Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended President Donald Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran, saying the action was necessary to stop Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
Rubio acknowledged that the conflict was not especially popular and said it had affected Republicans’ losses in last week’s midterm elections. He was responding to comments by Vice President JD Vance, who also connected the losses to the war.
Rubio said Trump acted in response to a serious threat. Confronting difficult security challenges may not always be popular, he said, but can still be necessary.
Trump has repeatedly defended the decision to intervene in Iran’s nuclear program. On Sunday, he told reporters that, in hindsight, the operation would be remembered as one of the best things the country had done, arguing that Iran could have used a nuclear weapon to devastate the world.
Still, Trump told “60 Minutes” over the weekend that he was not currently seeking to widen the conflict.
The United States and Iran are holding talks, though Rubio said they have made little headway. He said Iran’s demands were unacceptable and, in some cases, unrealistic.
Iran said Sunday it had lifted its self-imposed limit on the range of its ballistic missiles and threatened to deploy new domestically developed weapons. The announcement came hours after the U.S. military launched a task force intended to disrupt Tehran’s weapons shipments and illicit trade on Nov. 7.
Brig. Gen. Hossein Mohebbi, a spokesperson for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said the country was no longer bound by its former 2,000-kilometer range restriction—about 1,240 miles.
