Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has said the world opposes every decision made by US President Donald Trump.
“The world opposes every decision made by Trump,” Khamenei said during a meeting with thousands of students in Tehran on Saturday, reports Reuters.
His comments came following Washington’s move to re-impose sanctions on Monday on Iran’s vital oil-exporting and financial sectors.
The top leader of Iran also said Iran’s arch-adversary the United States had failed to reassert its domination over Iran since the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled the US-backed Shah.
“America’s goal has been to re-establish the domination it had (before 1979) but it has failed. America has been defeated by the Islamic Republic over the past 40 years,” he added.
Washington will on Monday reintroduce far-reaching sanctions on Iran’s vital oil sales and banking sectors to try to force the Islamic Republic into negotiations to scrap its nuclear energy and ballistic missile programs and end its support for proxies in conflicts across the Middle East.
However, the Trump administration said on Friday that eight importing countries would temporarily be allowed to keep buying Iranian oil when sanctions come back into effect. Iran is the world’s No. 3 oil exporter.
Turkey said on Saturday that Ankara had received initial indications from Washington that it would be granted a waiver, but is awaiting clarification on Monday.
Indian Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said on Saturday that his country and other leading oil importers would benefit from the U.S. waivers.
Most international sanctions on Iran were lifted in early 2016 under a deal Iran signed with world powers the year before under which it curbed its uranium enrichment program, widely seen abroad as a disguised effort to develop an atomic bomb.
But Trump denounced the nuclear deal, approved by his predecessor Barack Obama, as flawed in Iran’s favour and withdrew Washington from the pact in May.
