Rubio says Trump’s Iran policy is ‘a head for an eye’
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said President Donald Trump’s policy toward Iran was “a head for an eye,” warning Tehran it would pay a heavy price for attacks on Americans and US interests.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said President Donald Trump’s policy toward Iran was “a head for an eye,” warning Tehran it would pay a heavy price for attacks on Americans and US interests.
Rubio made the remark when asked about Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi invoking the principle of “an eye for an eye.”
“The president’s policy is a head for an eye,” Rubio told reporters at an ASEAN summit in Manila.
“They will pay a very heavy price for the things they’re doing. They’re already paying a very heavy price,” he said.
Rubio said Iran’s industrial and defense industrial bases had been “decimated” and that Tehran was continuing to lose missile launchers and radar systems.
“They’re losing launchers. They’re losing radars every single night. They are suffering billions of dollars in damage, and their economy is a disaster,” he said.
Despite Iran’s rhetoric, Rubio said, “they are suffering tremendously, and they’re going to suffer more until they come to their senses.”
US goal is denuclearized Iran
Rubio said the Trump administration’s goal was a denuclearized Iran, not regime change.
“I think the US is seeking a denuclearized Iran that will never have a nuclear weapon,” Rubio said.
“Our issue and our concern and our focus is denuclearizing Iran. They can never have a nuclear weapon.”
Asked whether Washington was comfortable leaving Iran’s current leadership in power, Rubio replied: “They can’t have a nuclear weapon.”
He also rejected suggestions that Trump had made regime change an objective of the conflict.
“He never said regime change was a goal,” Rubio said.
“From day one of the operation, it was very clear that we were going to degrade their missile launchers, their drones, and their factories and their navy.”
Rubio said Trump had argued that the Iranian people deserved better leadership, but added that Washington’s national interest was ensuring Iran never acquired a nuclear weapon.
Iran not ready for a deal
Rubio said he did not believe Iran was ready to reach an agreement with Washington despite repeated indirect messages seeking talks.
"These people are calling us every day, begging, let's do a deal. They send us messages through other countries, third countries," Rubio said.
"The problem is, every time these people do a deal, they either break it or after they make it, they want to change the deal."
"I don't think they're serious about making a deal," he said, adding: "I think they'll be ready soon because the price they're paying is very high."
Rubio said Iran had suffered extensive military and economic damage.
"They're losing launchers. They're losing radars every single night. They are suffering billions of dollars in damage, and their economy is a disaster," he said.
Despite Iran's rhetoric, Rubio said, "they are suffering tremendously, and they're going to suffer more until they come to their senses."
Warning to Iran
Asked about Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi's remarks invoking "an eye for an eye," Rubio responded: "The president's policy is a head for an eye."
"They will pay a very heavy price for the things they're doing. They're already paying a very heavy price," Rubio said.
He said Iran's industrial and defense industrial bases had been "decimated" and said Tehran would continue to pay a price for its actions.
Russia question
Asked about a report that US intelligence analysts were investigating whether Russia had assisted Iranian drone strikes on CIA facilities in the Persian Gulf, Rubio declined to comment on the specific allegation.
"Let's imagine that were true. I certainly wouldn't discuss it in the press," he said.
Rubio said Iran had spent years building up the military capabilities it was now using.
"Nothing that Iran is doing, nothing that anyone's doing to help Iran is in any way increasing their ability to target Americans," he said.
"Iran has spent the better part of 20 years not just sponsoring terrorism, but building long-range rockets, short-range missiles and drones."
He said Tehran had intended to double its stockpile and use its missiles and drones to deter action against a nuclear weapons programme.
"The world will be a safer place because we addressed it," Rubio said, referring to US military action against Iran's capabilities.
The trial in federal court in Buffalo will determine whether Hadi Matar acted independently out of religious anger or carried out the attack in response to the fatwa issued by Iran’s first Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini and in service of Lebanon's Hezbollah, according to the New York Times.
"He wanted everyone to know he was doing this in the service of Hezbollah," federal prosecutor Timothy C. Lynch said in his opening statement. "He wanted to do it so he could be perceived as an Islamic martyr."
Matar, 28, faces charges of providing material support to a designated terrorist organization and committing an act of terrorism transcending national boundaries. If convicted on all counts, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.
He was convicted last year in a separate New York state case of attempted murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison for the August 2022 attack.
Prosecutors point to Iran contact
According to the New York Times, federal prosecutors say Matar contacted a person identified as Kamyar in Iran in May 2022, about three months before the attack.
Prosecutors say Matar wrote that he knew where to find Rushdie but was unsure "how to do it." They said he then asked whether the fatwa against the author remained valid and proceeded with the attack after receiving confirmation.
