Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Sunday said that the unilateral sanctions that the United States has imposed in his country have cost the Islamic republic's economy over $1 trillion.
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Tehran expects to be fully compensated, he told Iran's state-run PressTV.
Zarif said that once the US takes action to re-enter the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers and sanctions are lifted, the issue of compensation "must" be discussed.
"Whether those compensations will take the form of reparation, or whether they take the form of investment, or whether they take the form of measures to prevent a repeat of what Trump did," he said, referring to former US President Donald Trump, who pulled out of the nuclear deal in 2015 and imposed harsh, comprehensive sanctions on Iran's economy.
Zarif argued that the Trump administration had imposed 800 sanctions on all levels of the Iranian economy, saying that all of them would have to be lifted before the US could return to the deal.
He lauded China and Russia, two signatories to the 2015 deal, for "being Iran's friends" during the sanctions era, and admonished Germany, France, and Britain – the deal's European partners – for not pursuing "any tangible efforts" to maintain their ties with Iran.
"The situation Europe has created for itself is that it has to wait for the US to make a decision. It lives at the behest and mercy of the US," he said. "Now, they should convince the US to come back [to the nuclear deal] at least to allow them … to maintain their dignity and allow them to fulfill their obligations. That's not a tall order."
Iran's top diplomat further noted that if the US fails to lift sanctions, his country will leave the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and will continue to boost its nuclear program.
"This is not a threat. We are simply exercising the remedial measures foreseen in the JCPOA," Zarif stressed, adding Iran would like to "normalize economic relations with the world" and "does not want to engage in 'nuclear extortion'" as former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has claimed.
He said that it was Washington that was "engaging in extortion" as its crippling sanctions have prevented Iran from meeting the public's needs during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has hit the Islamic republic particularly hard.
The administration of US President Joe Biden is still continuing the "maximum pressure" campaign of the Trump era, Zarif said, saying that the US was blocking Iran's request for a $5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund to fight the pandemic.
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