President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that Iran informed his administration that it is in a “state of collapse” and wants the Strait of Hormuz to be opened amid what he said are leadership problems.
In a post issued on Truth Social on the morning of April 28, the president wrote, “Iran has just informed us that they are in a ‘State of Collapse.'”
“They want us to ‘Open the Hormuz Strait,’ as soon as possible, as they try to figure out their leadership situation,” he added.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday warned Iran that Washington would not tolerate any attempts to control or restrict traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, as a ceasefire between the two nations has mostly held up.
When asked in a Fox News interview about a report that Iran had made an offer to reopen the strait after talks this past week were canceled, Rubio said that the U.S. government can’t accept Iran continuing to determine which ships travel through the waterway. He also said that it’s unacceptable for Iran to implement a toll system on vessels.
“What they mean by opening the straits is, ‘Yes, the straits are open, as long as you coordinate with Iran, get our permission, or we’ll blow you up, and you pay us,’” Rubio told the outlet.
“They cannot normalize, nor can we tolerate them trying to normalize, a system in which the Iranians decide who gets to use an international waterway and how much you have to pay them to use it.”
He said that the strait is part of “international waterways.”
On April 26, Trump wrote in a Truth Social post that plans for U.S. officials to meet with Iranian authorities in Pakistan were scrapped. He said it would be “too much time wasted on traveling” and that Washington has “all the cards” in negotiations with Iran.
A ceasefire that was announced earlier this month is ongoing, while the U.S. military has continued to impose a naval blockade of Iranian ports to exert more economic pressure on the country. On Feb. 28, the U.S. and Israeli militaries began striking Iran, killing dozens of top leaders and targeting numerous military assets.
More than three dozen ships have been turned around or stopped since the blockade started earlier in April, U.S. Central Command said in a post on Sunday. On Monday evening, the command wrote that a U.S. destroyer enforced the blockade against a vessel, the M/T Stream, after it attempted to sail to an Iranian port.
Trump has said that the Iranian regime cannot obtain a nuclear weapon and that the country needs to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway that connects the Persian Gulf with the larger Indian Ocean. About one-fifth of the world’s oil traffic passes through the strait on a normal day, and its effective closure has driven oil and gas prices higher.
The White House did not immediately respond to an Epoch Times request for comment on Tuesday.