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Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told his cabinet on Wednesday that if madman Trump had not carried out economic terrorism against the Islamic Republic, the government could have obtained $ 60 billion in credit in international markets to invest in the country.
In a lengthy speech, Rouhani fiercely tried to defend his outgoing government’s record against relentless criticism from hard-line supporters who accused him of making a bad nuclear deal and then mismanaging the economy.
Rouhani said the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the 2015 nuclear deal called it, was indispensable, referring to the crushing international sanctions backed by the UN Security Council that were lifted after the signing of the nuclear agreement. Responding to internal criticism of the deal, the outgoing president said: If there was no JCPOA, the same situation and the same path [sanctions] would have continued. Imagine what our situation was like in 2013-2014.
Former President Donald Trump called the Obama-era deal a disaster, which would allow Iran to build a nuclear bomb in the not-so-distant future and remove previous international sanctions that presumably gave Tehran resources financial resources to continue its expansionist policy in the region.
Rouhani alluded to the preparation of documents by his government to describe the history of the past eight years and said that such a document will show that if an individual with a psychiatric illness had not become President of the United States , the JCPOA would have remained in place, and it would not be difficult to imagine the economic consequences compared to now. He listed Iran’s economic problems and claimed that inflation, unemployment and growth would all have been very different.
Although US sanctions have caused great damage to Iran’s economy over the past three years, indicators have shown that its closed economic system has grown anemic in the past 42 years since the establishment of the Islamic government. While a rapidly growing population required growth of at least five percent per year, the 40-year average is less than three percent. The economy is centralized and often poorly managed by government bureaucracy influenced by political appointments. Essentially, what kept Iran’s economy running was oil exports that funded over 50% of the budget. As soon as Trump’s sanctions cut oil sales, the country was forced to print money and entered high inflation.
However, Rouhani complained bitterly that during the current election campaign no one mentioned Trump and compared him to Saddam Hussein who attacked Iran in 1980, in what the Islamic Republic calls forced war. Rouhani said Trump’s war was also an imposed war, implying that his opponents are blaming him rather than the former US president.
While mentioning the possibility of Iran having borrowed $ 60 billion in international markets, Rouhani did not mention that hardliners halted major financial reforms demanded by the International Financial Action Task Force. (FATF), which put Iran on its blacklist for not having guarantees against money laundering and terrorist financing. Even if the US sanctions are lifted, Iran cannot have normal banking relations with the rest of the world as long as it meets FATF standards, let alone borrow billions of dollars.
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