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Iran minister: Trump should stop ‘interference’ in Middle East if he wants cheaper oil

by Megan Keller

Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh was quoted saying that America should stop interfering in the Middle East if it wants lower oil prices.

“Mr. Trump is trying to seriously reduce exports of Iran’s oil and also ensure the price of oil does not go up, but these two cannot happen together,” Reuters reported Zanganeh as saying to the Iranian Students’ News Agency.

“If he wants the price of oil not to go up and the market not to get destabilized, he should stop unwarranted and disruptive interference in the Middle East and not be an obstacle to the production and export of Iran’s oil.”

The comments come after President Trump on Tuesday took aim at Iran in a defiant address to the United Nations, calling on world leaders to join the U.S. in isolating Tehran.

Trump also used a large portion of his address to tout his administration’s plans to launch a “campaign of economic pressure” aimed at starving Iran of money it would use “to advance its bloody agenda” in the Middle East and beyond. 

The president has also gone after OPEC for high oil prices for months.
 
“OPEC and OPEC nations are, as usual, ripping off the rest of the world. And I don’t like it. Nobody should like it,” Trump said at the U.N. on Tuesday, according to CNN.
 
But Zanganeh blamed Trump, not OPEC, for the recent rise in prices.

“Trump blames OPEC for what he has created and caused: the rise of the price of oil and disturbance in the market.”

OPEC and 10 other oil producing countries, led by Russia, have been decreasing their oil production since the beginning of 2017, The Wall Street Journal reported.
 
The group overshot its goal, in part because of production problems in Iran and Venezuela, and is now attempting to bring supply gradually upwards.

However, Saudi Arabia, the de facto head of OPEC, said Sunday that the group will not rapidly increase supply, as Trump has demanded. 

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