Secretary of State Marco Rubio has started to do President Donald Trump’s flip-flopping for him.
Trump, perhaps bogged down by a lack of progress in negotiations with Iran, has taken to double-speak. In a Sunday afternoon Truth Social brag, the 79-year-old talked up his “deal,” saying that it far surpasses former President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear agreement with Tehran, even though, by his own admission, “It isn’t even fully negotiated yet.”
Tasked with spinning Trump’s latest whim, the United States’ top diplomat, who was in India for unrelated reasons, fielded questions from a baying press gaggle.
The secretary of state took a much more cautious approach than Trump, telling reporters, “I wouldn’t read too much into it.”
“We thought we might have some news last night,” he said, although he made it clear that there was still lots left to negotiate. “We have what I think is a pretty solid thing on the table in terms of their ability to open up the strait and enter into a very real, significant, time-limited negotiation on the nuclear matter, and hopefully we can pull it off,” he said.
Asked what was delaying a deal, he appeared to blame Tehran, according to Wall Street Journal reporter Vera Bergengruen on X. “It’s just a response… you got to hear back, and it takes the Iranian system a little while longer to get back. Look, the president’s not going to make a bad deal… he’s not in a hurry,” Rubio said.
Trump said the conflict would have ended within “four to six weeks.” It is now entering its 12th week.
“It has a lot of support in the Gulf. There’s a lot of support globally, every country that we’ve walked through it. [They] understand it’s not just very reasonable, but it’s the right thing for the world to get done,” Rubio added of the package he hopes will become a ratified deal.
Reuters reported that Rubio said the U.S. could soon be ready to abandon diplomacy altogether. The secretary rather ominously said that “alternatives” would be explored if negotiations fail.
Trump created hope for an imminent deal on Sunday afternoon. In a Truth Social post, he said: “If I make a deal with Iran, it will be a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama, which gave Iran massive amounts of CASH, and a clear and open path to a Nuclear Weapon,” Trump wrote. “Our deal is the exact opposite, but nobody has seen it, or knows what it is. It isn’t even fully negotiated yet.”
“So don’t listen to the losers, who are critical about something they know nothing about,” he continued. “Unlike those before me who should have solved this problem many years ago, I don’t make bad deals!”
The two sides remain divided over several contentious issues, including Iran’s nuclear program, Israel’s war in Lebanon against the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia, and Tehran’s demands for sanctions relief and access to tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues frozen abroad.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior Trump administration official told Reuters that Iran had agreed “in principle” to reopen the Strait of Hormuz in return for the U.S. lifting its naval blockade, as well as to eliminate Tehran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium.
They added that the U.S. believed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, had signed off on the deal’s basic framework.
