Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Tuesday warned candidates in the presidential election in the United States against questioning his country’s nuclear deal with world powers, AFP reports.
“We do not violate the nuclear accord… candidates in the American presidential election are threatening to tear up the nuclear deal. If they do so, we will burn it,” he told visiting dignitaries, according to the news agency.
The nuclear agreement signed in July last year between Iran and the P5+1 group — the U.S., Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany — came into force in January.
Under it, Iran has limited its nuclear program in exchange for a lifting of many international sanctions.
But Republican candidate Donald Trump has called the nuclear agreement “catastrophic” and has said he would seek to renegotiate it if elected president. One of those times came during his speech at the AIPAC policy conference, where he declared that his number one number priority is to roll back the “disastrous” deal with Iran.
In March, Trump said that if elected his first foreign policy priority would be to dismantle the deal and what he said was Tehran’s global “terror” network.
Similarly to Khamenei, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said earlier this month that the nuclear deal reached with world powers can’t be renegotiated, despite Trump’s pledge to do so if elected.
Zarif stressed that the deal “is not an Iran-U.S. agreement for the Republican front-runner or anybody else to renegotiate. It’s an international understanding annexed to a Security Council resolution.”
Tehran accuses Washington of not actively promoting relations between Iran and international business, especially banks.
“The other party had to lift sanctions but has not done so. The question of banking has not been regulated… we are unable to recover oil revenues and other capital we have in other countries,” Khamenei said Tuesday, according to AFP.
“The Americans are not applying a large part of their commitments as we have done,” he added.
Zarif, speaking at the Oslo Forum in Norway where he is due to meet US Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday, urged Washington to lift “psychological” barriers to Iran doing business.
“I think that while on paper the U.S. has lifted all sanctions, the psychological aftermath associated with many years of sanctions remains, and I think the US should play a more active role to remove them,” he was quoted as having said.
