US secretary of state Marco Rubio said the Iranian regime is confronting a fundamentally different US administration under President Donald Trump, arguing that Tehran can no longer rely on negotiations without facing consequences.Speaking in an interview with Fox News, Rubio said Iran had become accustomed to escaping accountability over several decades.“I don’t think the Iranian regime has ever faced a President like Trump, which is somebody that actually takes action,” Rubio said. He added that Iran had “got used to, for 20-30 years — not just the U.S., but the broader world — allowing them to get away with things like lying, breaking deals.”Rubio claimed the Trump administration had altered the strategic equation with Tehran by combining diplomacy with military pressure. While acknowledging that Iran still possessed missiles and drones, he argued that recent US strikes had significantly weakened its conventional military capabilities.He further argued that the shift had pushed Tehran towards negotiations on issues such as its nuclear programme and the Strait of Hormuz.“And that’s changed the whole dynamic… we are now approaching them from a position of strength, not from a position of weakness,” Rubio said.On Iran’s broader regional strategy, Rubio said the country continued to seek to “export their revolution” and argued that the only way to change its behaviour was to “make the price of it too high for them to be able to pay”.Rubio’s remarks came as the White House reiterated its hardline position on Tehran. According to Fox News, the administration has said Iran “will continue to pay” until it returns to negotiations in what President Trump considers “a meaningful way”, following allegations that Tehran attacked commercial shipping and US forces after signing a memorandum of understanding with Washington.Hours after Rubio’s interview, Trump announced that he had cancelled a planned military strike on Iran, saying the decision was conditional on Tehran moving quickly towards an agreement. Trump said there had been urgent appeals from Middle Eastern countries to halt the attack as the “perimeters of a deal have been agreed to”.He said the proposed understanding would include the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and an end to Iran’s nuclear threat, while stressing that the pause in military action would depend entirely on Iran’s willingness to “rapidly make a deal”.
