Rubio warns Iran with nuclear weapon would ‘blackmail the world’

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US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has told US media that the Strait of Hormuz is open and, with the exception of Iranian oil, there is almost as much oil flowing through as there was before the start of the US-Israel war on Iran, reports Al Jazeera.

He said, however, that if Tehran had a nuclear weapon, it would use it to “blackmail the world and to kill people”.

“It would control the straits, charge a toll, and decide who got energy and who did not,” Rubio said during an interview with Fox News, adding that such a scenario represented “an unacceptable risk”.

He said Iran’s governance was problematic.

“Who calls the shots in Iran are radical Shia clerics with an apocalyptic vision of the future. They believe that it is a religious calling to trigger about the last days of the world, the apocalypse,” he said.

Rubio said Iran used money received through sanctions relief or economic selling to build weapons and “export the revolution” rather than to “improve the lives of the Iranian people”.

“They use the money to fund Hezbollah, they use the money to fund Hamas, they use the money to fund Shia militias in Iraq… they use the money to sponsor terrorism and assassination plots,” he said.