by Ilya Tsukanov
30 Mαρτίου 2021
Over the past two months, Tehran’s hopes that President Joe Biden would make good on his campaign promises and rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement have wilted on the vine, with Iran making clear that it will not reduce its uranium enrichment activities until Washington scraps its sanctions.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has dug up an old Biden tweet and used it to attack his administration’s stubborn intransigence on returning to the JCPOA.
“It’s sadly ironic that the State Department is now calling on Iran to abide by the very deal the Trump administration abandoned”, Zarif wrote, citing verbatim an excerpt from a tweet by then-presidential candidate Joe Biden from June 2019.
"It's sadly ironic that the State Dept is now calling on Iran to abide by the very deal the Trump administration abandoned."@POTUS, 2019
Your admin follows Trump's footsteps while trying to use his unlawful sanctions as "leverage".
Nasty habits die hard. Time to kick this one. pic.twitter.com/PIhN1YwT3e
— Javad Zarif (@JZarif) March 30, 2021
“Your administration follows Trump’s footsteps while trying to use his unlawful sanctions as ‘leverage’. Nasty habits die hard. Time to kick this one”, the foreign minister suggested, encouraging the US president to live up to his own rhetoric.
Zarif’s commentary was accentuated by his decision to change his profile pic to a hilarious caricature of himself. The diplomat indicated on his Instagram page that he plans to use caricatures created throughout his seven-and-a-half-year tenure as foreign minister throughout the remainder of his term, which is expected to wrap up in June after presidential elections.
No, #Iran FM Zarif's social media accounts have not been hacked. He said on Instagram today that he intends to use various caricatures of himself going back to 2012 as profile picture on Twitter and Instagram until he leaves office later this year. pic.twitter.com/IlslwJii1F
— Kian Sharifi (@KianSharifi) March 30, 2021
Iran’s hopes for a sea change in US policy after the transition from the openly hostile Trump administration to Joe Biden’s team have withered with time, with the Democratic president opting to continue pressuring Tehran using Trump’s sanctions to try to get the country to dramatically reduce its uranium enrichment levels. Iranian officials have emphasised again and again that the Islamic Republic will not budge on enrichment until the US lifts its illegal sanctions.
Over the weekend, a plethora of US media outlets warned that the Iran-China strategic cooperation agreement reached Saturday may have severely undermined US sanctions leverage, with contracts between the Islamic Republic and the People’s Republic expected to dramatically reduce the impact of US restrictions on Iran’s economy
Published at sputniknews.com
