Era of Western hegemony over, Iran’s FM Zarif says on LatAm tour

Zarif made the remarks at a forum in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, on Thursday during a three-leg tour of Latin America that is to take him to Cuba and Bolivia next.

“The West is fighting for its survival …, the era of Western hegemony is over,” he said, speaking alongside his Venezuelan counterpart Jorge Arreaza.

“Today, the United States and all its allies combined cannot control what happens in the world, they have lost control … The West is losing its integrity, it is losing its coherence, its cohesion,” he said.

The remarks came after the US failed to prevent Iran from sending two massive sets of shipments featuring gasoline supplies and refinery equipment to Venezuela earlier this year. The exports came in blunt defiance of the US’ economic war on both the countries that has seen Washington targeting them with across-the-board sanctions.

Zarif said Western states have lost their monopoly and power has been decentralized due to emergence of “sources of power that are independent and inspire others, such as Iran and Venezuela.”

US’ desperate warmongering

Once it sensed the unpreventable change in the global order, the Iranian top diplomat said, the US began waging back-to-back wars across the world, the top Iranian diplomat said.

During the last decades, the US “has waged one war per year” in the world, that is against Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, among other countries, because it has realized that in the unfolding of history, “the industrial Western world is losing its central role,” Zarif said. “The US wages a war every year to prevent precisely this change in the movement of history,” he added.

The American officials, who were alarmed by the receding Western sphere of control, set off this campaign of spreading violence across the world so they would be able to “institutionalize the domination of the West” by “instrumentalizing military supremacy,” the Iranian official concluded.

Zarif arrived in Venezuela on Wednesday for high-level talks as he begins a three-nation Latin America tour that will also take him to Cuba and Bolivia.

Zarif was welcomed by his Venezuelan counterpart, Jorge Arreaza, upon his arrival in Caracas.

Earlier this week, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said Zarif would travel to Venezuela and Cuba as well as Bolivia, where he would attend the inauguration of president-elect Luis Arce.