Iran has strongly denounced the United States for targeting its oil industry with new sanctions, and its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued warnings against possible negotiations with Washington.
Meanwhile, the Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman called these sanctions, which were announced a day earlier, “illegitimate and unlawful,” the official IRNA news agency quoted him as saying. What the U.S. administration is doing resembles an “unfair move aiming to strangle the Iranian people” by blocking legitimate trade with economic partners, said Esmaeil Baghaei.
He added that Iran holds the United States responsible for the consequences of such unilateral and aggressive actions. Later, Khamenei supported these words when he declared that negotiations with the U.S. are “not smart, wise, or honorable.”
Earlier this week, U.S. President Donald Trump signaled that he wants to increase pressure on Iran to negotiate a “verified nuclear peace agreement.” Trump pulled the United States out of the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, reinstating crippling sanctions that prompted Tehran to violate the pact’s limits.
Ali Khamenei added that negotiation with the U.S. is futile, and that every time in the past Iran had made concessions in talks, the agreements were cast aside. He also threatened that if Iran’s security is jeopardized, then so will U.S. security.
The new sanctions are the first since Trump returned to office. The US president has sought to cut Iranian crude exports-which have plunged since last year-to zero in an effort to press Tehran to curtail its nuclear program. The fresh sanctions target entities, ships and individuals involved in selling Iranian products, including the owner of the National Iranian Tanker Company, which shipped millions of barrels of Iranian oil to China.
Meanwhile, Germany, France and the United Kingdom have been in diplomatic overtures with Tehran seeking ways to salvage the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, which Trump pulled out from in 2018. The senior Iranian official signaled recently that Tehran was willing to give the U.S. a chance to resolve outstanding differences. Tehran has refused to accept the U.S. sanctions on its petroleum industry, referring to attempts to seize its exports as “piracy.”
