Iran’s foreign minister says the country has no preference between the two US presidential candidates Donald Trump and Joe Biden, even though it considers the latter’s statements to be “more promising”.

Speaking to CBS News on Monday, Mohammad Javad Zarif said that "the statements by the Biden camp have been more promising, but we will have to wait and see."

It's not what the new administration says during the campaign that counts, but what it does in office, Zarif added.

"What is important for us is how the White House behaves after the election, not what promises are there, what slogans are made. The behavior of the US is important. If the US decides to stop its malign behavior against Iran, then it will be a different story no matter who sits in the White House," the Iranian top diplomat noted.

Earlier in the day, the Foreign Ministry said Iran is unconcerned about who will become the United States’ next president and only looks towards the US administration’s political choices.

“More than [paying attention to] the results [of the US elections], we pay attention to the US administration’s actions,” and the policy that it will adopt, ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said in Tehran on Monday, on the eve of the US presidential elections.

The Biden camp has signaled that, if he wins, his administration would attempt to renegotiate the deal hashed out in 2015, but the Iranian Foreign Minister told CBS News that is not Tehran's hope.

"If we wanted to do that [renegotiate], we would have done it with President Trump four years ago," Zarif said, stressing that "under no circumstances" would Tehran consider renegotiating the terms of a deal which has since been adopted as a United Nations Security Council Resolution.

Zarif was categorical that Iran would, instead, like to see the US re-join the deal.

"We can find a way to reengage, obviously. But reengagement does not mean renegotiation," he said. "It means the US coming back to the negotiating table."

Zarif further said the Trump administration's "maximum pressure" campaign against the Islamic Republic has failed.

"It has hurt Iran," he said. "But it hasn't brought the type of political change that the US desired — be it regime change, which was the desire of a certain segment of the current US administration, or what President Trump wanted, which was to bring Iran to its knees so that he could dictate his terms of negotiations."

"I know that Vice President Biden understands that that won't happen [renegotiate the terms of the nuclear deal], and may act differently," the Iranian foreign minister said. He expressed hope, however, that Trump, too, "is capable of acting differently."

Elsewhere in his remarks, Zarif once again denied any interference by Iran in the US elections, and called President Trump "the single person who is making the most important and effective affront against the U.S. electoral system."

Anyone interested in undermining US democracy, Zarif suggested, "will just ask President Trump to continue talking about forgeries and inconsistencies in mail-in ballots and all sorts of other stuff."

 

Source: Press TV