The top US diplomat said Monday that it would be unacceptable for Iran to \u201cdecide who gets to use an international waterway,\u201d referring to the Strait of Hormuz and Tehran\u2019s attempts to establish a new status quo.
\nIran 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.
\nBut Rubio said the offer was not innocent. \u201cWhat they mean by opening the strait is, \u2018Yes, 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\u2019s not opening the straits; those are international waterways,\u201d Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.
\n\u201cThey 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,\u201d he said in an interview with Fox News.
\nRubio lamented the fact that hardliners \u201cwith an apocalyptic vision of the future\u201d have the ultimate power in Iran.
\nHe added that the status of the new supreme leader, the son of the former, was still unclear.
\n\u201cNow 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,\u201d Rubio said.
\n#StraitOfHormuz #Iran #USDiplomacy #MarcoRubio #InternationalWaterways #MaritimeSecurity #IranianControl #Geopolitics #MiddleEast #SupremeLeader<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The top US diplomat said Monday that it would be unacceptable for Iran to \u201cdecide who gets to use an international waterway,\u201d referring to the Strait of Hormuz and Tehran\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11484,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle-east-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fajr.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fajr.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fajr.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fajr.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fajr.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fajr.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fajr.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fajr.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fajr.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fajr.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}