Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Wednesday that talks with the U.S. would not lift sanctions but rather strengthen them.
His remarks came during an annual meeting with university students in Tehran.
He noted that some within Iran continue to raise the issue of negotiations with the U.S., asking why Tehran does not engage in talks. He said his response is that negotiations would not yield positive results for the country.
"I want to say that if the goal of negotiation is to lift sanctions, negotiating with this U.S. government will not lift sanctions, meaning it won't remove the sanctions," he stated. "It will tighten the knot of the sanctions, it will increase the pressure. Negotiating with this government will increase the pressure."
It came on the same day that Anwar Gargash, a senior Emirati diplomat and advisor to the president of the United Arab Emirates, arrived in Tehran to meet Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.
Gargash brought with him a letter from U.S. President Donald Trump for Ayatollah Khamenei, according to the Iranian Foreign Ministry.
While the content of the letter remains speculative, sources suggest that Trump is seeking to resume negotiations with Iran in hopes of resurrecting the 2015 nuclear deal in exchange for curbs on Iran's nuclear program.
Khamenei called Trump's letter "an attempt to deceive global public opinion.”
"This person tore apart and threw out of the window finished and completed, and signed, talks," Khamenei said. "How could one possibly negotiate with such a person?”
He added: "If we wanted to build a nuclear weapon, America couldn’t stop us.”
Trump unilaterally withdrew from the landmark accord in May 2018, after which Iran gradually increased its uranium enrichment from 3.57%, as stipulated in the deal, to 60% purity.
Iran engaged in indirect negotiations with the Joe Biden administration, mediated by the EU, but the marathon talks failed to produce any breakthrough as tensions continued to simmer.
In his remarks Wednesday, Khamenei said sanctions are not ineffective, but they are not the sole cause of Iran's economic problems.
He addressed American threats to Iran's nuclear program, saying that the U.S. claims it will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. He asserted, however, that if Iran had wanted to develop nuclear weapons, the U.S. would not have been able to stop it.
"The fact that we do not have nuclear weapons and are not seeking them is because we ourselves do not want them for certain reasons," Khamenei pointed out.
He emphasized that Iran is not seeking war, but if the U.S. and its allies make a "wrong move," the response from Iran will be "decisive and certain."
Iran struggles with economic woes exacerbated by U.S. and Western sanctions over its nuclear program, and Trump has imposed more since he took office in January. That pressure, coupled with internal turmoil in Iran and recent direct attacks by Israel, has put Tehran in one of the most precarious positions its theocracy has faced since its 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Trump last week acknowledged writing a letter to the 85-year-old Khamenei.
"I’ve written them a letter saying, ‘I hope you’re going to negotiate because if we have to go in militarily, it’s going to be a terrible thing,'” Trump said in the interview.
Trump has offered no details on what, if anything, was specifically offered to Iran in the letter.
The move recalled Trump’s letter-writing to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in his first term, which led to face-to-face meetings but no deals to limit Pyongyang’s atomic bombs and a missile program capable of reaching the continental U.S.
The last time Trump tried to send a letter to Khamenei, through the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2019, the supreme leader mocked the effort. Abe ended up slipping the envelope under his leg in footage widely shared by Iranian state media to this day.
Since Trump returned to the White House, his administration has said Iran must be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons. A report last month by the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog said Iran has accelerated its production of near weapons-grade uranium.
Trump’s first term in office was marked by a particularly troubled period in relations with Tehran. In 2018, he unilaterally withdrew the United States from Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers, leading to sanctions hobbling Iran’s economy. Iran retaliated with attacks at sea - including one that it likely carried out and that temporarily halved Saudi Arabia’s oil production.
Trump also ordered the attack that killed Iran’s top general in a Baghdad drone strike in January 2020.
