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Rouhani: US failure over anti-Iran Security Council resolution unprecedented in UN history

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has called the United States’ defeat last month to have the UN Security Council ratify a resolution it had drafted to extend an anti-Iran arms embargo an unprecedented fiasco for Washington at the world body.

“The dear Iranian people know this that the United States has suffered big political defeats over the recent weeks,” Rouhani said on Thursday, as he inaugurated three national developmental projects undertaken by the country’s Ministry of Energy in the western and northwestern provinces of Kermanshah, East Azarbaijan, and Ardabil.

The chief executive was referring to an August 4 meeting at the UNSC, when only the Dominican Republic voted in favor of the US-drafted resolution that was vetoed by China and Russia, and abstained by the 15-member Security Council’s remaining constituents.

The embargo is expected to expire in October under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and world powers that the US ditched in 2018. Prior to the submission of the draft, many countries had cautioned the US that they would not fall into line with its anti-Iran bid as Washington had left the JCPOA, and, therefore, could not either benefit from or challenge any of its stipulations.

Washington then tried returning all of the Security Council sanctions against Iran, but was similarly snubbed by the overwhelming majority of UNSC members.

‘Months of useless US peddling’

Rouhani said before failing to push its bid against the arms embargo at the UNSC, there had never been a case throughout the United Nations’ 70-plus-year-old history, when Washington would lay out an anti-Iran resolution and “go around begging [support for it] from this and that country for months,” but only be accommodated by a single country.

“This was a very important matter,” the president said, and attributed this defeat to the steadfastness staged by the Iranian people against the US since Washington left the JCPOA and returned the sanctions that the nuclear deal had lifted.

‘Iranian people killed US dreams’

“Had not the Iranian people resisted throughout these two years and a half, not only would have the US had some worse resolutions approved against us, but it would have also realized all of its dreams against the [Islamic] establishment and this nation,” he noted.

The United States’ failure at the UN is ironically concomitant with “Iran’s prosperity,” the president said, referring to the developmental projects that he was unveiling from Tehran via video-conference.

Rouhani said inauguration of the monumental projects come while the country is weathering sanctions that have been unprecedented in toughness since the 1979 victory of Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

“The Iranian people have, nevertheless, met these plots with greater steadfastness each day,” he noted, adding, “Through this resistance, we proved that the US has suffered defeat.”

He reminded that what the US had intended for the Iranian people was not limited to simple pressure, saying Washington sought to break down the nation’s resistance and have it accept its demands.

“Such [a goal], though, did not come to pass and will not [ever] either,” Rouhani concluded.

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