LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio will likely face a lot of questions from lawmakers today about the war in Iran. When will it end? When will gas prices go down? Rubio started making the rounds on Capitol Hill for budget hearings Tuesday. NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: A Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing was the first chance for lawmakers to question Rubio in public since the U.S. and Israel launched the war against Iran in late February. Democrat Chris Murphy of Connecticut says the global economy has been held hostage, while President Trump gives what Murphy calls wildly different accounts as to when the war will end and when traffic can resume in the Strait of Hormuz.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CHRIS MURPHY: The question is how are we going to get it reopened? Are you going to drive a bargain that is so tough and so hard that the strait remains closed? So how are we...
MARCO RUBIO: Well...
MURPHY: ...Going to get it open?
RUBIO: The first thing - that is a predicate to anything else happening. The straits have to be reopened. So the way to think about it is this. If Iran wants to be able to move its oil again through the strait, they will have to reopen the strait.
KELEMEN: Secretary Rubio says the U.S. will lift its blockade of Iranian ports only once the Iranians stop firing on commercial vessels, and he says sanctions won't be eased until Iran negotiates over its nuclear program. Senator Cory Booker, another Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, sounded frustrated that while the first Trump administration - in his words - trashed President Obama's nuclear deal, U.S. diplomacy is now stalled, and Iran has found new leverage by closing the Strait of Hormuz.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CORY BOOKER: We are the strongest nation on the planet Earth, and we're in a stalemate with Iran. And now we're begging to get back into a deal that you all...
RUBIO: We're not begging.
BOOKER: ...Trashed in the first place.
RUBIO: There's no one begging.
KELEMEN: Secretary Rubio pushed back.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
RUBIO: No one's begging for anything here. The Iranians might be begging because their economy's losing hundreds of millions of dollars a day.
KELEMEN: But in Iran, he acknowledged that the U.S. is dealing with a fractured system. Iran's supreme leader was killed early in the conflict, and his son, who took his place, hasn't been seen in public. Republican Senator Mike Lee asked Rubio about that.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MIKE LEE: Are you confident he's still alive, by the way?
RUBIO: Yeah. I think there's indications that - in fact, you - we've not heard from him publicly. We haven't seen him publicly. And I would imagine, given what's happened to multiple leaders in that system, being very public is probably not something that's recommended for them internally. But that said, 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.
KELEMEN: And that slows things down. As for the Trump administration's handling of this diplomacy, Democrat Jacky Rosen blasted Rubio for not personally taking part in negotiations that were hosted by Pakistan earlier this year.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JACKY ROSEN: We confirmed you to be our secretary of state. We confirmed you to be in the negotiations that are happening. And it's just unthinkable to me that you are not - you are missing high-stakes negotiations or that you're not involved.
KELEMEN: She mistakenly said he was at a party in Miami at the time. It was actually at a UFC fight, which Trump was attending too.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
RUBIO: I'm the national security adviser and secretary of state. I was co-located with the president in the midst of a high-stakes negotiation so that I could immediately inform him about events occurring halfway around the world. I was where I needed to be at that moment because we had a very capable team on the ground in Pakistan led by the vice president.
KELEMEN: Along with Trump's envoy, real estate developer Steve Witkoff, and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. They've been leading negotiations on Iran as well as trying to resolve Israel's war in Gaza and Russia's war in Ukraine.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
