Iran can be both a prosperous and peaceful country, and U.S. President Donald Trump hopes that the Islamic Republic seizes that chance, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Sean Hannity, of Fox News, during an interview on Thursday from the Cornelia Diamond Golf Resort and Spa in Antalya, Turkey.
“Our problem is not with the Iranian people. The Iranian people are a peaceful people, an ancient civilization and culture we admire greatly,” Rubio said. “Our problem is with a clerical regime that is behind every problem in the region: Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, the militias that have conducted attacks out of Iraq and Syria.”
All of those terror groups “track back to the Iranian regime,” Rubio said. “All the instability in Syria tracks back to the Iranian regime. It’s a regime that every day and every Friday chants, ‘death to Israel, death to America.’”
“We have to believe them when they say that,” he said.
The Iranian regime must never get nuclear weapons, according to Rubio. “The end decision lies in the hands of one person, and that’s the supreme leader in Iran, and I hope he chooses the path of peace and prosperity, not a destructive path,” the secretary said. “We’ll see how that plays out.”
Hannity asked Rubio about published reports that the Iranian regime has enriched uranium to “quite a high” level, and that “if you’re at 60% enrichment, it is not a stretch to get to weapons-grade enrichment at 80%, 90%.”
“When you say 60, it’s misleading when people hear that number because they think 60% enrichment and 90% is what you need for a weapon,” Rubio said. “Actually, 90% of the work it takes to get to weapons-grade enrichment is getting to 60. Once you’re at 60, you’re 90% of the way there. You are, in essence, a threshold nuclear weapon state, which is what Iran basically has become.”
“If they decided to do so, they could do so very quickly,” Rubio said. “If they stockpile enough of that 60% enriched, they could very quickly turn it into 90 and weaponize it.”
That ability to weaponize quickly is “why Israel feels urgency about it, and that’s why we feel urgency about it,” Rubio said. “But not just us. Throughout the Gulf region, no country in the region wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”
