📌 Tehran, IRNA – Former foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, emphasizing the importance of national self-confidence in foreign policy, says Iran needs to engage in dialogue with the global power structure on an equal footing, avoiding any weakness and passivity.
Zarif shared his views on political and international developments, including anti-Iran plots and pressures, during an unveiling and review event on three of his recently authored books on Saturday.
“We must achieve self-belief and engage with the world precisely from our own standpoint,” he stressed, underscoring that the fundamental prerequisite for entering into any “constructive dialogue is belief in oneself and one’s own independent identity.”
Insisting on upholding Iran’s historical and authentic ground, the former top diplomat said that the dignity, stature, and capabilities of this land are what matter most in the international arena and in front of a party that has been hollowed out of its own identity.
According to him, gaining a rightful place, acknowledging civilizational and defensive weight, and leveraging domestic strength are other aspects that enable Iran to engage in dialogue constructively with the world—avoiding the traps of weakness and passivity while steering clear of costly, fruitless confrontations.
Referring to the recent US-Israeli-imposed wars, Zarif said that Iran, solidifying its strategic reality, has proven to the aggressors and their backers that the era of “hit-and-run” tactics is over. The practical reality demonstrated that even when two nuclear powers simultaneously attacked Iran, they failed to achieve their strategic objectives, he added.
He said Iran’s deterrence capabilities were on display in a manner unprecedented in modern history, forcing a global superpower to evacuate its military bases from the region, and daring enough to directly target those bases, inflicting heavy losses.
Zarif also highlighted the war crimes committed by American and Israeli aggressors by targeting non-military areas such as Lamard, where the Hiroshima-type bomb was detonated at a high altitude, exploding before hitting the ground, each scattering 180,000 pieces of shrapnel—totaling 720,000 fragments—which struck civilians.
On the US sanctions regime, he said he was one of the victims of such cruel measures, which even hindered the publication of academic works, and the reason was his support for the martyred Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, and the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC).
Slamming US policies toward Iran, Zarif said the Americans had not understood the Iranian nation and remain under the illusion that they could force Iran to capitulate through pressure and threats. “Never threaten an Iranian,” was my warning at one point during the JCPOA negotiations, he added, with reference to sanctions mechanisms.
My experience spanning over four decades in diplomacy and foreign policy demonstrates that threatening the Iranian nation invariably yields the exact opposite; this people will never yield or bow down in the face of threatening rhetoric, he underscored.
Pointing to Washington’s resort to repeatedly failed policies against Iran, Zarif noted that the cognitive deficit had dragged the US into a vortex of aggression against Iran, because the American leadership was unable to grasp the realities of Iranian society and was easily deceived by Benjamin Netanyahu, who dragged it into the dangerous vortex of military aggression.
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