Iran’s new ultraconservative president on Tuesday voiced support for renewed nuclear negotiations in his international debut whilst he hailed what he termed the decline folks hegemony.
President Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric who succeeded a government that sought better relations with the West, called on the US to satisfy its promises to finish sanctions under the 2015 nuclear accord.
“The Islamic Republic considers useful talks whose ultimate outcome is the lifting of all oppressive sanctions,” Raisi said during a recorded speech to the UN General Assembly.
He repeated the clerical state’s stance that nuclear weapons are religiously prohibited, an edge that has been met with skepticism notably by Israel, which has administered a sabotage campaign to delay Iran’s nuclear work. Nuclear weapons “have no place in our defense doctrine and deterrence policy,” Raisi said.
President Joe Biden, appearing face to face in his own maiden UN speech, earlier said that the US was able to return to the nuclear accord from which his predecessor Donald Trump bolted.
“We’re prepared to return to full compliance if Iran does the same,” Biden said, pertaining to US promises under the accord to lift sanctions.
But months of indirect negotiations brokered by the ECU Union since Biden’s election have did not revive the accord fully.
Iran has taken steps far away from the accord to protest the sanctions and insists on a full lifting of economic pressure — while the Biden administration says it’s only watching sanctions imposed over its nuclear program, not people who were supported other concerns including human rights.
Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Said Khatibzadeh, traveling with Raisi, said that he expected a resumption of the indirect talks in Vienna which include the nations still within the agreement — Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia.
“The Vienna talks will resume soon, in the coming weeks,” he said, as quoted by the official IRNA press agency.
Raisi devoted most of his speech to denunciations of the US, pointing to the collapse of the Western-backed government in Afghanistan also because of the mob attack of the US Capitol on Epiphany by Trump supporters seeking to overturn his defeat.
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