Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Tuesday that any new nuclear deal with Iran would have to go far beyond the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, arguing that agreement failed to stop Tehran from building up its enrichment capabilities.
“It is not JCPOA,” Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “[That deal] would have expired this year, and it allowed them to keep all the enrichment equipment that they needed.”
Rubio noted that Iran has already enriched nearly 1,000 pounds of uranium to 60% purity — just a short technical step from weapons-grade levels.
Any future agreement, he said, would have to address both Iran’s enrichment infrastructure and its growing stockpile of highly enriched material — making clear Tehran won’t get sanctions relief without it.
“It would have to deal with that question,” Rubio said, “and it would have to deal with the highly enriched uranium that they currently are in possession of.”
The secretary’s public testimony — his first since the Iran war began Feb. 28 — came as Washington and Tehran are discussing a potential agreement through mediators that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and begin formal nuclear talks between the two adversaries.
“There is the prospect before us — which could happen today, it could happen tomorrow, it could happen next week,” Rubio said. “For the first time, certainly in my memory, they have agreed to negotiate aspects of their nuclear program that just a month ago, just a year ago, they were refusing to even mention.”
He also laid out exactly what the US hopes to see as a result of the ongoing communications.
“We’re hopeful that something like that could happen in which the straits would reopen, we would enter into a period of negotiations on very specific topics — delineated negotiations in the hope of reaching an outcome that’s acceptable to us, and something they would be able to do as well,” he said.
However, Rubio made clear the US will not ease sanctions on Iran in exchange for Tehran reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, the US would agree to lift its blockade of Iranian ports, which is costing Tehran “hundreds of millions of dollars a day.”
“There wouldn’t have been a blockade if Iran had agreed to do what they said they would do when the cease-fire kicked in, which is they were going to open the straits,” he explained.
Meanwhile, President Trump on Tuesday shot down Iranian state-affiliated media’s reports that Washington and Tehran have stopped communicating through mediators in recent days, claiming in a Truth Social post that the negotiations have been “going on continuously” without pause.
“Where they lead, one never knows, but as I told Iran, ‘It’s time, one way or another, for you to make a Deal. You’ve been doing this for 47 years, and it cannot be allowed to go on any longer!’” he added.
His post came after IRGC-affiliated outlet Fars News Agency reported “no message exchange with America is currently underway.”
“While some media outlets and Western officials are trying to portray the process of message exchange between Iran and America as normal, the information obtained by the Fars News Agency correspondent reveals a different reality,” Fars wrote in a post to X.
Rubio at the hearing explained that the negotiating process is taking extra time because of the disjointed and involved nature of communications in Iran.
“Complicating that process, unfortunately, is their internal regime is somewhat fractured … it takes days to get responses from their system,” he told the Senate committee.
However, he said Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is “increasingly” involved in negotiations with the US — but still has not been seen directly.
“I think there are indications out there that he is increasingly engaging at some level, although all of his communications have been in writing and through intermediaries,” he said. “They’re operating probably using couriers and things of this nature.”
Khamenei’s location has been unknown since he was injured and likely disfigured in the barrage of US-Israeli-led attacks on Iran, which killed his father, wife and son.
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The Post previously reported that Trump had been briefed that the supreme leader is “probably gay.”
Should the talks between Washington and Tehran collapse, Rubio said Iran would face the prospect of confronting the US without the defenses it once had, thanks to Operation Epic Fury.
“If it doesn’t work out, then obviously we still have a problem with respect to their nuclear ambitions — but what they won’t have is the conventional shield to hide behind any longer,” he said, referring to missiles and drone infrastructure destroyed by the US military in the shooting phase of the war.
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