Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday that deep divisions inside Iran’s ruling structure are the single biggest obstacle to reaching an agreement, complicating already fragile negotiations.
Speaking in an interview with Fox News’ Trey Yingst, Rubio described a regime split between competing factions that often undercut each other at the negotiating table.
“Other than the fact that the country is run by radical Shia clerics, that’s a pretty big impediment. The other is that they’re deeply fractured internally, and I think that’s always been the case, but I think it’s far more pronounced now. The best way to understand Iran is you have a political class now. I think, look, people talk about moderates and hardliners. They’re all hardliners in Iran. But there are hardliners who understand they have to run a country and an economy, and there are hardliners that are completely motivated by theology,” Rubio said.
He went on to draw a sharp distinction between factions within the regime, arguing that some officials are driven by practical concerns while others are guided by ideology.
“The hardliners that are motivated by theology are not just the IRGC officials, but obviously the supreme leader and the council that surrounds him. And then you’ve got the political class, the foreign minister, the president, the speaker of the moguls. These guys, they’re hardliners, too, but they also understand the country has to have an economy. People have to eat, they have to figure out a way to pay salaries and their government. And so you see a tension, and you always have in that system between the Iranians who understand, let’s be hardliners. But let’s also balance that with the need to run a country and the hardliners who don’t care and have this apocalyptic vision of the future,” he continued.
In Rubio’s telling, that divide ultimately limits what Iran’s negotiators can deliver, even if talks appear to make progress on the surface.
“Unfortunately, the hardliners with an apocalyptic vision of the future have the ultimate power in that country,” he added. “So as much as anything else, one of the impediments here is that our negotiators aren’t just negotiating with Iranians. Those Iranians then have to negotiate with other Iranians in order to figure out what they can agree to, what they can offer, what they’re willing to do, even who they’re willing to meet with.”
Watch the clip above.
