Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Monday that it’s unclear whether the group the United States is currently negotiating with in Iran will ultimately end up being in charge once the war is done.
Rubio’s comments came after President Donald Trump proclaimed on Monday morning that the U.S. is negotiating with “A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME.”
Neither Trump nor Rubio specified exactly who is included on the Iranian negotiating side. Whomever they’re speaking with, however, is “saying some of the right things privately,” Rubio said in an interview with Good Morning America, while the president said, “Great progress has been made.”
Even with the progress, no one yet knows who will emerge as Iran’s next leader. There have been no public sightings of Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei since he was selected to be the next supreme leader, following the assassination of his father, Ali Khamenei, who had led the country from 1989 until his death on Feb. 28.
U.S. officials have said the younger Khamenei, who is thought to be a hard-liner, was injured in the strikes that killed his father and several other senior Iranian leaders, but his well-being remains a mystery, raising the question of whether he or someone else will ultimately emerge as the leader of the country.
“But at the end of the day, we have to see if these people end up being the ones in charge, seeing if they’re the ones that have the power to deliver. We’re going to test it. We are hopeful that that’s the case,” Rubio explained.
“There are clearly people there talking to us in ways that previous people in charge in Iran have not spoken to us in the past, some of the things they’re willing to do, some of the things they’re saying they’re willing to do,” he added.
Trump, for his part, threatened U.S. escalation if the negotiations do not result in an agreement.
“Great progress has been made but, if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched,'” the president said.
Trump initially issued a similar threat more than a week ago, but has pushed the deadline back a couple of times, citing progress in the negotiations. The latest self-imposed deadline for a deal is April 6.
After Trump’s initial threat of attacks on Iran’s power plants, Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf threatened to hit energy sites across the Middle East.
TRUMP’S TWO PATHS FOR IRAN WAR: NEGOTIATION OR ESCALATION
While the administration is hoping negotiations pay off, the military has deployed thousands of additional troops to the region since the war began with the possibility of new types operations taking place, including attempting to conquer Iranian islands in the Persian Gulf near the Strait of Hormuz to help open the vital waterway, or a mission to try and recover more than 900 pounds of enriched uranium believed to be buried deep underground after U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities last June.
If Trump escalates the war, Iran could choose to match that escalation due to its concern that the war poses an existential threat to its control.
