Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the foreign ministers of the G7 nations in Paris on Tuesday that the United States will keep imposing devastating economic costs on Iran and that Washington has options beyond the two Tehran keeps presenting it with — restarting the war or accepting the regime's demands — according to Reuters, which cited four G7 diplomats who heard him. Two of the diplomats said Rubio called Iran's rulers "lunatics."
Rubio told the meeting that sanctions were working, the diplomats said, and were limiting Tehran's ability to fund its proxies and its activities across the region. "Rubio said that they will continue with... (imposing) devastating economic operating costs on Iran," one of them told Reuters.
The closed-door account matches what Rubio has been saying in public all week. In a State Department video posted on Monday, he drew a hard line between the Iranian people and the men who rule them: "The Iranian people are great people," he said, describing the rulers as a "small core of violent maniacs" who have carried out terrorism and sabotage around the world. On Tuesday the State Department posted more of his words: "The economic pain that is being inflicted on Iran right now, on that regime, is extraordinary. It compounds, it's growing every day. These sanctions get worse over time... It's all brought about by the fact that this radical regime of lunatics is imposing this on their own people."
He was just as blunt about the terms Tehran keeps demanding. "Iran would love a deal. The problem is, the conditions they continue to place are absurd. They're not even serious. But that could change. Eventually, you have to eat," Rubio said. And he put the region's violence at one address: "Behind every single one of these destabilizing activities in the Middle East there's one common denominator — the Iranian regime."
The Iran crisis had been added to the G7 foreign ministers' agenda in Paris, and the meeting drew a surprise guest: Qatar's prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, flew in from Washington, where he had met President Donald Trump on Monday, to sit down with officials from Qatar, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Saudi Arabia on the conflict. Qatar said both Washington and Tehran had responded positively to its mediation efforts, and warned that winter and the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz were increasing the pressure on everyone.
For American families, the strategy Rubio described is the one that keeps the pressure on Tehran's war machine without putting American troops back into a shooting war — sanctions that squeeze the regime's oil money and its funding for proxies are what stand between the present standoff and either a wider war or a deal that lets the regime off the hook.
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