Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Shamkhani said Sunday that Islamic countries, especially Iran and Pakistan, should expand the scope of cooperation against the policies of the United States (US).
“The US policies are based on hypocrisy and double standards towards Islamic countries, thus making it compulsory for Muslim countries, especially Iran and Pakistan, to expand cooperation against the US while maintaining vigilance to deter any threats,” Shamkhani said during a meeting in Tehran with Pakistan’s National Security Advisor Nasser Khan Janjua.
On the occasion, Janjua ensured Pakistan’s cooperation in security and economic areas. Referring indirectly to the US policies against Islamic countries, Janjua said that Muslim countries should raise awareness among the masses to counter foreign plots aimed at dividing the Muslims.
Shamkhani said that the new national security strategy adopted by the US would spread insecurity and instability in all corners of the world. These remarks were made by the Iranian security chief two days after Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif said that Islamabad’s alliance with Washington was over.
Relations between both the countries also went sore after Donald Trump announced his new strategy on December 18 last year, where he announced the suspension of military aid to Pakistan. The strategy did not target Pakistan alone, as Trump also managed to irritate China and Russia. Both these countries hold immense sway over the global political and economic stage at the moment.
Referring to China, together with Russia, as rival and revisionist powers, Trump sharply criticised China for challenging US power. The severe allegations from the US immediately sparked a backlash from China. The Chinese Foreign Ministry reprimanded the US for “malicious slander.”
The US strategy laid forward the Trump administration’s harshest stance toward China since Trump took office in January last year. Singling China out for 33 mentions, the report bluntly criticised China for seeking to “challenge American influence, values, and wealth” as well as “attempting to erode American security and prosperity,” and using “technology, propaganda, and coercion to shape a world antithetical to” US interests and values.
Specifically, it claimed that “China seeks to displace the United States in the Indo-Pacific region, expand the reaches of its state-driven economic model, and reorder the region in its favour.”
Russia also dismissed the US new strategy as imperialist.
“A quick read of the parts of the strategy that mention our country one way or another… (shows) an imperialist character,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
The strategy, he added, also showed “an unwillingness to give up the idea of a unipolar world, moreover, an insistent unwillingness, disregard for a multipolar world.”
