Leadnaija
Trump revealed this week that he was seeking to strike a new deal with the Iranian regime, after withdrawing from an Obama-era agreement in his first term.
Ali Khamenei speaks.
Addressing an assemblage of senior officials in Iran Saturday, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said the country would “definitely not” accept negotiation demands from “bullying governments.” | Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader via AP
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei rejected President Donald Trump’s request to negotiate a new nuclear agreement, saying Saturday that the country would not submit to “bullying governments.”
Trump revealed this week that he was seeking to strike a new deal with the Iranian regime, telling Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo that he wrote Khamenei a letter calling for an agreement to stop the country’s rapidly advancing nuclear weapons program. The president separately told reporters Friday that “we’re down to the final strokes with Iran,” warning vaguely of the possibility of an armed conflict if the country did not meet his demands.
But the veiled threats did not seem to faze Iranian leaders.
Addressing an assemblage of senior officials in Iran Saturday, Khamenei said the country would “definitely not” accept negotiation demands from “bullying governments.” He did not mention Trump by name.
“The insistence of some of the bullying governments for negotiations is not for the purpose of solving problems, rather for the purpose of dominance and to impose their own expectations,” Khamenei said in Farsi. “The Islamic Republic of Iran will definitely not accept their expectations.”
The supreme leader’s response came after Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi immediately dismissed Trump’s proposition, saying Friday that Iran would not return to the negotiating table until the U.S. lifted its “maximum pressure” sanctions policy.
Araghchi told reporters on Saturday that Iran had not yet received Trump’s letter.
Trump in his first term unilaterally withdrew from a nuclear deal between Iran and other nations, imposing harsh sanctions in a “maximum pressure” campaign that severely weakened the Iranian economy. The president reimposed the sanctions campaign last month, targeting the country’s oil exports in an effort to dry up funds for its nuclear program.
Iran has ramped up its enrichment of uranium to near weapons-grade levels, prompting repeated warnings from the International Atomic Energy Agency that the country is dangerously close to reaching nuclear capacity.
