Rubio Says Iran Serious about Reaching Deal with U.S.
"I think they're are serious about getting themselves out of the mess that they're in," Rubio said in an interview with a news agency, citing Iran's deteriorating economic landscape — including runaway inflation, wage payment failures, and suffocating sanctions — as factors driving Tehran toward the negotiating table.
"All the problems that Iran had before the start of this conflict are still in place, and most of them are worse," he said.
Yet Rubio made clear that economic desperation alone would not be sufficient grounds for a deal unless it addressed Washington's core security concern.
"We have to ensure that any deal that is made … definitively prevents them from sprinting towards a nuclear weapon at any point," he added.
His remarks landed amid media reports indicating Iran has proposed reopening the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly 20% of global oil supply flows daily — in exchange for the US lifting its naval blockade and halting hostilities, while pushing broader nuclear negotiations to a later phase. The strait's mounting instability has already driven up oil prices and inflated shipping and insurance costs worldwide.
Rubio flatly rejected Iran's characterization of the waterway as open, offering a blunt rebuttal of Tehran's framing.
"The straits are opened, as long as you coordinate with Iran, get our permission, or we'll blow you up and you pay us. That's not opening the straits," he said.
He pressed the point further, warning against any creeping normalization of Iranian gatekeeping over a globally critical passage.
"Those are international waterways. 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 added.
Diplomacy between the two sides has so far yielded little traction. Iran and the US convened talks in Islamabad on April 11, failing to broker a resolution to the war that erupted on February 28. Those negotiations followed a Pakistan-mediated two-week ceasefire struck on April 8, which President Donald Trump subsequently extended.
A planned mission to Pakistan by special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner was abruptly cancelled by Trump over the weekend. Efforts to schedule a fresh round of negotiations remain ongoing, with the Strait of Hormuz, the US blockade of Iranian ports, and the future of Iran's nuclear program all emerging as core stumbling blocks to any breakthrough.
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