“Trump must show that he is not following the wrong policies of the past,” Javad Zarif, Iran’s vice president for strategic affairs, told reporters in Tehran.
Zarif’s comments were in relation to Trump's “maximum pressure” policy that included harsh sanctions on Iran during his first term in office.
“He must have realized that the maximum pressure policy that he initiated caused Iran's enrichment to reach 60 percent from 3.5 percent,” Zarif said, referring to enrichment of uranium.
“As a man of calculation, he should do the math and see what the advantages and disadvantages of this policy have been and whether he wants to continue or change this harmful policy,” he said.
During Trump’s first term in office, the US withdrew from the 2015 nuclear accord between Iran and the West, and instead introduced sanctions in an attempt to pressure Tehran into halting its nuclear program.
Zarif, who was foreign minister from 2013 to 2021, was one of the actors who helped seal the nuclear deal.
Trump’s triumph in Tuesday’s election and his imminent return to the Oval Office raised speculations that he will also return to his hawkish stance on Iran.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people close to Trump’s campaign, that the president-elect plans to drastically increase sanctions on Iran to deter its oil sales and undercut Iran’s ability to support proxies in the Middle East.
However, on Tuesday Trump told reporters that he was “not looking to do damage to Iran.”
Esmael Baghaei, the Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson, said on Thursday that he hopes Trump’s return to power allows the US to “revise the wrong approaches of the past.”
A day after Trump’s electoral victory, the Iranian currency plummeted to an all-time low, trading at 703,000 rials to the US dollar.
During his first term, Trump ordered the killing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ (IRGC) Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani.
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