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Speaking at a high school event in Tehran on Sunday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that much of the United States' economic influence would "go away" if countries around the world were to ditch the dollar as the basis for their international trade, Sputnik reported.

"America’s power rests on the dollar; a great part of America’s economic power will go away if countries eliminate the dollar from their economic systems," the minister said.

Zarif went on to say that Washington was trying to beef up pressure on Tehran "out of desperation" and slammed the US-led economic war as "economic terrorism".

"It amounts, by definition, to economic terrorism because the United States is putting pressure in terms of what its president calls warfare on normal ordinary Iranians in order to change the policies of their government," he told reporters on the sidelines of the event.

The developments come against the backdrop of a new set of US sanctions on Tehran's petrochemical sector, targeting the country's largest holding group, Persian Gulf Petrochemical Industries Company, among other firms.