicit nuclear activity.
“We got weak inspections in exchange for no more than a purely short-term and temporary delay in Iran’s path to nuclear weapons,” Trump said Friday. “What is the purpose of a deal that, at best, only delays Iran’s nuclear capability for a short period of time?”
As Rouhani dismissed those complaints, Iranian officials seemed especially determined to cast the United States in a villainous role. “[Trump] has to study history better and more closely and know what they [U.S. officials] have done to the Iranian people over the past sixty-something years and how they have treated the people of Iran during the past 40 years after the victory of the Revolution [in 1979],” Rouhani said.
A senior Iranian cleric drove the same message to the home audience. “The U.S. has always tried to bring the Islamic Republic to its knee throughout the history and the Iranian nation would never forget their animosity,” Ayatollah Movahedi Kermani said Friday, according to the semi-official FARS News Agency.
In Trump’s speech, by contrast, the president praised the Iranian people and sought to drive a wedge between them and their government.
“[W]e stand in total solidarity with the Iranian regime’s longest-suffering victims: its own people,” Trump said. “The Iranian people long to — and they just are longing, to reclaim their country’s proud history, its culture, its civilization, its cooperation with its neighbors. We hope that these new measures directed at the Iranian dictatorship will compel the government to reevaluate its pursuit of terror at the expense of its people.”
