US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in New Delhi on Sunday that the world may receive “some good news” on a peace deal with Iran within hours, sharpening Washington’s public timeline on the negotiations.
“I do think perhaps there is the possibility that in the next few hours the world will get some good news,” Rubio told reporters at a joint press conference with Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, NewsFirst reported citing NDTV.
Rubio said the emerging deal would address concerns over the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has largely blocked in response to the US-Israel joint attack, and would begin “a process that can ultimately leave us where the president wants us to be, and that is a world that no longer has to fear or worry about an Iranian nuclear weapon.”
The top US diplomat reiterated Washington’s core demands. “Iran can never possess a nuclear weapon. The Strait of Hormuz is an international waterway, and what they are doing now is basically they are threatening to destroy commercial vessels using an international waterway that is illegal under any concept of international law,” he said.
Rubio is on a four-day India tour ahead of a Quad foreign ministers’ meeting in New Delhi on Monday. The Sunday remarks are a tighter timeline than his comments a day earlier in New Delhi that “some progress” had been made and an announcement could come in “a couple of days”. They also build on US President Donald Trump’s early-Sunday statement that an agreement involving the US, Iran and several Middle Eastern countries had been “largely negotiated”, with the Strait of Hormuz to reopen under the proposed framework.
A confirmed deal would directly ease Sri Lanka’s fuel-supply constraints, which have pushed the CPC oil import bill from USD 152 million in December to USD 521 million in May and lifted CPC diesel shipment costs above USD 281 per barrel.
