Iran’s re-elected president Rouhani slams US-Saudi summit

As his victory was announced on Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump was in Saudi Arabia, Iran’s regional rival, bolstering a coalition of states opposed to the Islamic republic.

Mr Rouhani said Iranians are “waiting for this government to be civil” and that “hopefully, things will settle down.so we could pass more accurate judgments”.

Donald Trump’s Middle East tour and the largest arms deal, signed between Washington and Riyadh during it, has obvious anti-Iranian orientation, which was clearly stated by the US State Department: “New contracts will help to support Saudi Arabia’s security in the Persian Gulf region in the face of Iran’s unsafe influence and Iran-related threats”.

“You can’t solve terrorism just by giving your people’s money to a superpower”, Rouhani said. Trump has threatened to try to renegotiate the deal.

“The Iraqi, Lebanese and Syrian nations have stood against terrorists and Iranian diplomats and advisors have been helping them”, the Iranian president added.

American President Donald Trump’s choice of Saudi Arabia as the first country to visit – early in his tenure – is understandable.

In his address at the Riyadh gathering, Trump lent strength to autocratic tendencies among the Gulf rulers and their allies and encouraged them to continue the proxy war in Syria and initiate hostilities against Iran when they are ready.

Rouhani on Monday dismissed Trump’s summit with Arab leaders in Saudi Arabia as “just a show”.

He said the only sensible move by Washington was the nuclear deal it signed with Iran in 2015, when the United States “talked with respect” and reached a “win-win result”. With President Hassan Rouhani reelected by a large margin, the focus is on how it will affect United States relations with the Middle East. “Who can claim that stability of the region can be restored without Iran?” he said.

“Promoting and supporting extremist ideologies and presenting a violent and unrealistic image from Islam on the one hand, and sacrificing the interests of the regional countries through promotion of instability, bloodshed and fratricide on the other sums up these policies“, he said.

Rouhani was responding to a question on Monday from The Associated Press at a news conference in Tehran.

Unlike Saudi Arabia, which occasionally holds elections for municipal councils, Iran regularly holds elections for president, parliament and other posts. Rouhani’s main opponents have taken advantage of this weakness during the past four years of his presidency and even in the three television debates before the election.

A $110 billion defence deal signed with the Saudis, with much more in terms of commerce and investment in the air with the Sunni world as a whole, is a sign of the deepening of USA ties with Islamic nations other than Iran, suggesting no ambiguities in foreign policy priorities.

On Monday, Trump touched down in Israel for the second part of his foreign trip, the first one since taking office.

The US has no other way but to think of “a win-win approach vis-a-vis Iran, otherwise they will fail”, he said. Importantly, the JCPOA only provides relief for the majority of nuclear-related secondary sanctions, and a wide range of activities are still sanctionable, including activity which involves Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC), support for terrorism, human rights abuses, or proliferation of ballistic missiles and WMD or threats to the peace, security, or stability of Yemen.