The top US diplomat said Monday that it would be unacceptable for Iran to “decide who gets to use an international waterway,” referring to the Strait of Hormuz and Tehran’s attempts to establish a new status quo.
Iran has said it would unblock the strait as part of a deal with the United States following the joint US-Israeli war on Iran earlier this year.
But Rubio said the offer was not innocent. “What they mean by opening the strait is, ‘Yes, the straits are opened as long as you coordinate with Iran, get our permission or else we’ll blow you up, and you pay us. That’s not opening the straits; those are international waterways,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.
“They cannot normalize, nor can we tolerate them trying to normalize, a system in which the Iranians decide who gets to use an international waterway, and how much you have to pay them to use it,” he said in an interview with Fox News.
Rubio lamented the fact that hardliners “with an apocalyptic vision of the future” have the ultimate power in Iran.
He added that the status of the new supreme leader, the son of the former, was still unclear.
“Now that you have a supreme leader whose credibility is still untested, whose access is questionable, who has not been seen visibly, publicly and has not spoken. We have not heard his voice,” Rubio said.
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