U.S. Will Not Accept Iran Control Of Key Oil Chokepoint Hormuz- Rubio

U.S Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested Iran still wants to retain control of the Strait of Hormuz and cast that as unacceptable to the U.S., after President Donald Trump canceled the latest round of negotiations with Tehran over the weekend.

Asked about a report that Tehran had made an offer to reopen Hormuz after the talks were scrapped, Rubio told Fox News the U.S. cannot tolerate Iran continuing to decide which vessels can sail through the strait or allow any Iranian tolls.

“If what they mean by opening the straits is, ‘yes, the straits are opened, as long as you coordinate with Iran, get our permission, or we will blow you up and you pay us,’—that’s not opening the straits,” Rubio said in a Fox News interview that aired Monday.

“They cannot normalize—nor can we tolerate them trying to normalize—a system in which the Iranians decide who gets to use an international waterway and how much you have to pay them to use it.”

The comments come after Axios reported that Iran had given the U.S. a new proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the war in a deal that would postpone more complex negotiations over the country’s nuclear program.

Trump and other U.S. officials have said Iran’s nuclear ambitions were the main reason the U.S. and Israel launched a war against Tehran.

The Strait of Hormuz, which normally carries one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas exports, has been effectively closed since the U.S. and Israel attacked Tehran at the end of February.

While Iranian threats first closed the strait, the U.S. is now also enforcing a naval blockade to prevent Iran-linked ships from navigating Hormuz.

While a ceasefire has mostly held since early April, the strait’s closure has caused global energy prices to soar.

The waterway, which was functioning normally before the war, has become one of the major sticking points in U.S.-Iran negotiations mediated by Pakistan, with a previous round of talks in Islamabad ending without any deal.

While talks were expected over the weekend, Trump told his son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff to skip another trip to Pakistan.

The unpopular war has become a political challenge for Trump domestically—given the sharp rise in U.S. gas prices—and it has also strained already-fraught ties with European nations, who have tried to avoid getting drawn into the conflict even as they deal with the energy crisis.

On Monday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said in unusually candid comments that the U.S. was being “humiliated” by Iran’s leadership, which had proceeded “very skillfully” in talks.

At the United Nations Security Council on Monday, diplomats discussed the Strait of Hormuz in a dedicated session. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said allowing tolls and bribery from Iran would set a dangerous precedent.

“Access to the seas would be a privilege reserved for the few,” he said, “Straits would become militarized corridors. Global trade would be taken hostage, and entire regions would become isolated. The world would be asphyxiated, subject to lawlessness and the law of the strongest.”