Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Saturday said that this is not the time to build walls between the nations, referring to United States President Donald Trump's executive orders of constructing a wall along the southern borders of Mexico and America.
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Rouhani, who did not mention Trump in his statement, also criticised the steps taken by the Republican leader towards cancelling world trade agreements.
"Today is not the time to erect walls between nations. They have forgotten that the Berlin wall fell years ago," the Iranian president said in a live speech on Iranian state television.
"To annul world trade accords does not help their economy and does not serve the development and blooming of the world economy. This is the day for the world to get closer through trade," Rouhani told a tourism conference in Tehran.
Trump, on Monday, formally withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, delivering one of his campaign vows to end America's involvement in the 2015 pact with 10 other nations.
Rouhani, however, worked to thaw Iran's relations with major world powers and come up with a nuclear deal, which was signed in 2015 with US and other countries. The deal curbed Iran's nuclear programme in exchange of lifting several sanctions imposed on the country by various nations. The Iran nuclear deal was a landmark foreign policy achieved under former president Barack Obama.
However, Trump has threatened to annul the deal or to seek a better deal with the Iranian nation. However, other five world countries involved in the deal have reaffirmed their commitment to the deal, despite Trump's comments.
Before Trump's inauguration, Rouhani had also said that Trump could not unilaterally cancel the nuclear deal and that talk of renegotiating it was "meaningless."
