TEHRAN -- President Ebrahim Raisi on Monday headed for New York with an agenda to pursue “fair international order through economic multilateralism” as he dismissed any plan for a meeting with American officials.
Speaking to reporters before departing Tehran, Raisi said he would use the UN General Assembly as an opportunity to outspokenly defend the great Iranian nation’s rights and talk about the cruelty and corruption the world is suffering from.
“Since the media in the world is dominated by the big powers and the hegemonic system, such opportunities should be used to outline the Islamic Republic of Iran’s stances and publicize cruelties to the great Iranian nation,” the president stated.
The president touched on his plans for meeting world leaders on the sidelines of the assembly, reiterating that he will not hold any meeting or talks with the Americans.
President Raisi, in his first U.S. media interview, said that the Biden administration’s promise to adhere to a new nuclear agreement was “meaningless” without guarantees that the United States would not again unilaterally withdraw from the deal in the future.
“If it’s a good deal and fair deal, we would be serious about reaching an agreement. It needs to be lasting,” said Raisi, speaking through an interpreter in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” conducted last week in Tehran and broadcast Sunday evening. But he added: “We cannot trust the Americans because of the behavior that we’ve already seen from them. That is why if there is no guarantee, there is no trust.”
Washington is non-committal on Tehran’s demand for guarantees that the United States would stay in the agreement. Negotiations that began nearly a year and a half ago have now sputtered to a virtual stop.
Since July, when European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, whose office has coordinated the talks, sent Tehran and Washington what he called a “final text” of every issue that had been successfully negotiated, the two capitals have exchanged two rounds of responses without reaching agreement. No additional talks are scheduled.
Raisi, elected in June 2021, said that there would be no benefit in meeting with President Biden when both presidents attend the UN General Assembly this week. “The new administration in the U.S., they claim that they are different from the Trump administration,” he said. He added: “But we haven’t witnessed any changes in reality.”
Biden campaigned on a pledge that he would restore the original nuclear deal with Iran, which lifted nuclear-related sanctions in exchange for restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program. After withdrawing from what he called a “bad deal” negotiated by his predecessor, Barack Obama, President Donald Trump reimposed the lifted sanctions and added more for what he called “maximum pressure” that would cause Iran to capitulate.
Instead, Iran has gone far beyond the limits imposed by the agreement, increasing the quantity and quality of enriched uranium. Iran has repeatedly said it has no intention of developing such a weapon. Raisi said Iran’s nuclear program is intended for medical and agricultural use.
Meanwhile, the U.S. administration has added to the list of sanctions against Iran which has worked to circumvent the illegal U.S. sanctions by exporting much of its oil to China and other countries.
Raisi said that Iran was “not going to forget” the January 2020 assassination of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, who was martyred by a U.S. drone strike. Calling it a “heinous crime,” he said that “we want justice to be served.”
Last month, the Biden administration indicted an Iranian national with alleged ties to the IRGC. The government accused the Iranian, charged in absentia, with funding a plot to assassinate former Trump national security adviser John Bolton. Asked whether his government had ordered Bolton’s assassination, Raisi said: “That’s the type of the actions that the Americans and Zionist regimes are doing in the world. We are not going to carry out the same actions.”