Ruhollah Khomeini, issued the fatwa in 1989 after the publication of The Satanic Verses, a novel that prompted protests from many Muslims over its depiction of a fictionalized version of the Prophet Muhammad.
Hezbollah evidence disputed
Prosecutors, Lynch said, will present text messages, notebook entries, propaganda videos and other evidence that they argue shows Matar was motivated by Hezbollah and Iranian leaders.
Matar, according to prosecutors, compiled propaganda videos titled "Rushdie Fatwa 1.6" that included a 2006 speech by former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah condemning cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. They also said Matar sent the videos to others.
Prosecutors further say Matar used the name and birth date of a Hezbollah fighter on a fake identification card and kept notes weighing the advantages and disadvantages of killing Rushdie.
Defense lawyer Nathaniel L. Barone II rejected that his client acted on behalf of Iran or Hezbollah.
"The government didn't know what Hadi Matar's mental state was at that time," Barone told the court.
Before the trial, Barone described Matar as a religious man angered by The Satanic Verses, arguing the attack stemmed from personal outrage rather than direction from a foreign government or militant group.
Rushdie expected to testify
Rushdie is expected to testify this week about the attack, as he did during the state trial last year.
The author was stabbed more than a dozen times while preparing to speak at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York about writers living in political exile. He suffered severe nerve damage and lost sight in one eye.
Prosecutors must persuade jurors that Matar did more than act on personal religious conviction and instead knowingly provided support to Hezbollah, a key legal distinction that could determine whether the terrorism charges succeed.
The trial is expected to last about two weeks.
The panel, held at Iran International's Washington headquarters and moderated by Fardad Farahzad, brought together Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, Ilan Berman of the American Foreign Policy Council, and Iranian-American analyst Fereshteh Pezeshk.
The discussion came amid renewed US strikes, with attacks tearing through bridges and infrastructure across Iran's south.
Is Washington heading for a ground operation?
The question hanging over the room was whether the air campaign is a prelude to something larger. Rubin framed the choice in stark terms.
"When you have a hornet's nest, you have two good options. One is to leave it alone. The other one is to get rid of it," he said. "The last thing you want to do is sit underneath it lightly tapping it with a stick, and we're getting to the point where that stick tapping is over."
The open question, he added, is "are we heading to boots on the ground? And if we're heading to boots on the ground, are we simply talking about the islands in the Persian Gulf, or are we talking about some of the ports?"
Pezeshk talked about the risks. A move onto Iranian soil, she argued, would be "disastrous," and not only in military terms. "A very good population of Iranians, unlike the rest of the Middle East, are pro-American," she said, describing "a chasm between the people and the Islamic Republic" after the killing on Iran's streets.
An occupation, she warned, could close that chasm rather than widen it. "The solution is in Tehran, not on the coasts. You've got to resolve that problem."
Berman placed the same question inside American politics, noting that gasoline prices and looming midterm elections are shaping every decision the administration makes.
The task now, he said, is to establish what military planners call escalation dominance, "to show the Iranian regime that they have more firepower and they have politically more will to stay and to fight."
Regime change or transformation?
The most contested idea of the evening came from Berman, who argued that a quieter transformation has already taken place inside the Islamic Republic.
The current rulers, he said, "have a different DNA. They behave differently, they negotiate differently," a shift he traced in part to a war that opened at the very top of the escalation ladder with the killing of the supreme leader.
However, he pointed out that the change has not produced true regime change. “The Trump administration hasn’t dug deep enough... “You haven’t had regime change as most of us have historically thought about it – a transition from the Islamic Republic to a fundamentally different governing system.”
Rubin pushed the logic toward the machinery of power, describing an effort to peel away the leadership layer by layer. With the Revolutionary Guards numbering well over 100,000, he argued, "somewhere along those ranks there is someone who wants to enrich himself" and would deal with Washington.
But he cautioned that the administration may not know who actually runs the country, comparing its approach to "negotiating with the doorman in a skyscraper rather than negotiating with the owner."
Both men returned to a warning that any transition badly managed could produce something worse.
Pezeshk offered the strongest caution against treating decapitation strikes as a complete regime-change strategy. “You have to resolve the political issue in Tehran, not the manifestation.”
She pressed the point harder: removing the leadership without a plan for the day after risks chaos. "How do you ensure it's not going to be a Taliban-like power that comes in? Are you working with the opposition? Are you inclusive enough?" She saw little sign of that groundwork.
"The guy sitting in Tehran is going to be there forever until they die. The US president, two and a half years from now, is gone."
The next uprising, and a fumbled chance
If there was a shared conviction, it was that Iran's streets, not its negotiators, will decide the outcome, and that Washington keeps missing its moments there.
