Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has rejected the US call for talks with the Islamic Republic as mere lie and stressed the country’s perseverance against the pressures imposed by Washington.

“They say ‘we are ready to negotiate.’ They are saying something strange. What does ‘we’re ready to negotiate’ mean? Who left the negotiating table? Who broke the negotiating table? Who set fire to the negotiating room? It was them (Americans),” Rouhani said in a meeting with Iranian governors from across the country in Tehran on Tuesday.

He added that Iran has been acting on the basis of rationale, logic, morality, and international commitments but the Americans have, on the contrary, violated all of those principles and “are telling lies every day.”

The president emphasized that the Iranian nation resisted and countered the American lies, saying, “Our people are doing a great job. Our people are putting up resistance against a superpower that is acting in a brutal way.”

“It is clear to the entire world today that we will never surrender under sanctions and pressure,” Rouhani pointed out.

He noted that the US president imagined he could bring the Iranians to the negotiating table within three months by exerting pressure on the country, “but he later realized that he had been mistaken and had made a miscalculation.”

Tensions between Iran and the United States have been high since President Donald Trump decided in 2018 to unilaterally withdraw the US from the international nuclear agreement — officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — and reinstated the sanctions that the agreement had lifted, in defiance of the fact that the accord has been endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2231.

Under Washington’s pressure, the three European signatories to the JCPOA, France, Britain and Germany, have so far failed to fulfill their contractual obligation to protect Tehran’s business interests against the sanctions.