Pars Today

Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has said that one key lesson for future administrations to learn from the experience gained during the tenure of outgoing President Hassan Rouhani is that there is no benefit in putting one's trust in the West.

He made the remarks during his final meeting on Wednesday with President Hassan Rouhani and his cabinet members. The session was the last official meeting of the 12th administration with the Leader.

“The others should use your experience,” Ayatollah Khamenei told the meeting. “There is a specific experience that I have written down. It is something that I have repeated many times to you and the people, and now I repeat the same thing, which is a lack of trust in the West.”

“Posterity should use this experience. In this administration, it turned out that trusting the West does not work,” the Leader said.

Ayatollah Khamenei added that domestic programs should not be tied to Western countries under any circumstances due to the proven failure of such an approach.

“Wherever you tied your work to the West, you failed, and wherever you rose and moved forward without trusting the West, you succeeded,” he told the outgoing administration.

“Wherever you tied issues to an agreement or talks with the West and America and the like, you fell flat and you failed to move forward,” he said. “Because they don’t help. They are the enemies, of course.”

Making a reference to the ongoing talks in Vienna, Austria, to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the Leader thanked the diplomats for their efforts during the talks, saying, however, that the Americans insisted on their hostile stance against Iran and did not move even one step forward during the talks.

So far, six rounds of negotiations have been held in Vienna, three years after the US unilaterally withdrew from the nuclear deal, officially called the JCPOA, and implemented what it called the “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran.

“The Americans say and promise that ‘we will remove the sanctions’ but they have not done so,” said the Leader, adding that the US wants to add a sentence to the agreement demanding that Iran would begin talks on some other issues, otherwise there would be no agreement.

By adding this sentence, according to the Leader, the Americans are seeking to gain an excuse for further meddlesome acts over the JCPOA, Iran’s missile program and regional issues

“And if Iran does not want to talk about them, they would say ‘you have violated the JCPOA and therefore there is no agreement anymore,’” he added.

He also stressed that Washington does not shy away from once again violating its contractual commitments in the same way it did in 2018, a move that was “completely costless” for them.

Ayatollah Khamenei added that the US has refused to provide Iran with a guarantee that it will not violate its commitments again.

SS