Berman described unrest in Iran as a cyclical force, erupting roughly every two and a half years and accelerating. The lesson of the past six months, he said, is that the US was caught flat-footed when it mattered.
When the internet went dark in January, he recounted, the administration assumed it could "just pierce that veil" with Starlink units and VPNs. Instead it found the jamming, aided by Russia and China, far more robust than expected, and its own tools not prepositioned.
"One of the most important lessons that this last half year has brought is we should be thinking now about the next round of protests, because the next protest is going to start."
Pezeshk argued it already had. She credited the January protests, set off in part by an opposition call to the streets, as "one of the biggest protests ever in Iranian history," met with a killing she put at around 40,000. Her frustration was that such a force draws so little attention in Washington.
The Kurds, the islands, and a mafia state
Asked whether the US might arm Kurdish or other groups to open a ground front, the panel was wary. Rubin noted Washington's long reluctance to back separatist movements in the region, and Pezeshk attributed the on-again, off-again talk to "the chaos of the Trump administration."
Berman said officials he had spoken to were "very nervous about the steadfastness and the resolve of these elements."
Rubin, speaking "as an analyst rather than advocate," sketched where a limited campaign might fall: not the ports, but strategic islands, from Abu Musa and the Tunbs to Kish and Qeshm, "the gateway to Bandar Abbas."
He warned that seizing Iranian territory could backfire by rallying a fiercely nationalist public. The Islamic Republic, he argued, would not be moved by the loss of land the way a normal state would.
"They act like a mafia. They don't care if part of the country is gone as long as they're still in power."
Pezeshk’s argument was that territorial occupation – whether by US forces, Kurdish groups or another regional actor – could unite Iranians around national sovereignty.
Can an ideological system make a lasting deal?
Rubin argued that the Islamic Republic’s political identity limits its ability to reach the kind of pragmatic agreement sought by the Trump administration. Rubin argued that the Islamic Republic’s political identity limits its ability to reach the kind of pragmatic agreement sought by the Trump administration.
Pezeshk was skeptical any lasting deal is possible with a system she sees as ideological to its core.
Persian Gulf states, she said, want development, not confrontation, "they do not want to go back to the 18th century," while the Islamic Republic "has a tolerance for absorbing a lot of pain just because they don't care about their people."
Whether the war ends at the table or on the coast, the panel's consensus held that its true resolution lies elsewhere.
As Rubin put it, the nuclear file, the missiles and the proxies are all "the manifestation of the root cause, which is the Islamic Republic."
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot had already confirmed that two members of the French embassy were detained for several hours on Sunday, calling the episode "serious and unacceptable" and warning it "cannot go without consequences."
"One of them was physically abused," Barrot said, describing the detention as an "extremely serious act of intimidation" and a "flagrant violation of diplomatic immunity."
According to a source familiar with the matter who spoke to Iran International, Iranian security forces detained the two diplomats, took them to an undisclosed location and interrogated them. Both were subjected to psychological pressure during their detention and questioning, and that at least one was physically assaulted, the source said.
The episode has heightened concern among staff at the French embassy in Tehran, with several employees asking to return to France before completing their assignments, although their postings have not officially ended, according to the source.
French authorities are now considering whether to end some diplomatic assignments early and reduce the embassy's presence in Tehran, the source added.
Paris seeks answers
Iran International has sent a formal request to the French Foreign Ministry seeking comment on the condition of the two diplomats, Paris' planned response and the possible impact on embassy operations in Tehran.
The ministry had not responded by the time of publication.
Barrot said he had raised the matter directly with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, telling him the detention represented a serious breach of diplomatic immunity protected under international law.
According to Barrot, the two diplomats were responsible for French programs supporting Iranian civil society, particularly artists and scientists. Both were released and are expected to return to France.
Relations deteriorate
The detention comes as relations between Paris and Tehran continue to worsen over Iran's nuclear program, regional policies and the imprisonment of French nationals.
France has said it opposes lifting sanctions on Iran unless Tehran abandons its nuclear program and changes what Paris describes as destabilizing regional policies. Paris has also called for a broader European role in negotiations over Iran.
The dispute follows years of friction over French nationals held in Iran. Paris has repeatedly called for the release of Cécile Kohler and Jacques Paris, who have been detained since 2022, describing their imprisonment as arbitrary and accusing Iran of using foreign detainees to seek diplomatic concessions.
Earlier this year, France brought a case against Iran before the International Court of Justice over alleged violations of consular rights.
The detention of accredited embassy staff broadens the dispute from French citizens held in Iran to diplomats protected under international law, adding another point of strain in relations between Paris and Tehran.
Iranian authorities had not publicly commented on the case by the time of publication.
