U.S. defeat at UN was ‘inevitable’, says Rouhani

TEHRAN – President Hassan Rouhani said on Sunday that the U.S. has suffered a “definite defeat” at the UN Security Council while seeking to extend a UN arms embargo on Iran. Speaking at a cabinet meeting on Sunday afternoon, the president said, “With the U.S. suffering a definite defeat at the UN Security Council, September 20 will go down as a memorable day in the diplomatic history of our country.” Rouhani said the U.S., as a bullying country in the world, has been studiously working to reimpose the Security Council’s sanctions on Iran for two years but it failed to get the sanctions reinstated. According to Rouhani, since it withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018, the U.S. sought to bring the EU on board and pave the way for reimposing the international sanctions on Iran through provocative measures, but it neither succeeded in creating a coalition against Iran nor has it extended the UN arms embargo on the country. “Today, it must be said that the U.S. maximum pressure on Iran, politically and legally, has led to its defeat and isolation. The United States has lost to Iran three times in the past two months in a place where it thought wouldn’t be defeated but we witnessed that 13 of the 15 members of the Security Council stood up to the United States and defended the JCPOA,” Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA) quoted Rouhani as saying. Rouhani thanked Indonesia and Niger, Security Council presidents for August and September, as well as European and non-European members of the Security Council, for rejecting the U.S. request to reimpose all UN sanctions on Iran. “It was crystal clear that the U.S. would inevitably fail in this regard, but at the same time the modus operandi the Security Council adopted was valuable: ignoring the letter and request of the United States, and not convening to consider it.” the president noted. Rouhani was referring to a notification U.S. submitted to the Security Council on August 20 calling for the reimposition of all UN sanctions on Iran. All JCPOA participants, along with 13 of the 15-member UN Security Council, rejected the U.S. notification as illegal and void. They all said the U.S. lost its legal authority to trigger a return of UN sanctions on Iran after it withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal. However, the U.S. claims that, under UN Security Council Resolution 2231, it still is “a JCPOA participant state” as defined in UNSCR 2231 and thus it has the right to snap back international sanctions on Iran, a claim that was widely rejected by the international community. Rouhani said the U.S. measure has no legal standing, underling that Iran will never “acquiesce to U.S. bullying.” He also warned the U.S. against any further “bullying” after it announced the return of UN sanctions on Iran, saying that any bullying by the U.S. “surely will be met with a decisive response from Iran,” The president expressed Iran’s readiness to reverse its nuclear measures if the remaining parties to the nuclear deal fully implemented their obligations under the JCPOA.