Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said during a cabinet meeting on Wednesday that the contentious debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden demonstrated the United States is “mired” in a “very difficult situation.”
“On the one hand, they had the worst management in the coronavirus, and are grappling with the worst unemployment rate and unrest inside the United States,” Rouhani said. “On the other hand, they achieved no victory in foreign policy.”
Iran is one of the authoritarian nations that lies routinely and extravagantly about its own coronavirus response. Iran’s unemployment rate was considerably worse before the coronavirus than America’s is right now.
“They failed in their foreign policy agenda not only towards Iran, but also towards the region, the Pacific, Europe and the North American Free Trade Agreement,” Rouhani said, accusing the Trump administration of implementing “the most hostile, criminal, and terrorist policies” against Iran.
It is not easy to make the argument that U.S. foreign policy is currently faring worse than Iranian foreign policy. President Trump has received three Nobel Prize nominations for his foreign policy, particularly his Middle Eastern diplomacy, while Iran is increasingly isolated by the Abraham Accord peace deals its rivals are making with Israel. Iran’s Hezbollah proxy in Lebanon is in rough shape after the gigantic explosion in the port it controls; the international community furiously blamed Hezbollah this week for collapsing the latest effort to form a government in tumultuous and impoverished Lebanon.
Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are busting terrorist cells they describe as linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The Iranian oil industry has been reduced to smuggling oil to the decrepit socialist regime in Venezuela, paid off with bars of gold looted from the Venezuelan treasury. Iraqis grow weary of bloody terror attacks by Iran-linked Shiite militia forces, although Tehran might claim a win if the United States closes its embassy in Baghdad because of rocket and mortar attacks. Iran might even get dragged into the bloody mess unfolding in the disputed province between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
“Our enemies were unsuccessful in three years and, God willing, they will be so in these final months and the situation will not remain like this … if we stand united,” Rouhani said, clearly anticipating rescue for the regime if Biden wins the U.S. election. Rouhani himself is due to retire his position after a second term and be replaced in elections scheduled for June 2021.