Iran downplays the new round of US sanctions, urging the EU to resist Washington’s unilateralism

Tabnak – Despite officially announcing the return of nuclear-related sanctions against Iran, the US administration has stopped short of its end game plan for cutting Iran’s oil exports down to zero and grants sanction waivers to a number of Iran’s costumers. Meanwhile, Tehran downplays the new round of sanctions, underlining that the country has no worries in this regard.

In this vein, Iran says the United States is seeking to wage an extensive “psychological war” against Tehran by imposing a fresh round of sanctions, stressing that the Islamic Republic has no concerns over such US bids.

"There is no room for any concern. We should wait and see that the US will not be able to carry out any measure against the great and brave Iranian nation," Iran's Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi told IRIB on Friday.

Qassemi said the US carried out numerous measures and spent huge sums to exert pressure on international banks, companies, commercial enterprises and institutions in order to dissuade them from working with Iran, but all such efforts failed to bear fruit.

"It seems that the US has no more capability to put countries and global economic enterprises under pressure," the Iranian spokesperson added. He noted that the US sanctions are aimed at covering the country's failure in the economic sector and said Iran has the capability and knowledge to

Meanwhile, Iran’s envoy to the United Nations says the United States is making waves on the scene of international trade by targeting other countries with unilateral sanctions.

“Confronting multilateralism by resorting to unilateral actions, including imposition of embargo and sanctions, is not a sign of strength,” Gholam-Ali Khoshroo said on Thursday.

“Rather, it is a symptom of the weakness of intellect -- it betrays an inability in understanding a complex and interconnected world,” he told a UN General Assembly session to discuss a draft resolution over ending US sanctions against Cuba.

The ambassador cited the cases of Washington’s sanctions against the Latin American country and the Islamic Republic, and how the bans had come to trouble trade on the international level.

This comes a day after Iranian President Hassan Rouhani warned about the dangers posed by Washington’s unilateralism to the world, urging European countries to work with Iran to counter the US.

In a Thursday opinion piece published by the Financial Times, Rouhani lashed out at Washington for its foreign policy over the past two years, saying that the US administration’s policies have emerged as a new and complicated problem for the world.

He wrote that “the economic war that the US had initiated under the rubric of new sanctions not only targets the Iranian people, but also entails harmful repercussions for the people of other countries, and that war has caused a disruption in the state of global trade.”

The US plans to impose a second round of sanctions against Iran on Sunday, months after Washington scrapped the 2015 multilateral deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), reached between Iran and the P5+1 group of countries.

The first round of the bans – which had been lifted under the nuclear deal -- was re-imposed in August.