TEHRAN – President Hassan Rouhani said on Sunday that all the plans that the United States has taken against Iran have ended in failure.

“In the past 14 months that the pressure of sanctions has increased, our foreign debts have decreased. We had around $12.4 billion of foreign debt, but today, this amount has decreased to $9.5 billion," Rouhani stated.“During the past 14 months, the U.S. has imposed harshest sanctions against the Iranian people. However, any route that the U.S. has taken, be it political, social and legal, has led to failure,” he told a gathering of people in Shirvan, North Khorasan Province.

The Trump administration revoked the international nuclear deal, officially called the JCPOA, in May 2018 and ordered reimposition of sanctions lifted under the deal and added new ones. The Trump administration has been insisting that it is applying “maximum pressure” against Iran to force the country to renegotiate the terms of the JCPOA.

However, Rouhani said, the Iranians’ determination has not been weakened under the sanctions pressure.

Elsewhere, the president said the people are economically in a difficult situation, yet the country will overcome these difficulties through unity.

He also said it is wrong to say that the problems are rooted in the government’s incompetence.

The president added the country's foreign debts has been cut by 25 percent despite sanctions.

“In the past 14 months that the pressure of sanctions has increased, our foreign debts have decreased. We had around $12.4 billion of foreign debt, but today, this amount has decreased to $9.5 billion," he stated.

Pointing to an emergency meeting held by the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about Iran’s nuclear decision to reduce its commitments in response to violation of the JCPOA and reimposition of sanctions, Rouhani said no country paid attention to the U.S. claims which was a victory for Iran.

The emergency meeting of the 35-member board was held on Wednesday at U.S. request to address Iran’s exceeding of the limit set by the 2015 nuclear deal on its uranium enrichment level, regardless of the fact that Washington itself committed the biggest breach against the agreement in May 2018 by leaving it.

Speaking on Thursday with the Beirut-based Arabic-language al-Mayadeen television news network, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said the United States became politically isolated at the IAEA board meeting.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Seyyed Abbas Mousavi tweeted on Wednesday, “Another failure for the U.S. at the mockery of the IAEA’s Board of Governors. The U.S. was once again isolated by its own hands.”

Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA, Kazem Gharib-Abadi, told Press TV, “We have been informed that the United States were seeking to have some formal outcome of this meeting, something like a resolution […] but because they haven’t been in a position to convince the others to have their support for their claim, regarding consideration of Iran’s ceasing its implementation of the JCPOA, there has been no conclusion.”

“The majority of the members of the Board supported the JCPOA, multilateralism and deplored unilateral actions of the U.S.,” Gharib-Abadi added.

The Iranian envoy earlier told the IAEA’s special meeting that "the sadistic tendency of the United States to use illegal, unilateral sanctions as an instrument to coerce sovereign states and private entities should come to an end.”

Mikhail Ulyanov, the Russian ambassador to the IAEA, also tweeted after the meeting that the U.S. “was practically isolated on this issue”.

NA/PA