The Iranian embassy in India on Sunday mocked a 2020 social media post by US President Donald Trump, in which he claimed that Iran had never won a war. The said post on X (then Twitter) was reportedly Trump’s first public statement after the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, a top official of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), in January 2020.
In the post, Trump seemed to mock his predecessor, Barack Obama, over the 2015 US-Iran nuclear deal in which, as per Trump, Iran managed to extract more than the US could.
He wrote, “Iran never won a war, but never lost a negotiation!”
Sharing the screenshot of the post, the Iranian embassy in India said that not only has Iran “never lost a negotiation”, it “also recently won a major war” against the US.
Both Iran and the US have claimed victory in the recent war between the two countries, in which Washington was also backed by Israel. While Trump has claimed that the US has “decimated” the Iranian military,
Tehran framed the 14-day truce announced by Trump as a “historic win”.
Both countries sat down for negotiations in Pakistan for the weekend, which ultimately did not yield any result.
In another X post, the Iranian embassy in India further mocked the US, referring to the 2015 nuclear deal.
What Donald Trump had said in 2020
In Donald Trump’s first public response following the January 3, 2020, US drone strike in Baghdad that killed the commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force, Major General Qasem Soleimani, he had apparently mocked both Tehran and Barack Obama. “Iran never won a war, but never lost a negotiation!” he had said.
The US-Iran nuclear deal
The 2015 agreement between Iran and the P5+1 world powers (US, UK, France, China, Russia, and Germany), also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was at the time seen as a major breakthrough in Tehran’s relationship with the West.
Under the agreement, Iran agreed to reduce its enriched uranium stockpile by 98 per cent and its centrifuge count by roughly two-thirds for 10 years. The agreement also granted the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) unprecedented access to declared sites and a mechanism to inspect suspicious locations within 24 days.
In return, the West agreed to lift nuclear-related economic sanctions, unfreezing more than $100 billion in Iranian assets and allowing the country to resume oil exports.
In 2018, Donald Trump withdrew the US from the pact, calling it “defective” for not addressing Iran’s ballistic missile program or regional influence.
