The Trump administration has placed “crushing sanctions” on the Iranian regime, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Sid Rosenberg on the radio host’s eponymous WABC show.
“They are under extraordinary economic pressure,” Rubio said on the Sid and Friends in the Morning program. “Let’s see what happens after that, but I can tell you they’re going to be poorer and they’re going to have less money to spend on terrorism and on a nuclear weapon as a result of these sanctions and the blockade.”
Rosenberg asked Rubio why New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has long said, including on the campaign trail, that he would have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrested in New York City. (Mamdani recently admited that he lacked that authority and asked federal agencies to detain the Israeli premier.)
“He wishes he could,” Rubio told Rosenberg, of Mamdani. “He’s speaking to some constituency that’s at the core of his political support, but he’s not going to do it.”
“He doesn’t have the ability or the legal authority to do it,” Rubio said. “Some people in politics say things to show off.”
Rosenberg told JNS that his interview with the secretary of state demonstrates that “there is certainly no question as to whether or not the secretary is pro-Israel.”
“He’s all in,” Rosenberg said. “Unprovoked, he brought up the disastrous possibility of an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel and exposed New York’s Israel-hating mayor as a man trying to appease his antisemitic base.”
“I imagine he’s very popular with the people in Israel,” Rosenberg told JNS.
Rubio told the radio host that every American president has said that the Iranian regime cannot have a nuclear weapon, but U.S. President Donald Trump is “doing something about it.”
“No one likes high gas prices. No one likes high oil prices and diesel and all that,” Rubio said. “But it would be triple that. If Iran had a nuclear weapon, they could do whatever they wanted. They could close the straits and they would tell the world, ‘You can’t stop us. We control the straits. We’ll do whatever want, because we have a nuclear weapon and we’ll nuke you if you try to stop us.’”
The secretary told Rosenberg that if the Iranian regime is “willing to massacre their own people, what do you think they’d do to us or to Israel or to their neighbors, their Sunni neighbors for example?”
Rubio said that more oil is going through the Strait of Hormuz than a couple months ago, because “our military has done a great job of clearing it of mines, protecting the ships that are going through and more and more oil is flowing.”
“Iran’s getting no oil out. We have a total blockade,” he told Rosenberg. “They haven’t been able to get a single ship out now in weeks, and it’s hurting them.”
