Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Sunday that the United States currently has no military operation planned against Iran but left the door open for future strikes if it does not demonstrate a meaningful effort to make peace.
“We have other targets that we could hit, but we achieved our objective,” Rubio said in an interview on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”
“The primary targets we were interested in are the ones that were struck [last night] in devastating fashion,” Rubio continued. “And we’ve achieved that objective.”
Rubio made clear that the U.S. would retaliate if Iran attacked Americans “or American interests.”
“There are no planned military operations right now against Iran, unless — unless — they mess around and they attack Americans or American interests. Then they’re going to have a problem,” he said.
Rubio said he would not “broadcast what those problems are” but stressed U.S. capabilities to carry out sophisticated attacks.
“Know this: The United States flew halfway around the world, right into the heart of Iran, over their most sensitive locations — these things got rocked — and then we left. And we were out of their airspace, we were over the ocean before they figured out what had happened,” Rubio said.
“And there are plenty of other targets — We don’t want to do that. That’s not our preference. We want peace deals with them, and that’s up to them to decide,” he continued.
Trump announced Saturday evening that U.S. forces bombed three Iranian nuclear sites and said to Iran, in a social media post, “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!”
The bombs targeted three nuclear sites in Natanz, Esfahan and Fordow, located inside a mountain. Six “bunker buster” bombs were reportedly dropped on Fordow, while more than two dozen Tomahawk missiles were launched at the other two sites.
The bombings put the U.S. directly in Iran’s crosshairs for retaliation and made it an active participant in the Mideast war, which Israel launched with airstrikes against Iran on June 13.