Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has blasted as “psychological warfare” a wave of U.S. sanctions that were re-imposed on the country on Tuesday.
The United States brought back into effect harsh penalties that had been lifted under a historic, multi-party nuclear agreement that President Donald Trump abandoned in May.
The first of two rounds of US sanctions kicked in at 12:01 am, targeting Iran’s access to US banknotes and key industries, including cars and carpets.
“If you’re an enemy and you stab the other person with a knife, and then you say you want negotiations, then the first thing you have to do is remove the knife,” Mr Rouhani said in an interview on state television.
“They want to launch psychological warfare against the Iranian nation. Negotiations with sanctions doesn’t make sense.”
Iranians are already seeing the effects of the sanctions, with Iran’s rial currency losing around half its value since Trump announced the US would withdraw from the 2015 nuclear accord.
Mr Trump’s contempt for the nuclear deal dates back to his time as presidential candidate and on May 8, he made good on a pledge to pull America out of the international agreement.
He blasted the agreement yet again Monday, calling it a “horrible, one-sided deal (that) failed to achieve the fundamental objective of blocking all paths to an Iranian nuclear bomb.”
The unilateral withdrawal came despite other parties to the agreement – Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the EU – pleading with Mr Trump not to abandon the pact aimed at blocking Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and highlights the US leader’s go-it-alone style and his distaste for multilateral agreements.
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