Iran
Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro (right) bumps elbows with Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif at Miraflores Palace in Caracas, on November 5, 2020. Photo: Handout / Venezuelan Presidency / AFP
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — With the election of a new President of the United States, senior members of the Iranian regime have called for concrete change in Washington's policy towards their country.
Reacting to the election of Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden as US president, Iranian first vice president Eshaq Jahangiri said on Saturday night that he hoped for a change in "America's destructive policies."
"I hope we witness a change in America's destructive policies and a return to law and international commitments and respect for nations," Jahangiri wrote on Twitter.
"The era of Trump and his adventurous and warmongering team is over," he added.
As Biden victory's loomed, Iranian president Hassan Rouhani called on Washington to learn a "lesson" from three years of strict Trump administration policy towards Iran.
“Over the past three years, our people have faced economic terrorism and they showed unprecedented resilience, patience and steadfastness in the face of this," the president said at a coronavirus taskforce meeting in Tehran.
"I hope the conditions are as such that those responsible for sanctions realize that their path was not right and they will not achieve their objectives....The experience of the last three years should be a lesson that God willing the new administration in America will surrender to the laws and regulations and return to its commitments.”
US president Donald Trump, who lost Tuesday's election to challenger Biden, has applied a "maximum pressure" policy and crippling sanctions against Iran since his 2018 withdrawal from a landmark nuclear agreement with Tehran.
The sanctions targeted Iran's crucial oil industry and cut Tehran's access to its revenues abroad by blacklisting its banking sector, among others.
Biden has said during his campaign that he plans to embark on a "credible path to return to diplomacy" with Iran and raised the possibility of returning to the 2015 nuclear deal, negotiated when he was vice president under Barack Obama.
While on a tour of Latin American countries, Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told Venezuela-based TeleSUR that his country is looking for a change in rhetoric, not action.
"We haven't seen much diplomacy during president Trump, we've seen a lot of threats by him and the Secretary of State," Zarif said in the interview aired on Friday.
"There will be differences, but what is important for us is not the tone or the rhetoric, but the actions."
"The United States has engaged in illegal activity against Iran, has hurt our economy, has hurt our people, and it has to change its practice if it wants the situation to change," the foreign minister said.
Zarif said the US would have to earn back its place in nuclear deal discussions.
"The United States decided to leave that deal...if it wants to come back it has to gain a seat at the negotiating table."
Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who said Tuesday that the US election would have "no effect" on Tehran's policies towards Washington, called the drawn-out count of votes and Trump's claims of election fraud a "spectacle".
"Regardless of the outcome, one thing is absolutely clear, the definite political, civil, & moral decline of the US regime," Khamenei said on Saturday.
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