TEHRAN – With the world worried about President-elect Donald Trump’s leadership skills, President Hassan Rouhani has hailed the 2015 nuclear deal a “surprise” to the whole world.

Rouhani was making the remarks as he inaugurated on Sunday oil projects in the southern province of Khuzestan.  
“…BARJAM (Persian acronym for the nuclear deal) came as a surprise to the world,” he said. 
Iran and six world powers, including the U.S., hammered out an agreement to break the nuclear impasse, on for more than a decade. 
Under the deal, Iran started getting relief from economic sanctions in exchange for it rolling back its nuclear program.  
Rouhani has seen the pact as a unique opportunity to compensate lost opportunities to generate jobs for the increasing number of youths joining the workforce. 
“We should grab the current opening to attract investment and technology to develop the country and generate jobs for the youth,” he said. 
While Rouhani has hailed the nuclear deal as a legacy foreign policy, the election of Republican Donald Trump as U.S. president may come as a blow.
Walid Phares, one of Donald Trump's foreign policy advisers, on Thursday said the president-elect is going to demand changes to the Iran nuclear agreement. "Ripping up is maybe a too strong of word, he's gonna take that agreement, it's been done before in international context, and then review it," Phares said on BBC radio Thursday.

Other sides to the multi-party deal have reacted to threats to the deal from Trump.
Notably, EU foreign policy chief Federico Mogherini has ruled out the possibility of the deal being violated by Washington, saying it is not a bilateral agreement between Tehran and Washington. 
“The Iranian deal, the nuclear deal, is not a bilateral agreement between the U.S. and Iran,” she had said in an interview with CNN, stressing that she has “a personal, direct responsibility…”
Also, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has expressed hope for the full implementation of the deal, saying, "Of course Iran's options are not limited but our hope and our desire and our preference is for the full implementation of the nuclear agreement, which is not bilateral for one side to be able to scrap."