TEHRAN -- Leader of the 
Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei on Wednesday said U.S. President Trump’s withdrawal from a nuclear deal in his first term renders diplomacy with him pointless, dismissing fresh overtures by Washington for a new agreement.
“The U.S. president saying ‘we are ready to negotiate with Iran’ and calling for negotiations is a deception aimed at misleading global public opinion,” he told a group of students visiting him here. 
What this means is that the U.S. wants to portray itself as open to negotiations and making peace and Iran as not willing to accept it, the Leader added.
“What’s the point of negotiating when we know he won’t stick with it,” Ayatollah Khamenei said, referring to a 2015 international nuclear deal from which Trump withdrew.
“We sat down and negotiated for several years, and this very person took the completed, finalized and signed agreement off the table and tore it up.”
Ayatollah Khamenei said negotiations with the current U.S. administration will not lead to the lifting of sanctions, but “will make the knot of sanctions even tighter”.
The Leader said while sanctions are not without impact, the bad state of the economy is not solely due to sanctions. “The cause of economic problems is more our own negligence than sanctions,” he added.
Referring to Trump’s threats, Ayatollah Khamenei said, “They say ‘we will not let Iran obtain nuclear weapons’. If we wanted to make nuclear weapons, the U.S. could not stop us. But we do not seek nuclear weapons, and we have explained our reasons for this before.”
He also touched on the U.S. leader’s military threats, saying “Iran is not looking for war, but if the Americans and their agents take the wrong action, Iran’s retaliation will b decisive and certain, and the one who will lose the most is the U.S.”
Ayatollah Khamenei said Iran is the sole holdout in resisting the demands of the world’s bullies.
“Today, the world’s bullies say everyone must obey us and must put our interests ahead of their own, but Iran is the only country that has categorically rejected this.” 
The Leader also said the Islamic Republic has not been weakened by the loss of key political and military resistance figures in recent years, citing Iran’s late president Ebrahim Raisi, Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar.
“The absence of these dear ones is a loss. The events that occurred