Iran does not have a favourite candidate in the upcoming US presidential elections, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohamed Javad Zarif said yesterday.
“For Iran it does not matter who is sitting in the White House, for Iran the behaviour (of the United States) matters,” Zarif said in a video conference with Italian think tank ISPI.
He said his country expected from the US “respect for international agreements” and “compensation of Iranian people for the damages incurred over the last few years.”
Zarif said he was no longer sure that US President Donald Trump had a strong chance of re-election, due to recent domestic controversies and the ongoing novel coronavirus epidemic.
“I thought that President Trump’s base was still solid, now I have some doubts,” he said, adding that he was “speaking as an analyst” rather than as a foreign minister.
The US and Iran have been foes for more than 40 years, but their relations worsened after Trump decided to pull out of a 2015 international deal on Iran’s nuclear programme — a deal that his predecessor Barack Obama helped negotiate.
The Vienna agreement, known as the JCPOA, was intended to enable Iran to have a civilian nuclear programme, while preventing it from developing nuclear weapons, in exchange for the lifting of crippling economic sanctions.
“In 2021, President Trump or a new president will sit in the White House but they will inherit the responsibilities of the previous (administration),” Zarif said.
“Those responsibilities include damages they have inflicted upon the Iranian people and they have to compensate for those damages and they have to return to their international agreements,” he added.