Mousavian made the remarks Friday in an interview with the London-based online news outlet 'Middle East Eye' (MEE).
'Iran is the most experienced country in the world (at) handling sanctions. I don’t believe any other country in this region has the experience, capacity or scale to resist against sanctions,' MEE quoted Mousavian as saying.
“Iran has been sanctioned for almost 40 years. It is not something new,” he added.
For much of his interview he said, 'sanctions would do nothing to deter Iran’s conventional weapons industry.'
Mousavian referred to the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq imposed war saying, 'it pushed Iran to go for self-sufficiency on the production of conventional weapons.'
Today, Iran is the most powerful country in the region for producing conventional arms – from tanks to airplanes to jet fighters, missiles, everything,' he noted.
He went on to say that 'Iran would have a hard economic time” as a result of the sanctions and may take a small hit, given the current relatively high price of oil on the global market, at about $63 per barrel.
“It is a very important objective of Iran’s political security to manage an economy minus oil,” Mousavian said.
After Washington's May 8 exit from the historic Iran Deal, the US gave 90- and 180-day wind-down periods to other countries before it starts re-imposing oil sanctions on Tehran on November 4.
Part of the US' illegitimate sanctions were imposed on Iran on August 9.
The US President Donald Trump also said he would reinstate the US nuclear sanctions on Iran and impose “the highest level” of economic bans on the Islamic Republic.
This is while, the American media ‘Bloomberg’ announced on Friday that the US administration exempted eight countries from oil sanctions against Iran.
“The US has agreed to let eight countries including Japan, India and South Korea keep buying Iranian oil after it reimposes sanctions on the OPEC producer on Nov. 5,” Bloomberg quoted a senior administration official as saying.
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Tehran, Nov 3, IRNA - Iran's former diplomat and nuclear negotiator Hossein Mousavian described Iran as the most experienced country in the world in terms of handling sanctions.
