Meeting with the outgoing Rouhani government, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei remarked that “it became clear in this administration that trusting the West will not work… Whenever you made our affairs contingent on reaching an agreement with the West and the U.S., you were unsuccessful”. On the Vienna talks, he said: “The Americans have stuck to their obstinate position. On paper and in words, they promise to remove the sanctions, but they have not and will not remove them… They say, ‘If you want the sanctions to be removed, we should include a clause in the agreement which states that we must negotiate and agree over certain matters in the future’”. “This clause is actually a pretext for their future interference”, Khamenei contended, adding: “This is about the JCOPA itself, about renewing it and about various other matters such as missiles and regional issues. If we say later on that we are not going to negotiate over these matters… they will say that there is no deal because we have supposedly violated it”. He also emphasised that “when they [ie, the U.S.] are told to promise and guarantee that they will not violate [the deal] another time, they respond that they cannot give such a guarantee”.