Iran's foreign minister on Thursday urged US President-elect Joe Biden to abandon Washington's "rogue" behavior and lift crippling sanctions on his country, rejecting talk of renegotiating the 2015 nuclear deal.
Mohammad Javad Zarif said that when President Donald Trump left the landmark agreement, the United States had breached a UN Security Council resolution endorsing it.
"The US has been in grave breach of that resolution because the Trump administration has been a rogue regime," Zarif said in an online interview held as part of the Mediterranean Dialogues event, hosted by Italy.
"Now if President-elect Biden wants to continue to be a rogue regime, then he can continue to be asking for negotiations to implement its commitments," he added, AFP reported.
"The United States must stop, the United States must cease its violations of international law. It doesn't require any negotiations."
Decades old US-Iranian tensions escalated after Trump unilaterally withdrew from the nuclear agreement in 2018 and reimposed, then toughened, sanctions that have hammered Iran's economy.
Biden has signaled he will return the US to the deal, which offered Tehran relief from international sanctions in exchange for guarantees, verified by the United Nations, that its nuclear program has no military aims.
Also, Biden told The New York Times this week that if Iran returned to compliance, the US would rejoin, after which he would seek to tighten Iran's nuclear constraints and address concerns about both its missile program and Iran's support for militants in the region.
But Zarif said: "We will not renegotiate a deal which we negotiated."
