U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says Iran’s clerical regime is Middle East’s “central problem,” Palestinian issue easier without it

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Iran’s clerical leadership is the central source of instability in the Middle East and argued that the Palestinian issue would be easier to address without the current system in Tehran.

Rubio made the remarks in a Breitbart News interview recorded Thursday, October 15, in the Thomas Jefferson State Reception Room at the State Department in Washington and published Sunday, October 18.

Rubio said U.S. policymakers had traditionally treated the Palestinian question as the central issue for peace in the Middle East, but argued that President Donald Trump had shown that Iran’s government is “the number one driver of instability and war and conflict and the number one obstacle to peace in the Middle East.”

He pointed to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran-backed militias in Iraq and the Houthis as examples of regional conflicts he linked to Tehran. “If there were no Islamic clerics, these radical Shia clerics in Iran — if they didn’t exist, if that wasn’t there — none of these problems would exist,” Rubio said. “You may still have a Palestinian issue. I would argue that issue would be easier to deal with if Iran didn’t exist.”

Rubio said Europe is now trying to reverse what he called 20 years of “green hyperbole,” underinvestment in domestic energy production and overreliance on limited sources of supply. He said the process would take time and argued that Europe’s economic future depends on reducing those vulnerabilities.

Rubio also said U.S. foreign policy under Trump is placing greater emphasis on rewarding countries that work with Washington. “For a long time, we demanded countries be friendly to us, but we didn’t reward them,” he said, arguing that U.S. adversaries often received more attention than its partners.

Turning to Latin America, Rubio said a succession of voters had elected leaders who prefer closer relations with the United States. He stressed that they are “not puppet presidents” and would make decisions based on their own national interests, but said they would rather partner with Washington and share U.S. priorities.

Rubio linked some of those political changes to the Trump administration’s restructuring of foreign aid and closure of USAID as an independent agency. He said some environmental and indigenous-rights NGOs in Latin America were part of what he called an “anti-American global network of NGOs” that had received U.S. funding. Rubio said he could not prove that ending such funding directly changed election results but added: “I don’t think it’s a coincidence, in my personal view.”

He said the United States remains “the most generous country in the world in foreign aid,” but that assistance is now designed specifically to advance U.S. national interests and will not go to organizations the administration views as hostile to America.