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Secretary Rubio Delivers Remarks to the Press in New York, Sep. 23, 2026

September 23, 2026 · U.S. Department of State · 0:54:26

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Secretary of State Marco Rubio took questions from the traveling press in New York on September 23, 2026, in a 54-minute exchange during UN General Assembly week; the State Department’s full-session live feed of the same availability is recorded as an alternate source. The questioning led with Iran: the previous day’s conversation, he said, was with mediators in the process, and “the number one issue” is that “Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.” The southern lane of the Strait of Hormuz is open, he said — “every day more and more barrels of oil are flowing through there” — with the U.S. military defending shipping and removing mines, while Iran had fired on shipping again that morning. “The only blockade in the Hormuz Straits is the one we’ve imposed on Iran,” he said. The President, he added, remains open to a deal, and holds military options on which Rubio would not speculate.

The exchange ranged across Sudan’s humanitarian calamity — where progress, Rubio argued, is blocked by external actors feeding the proxies, and which the United States is raising “in every forum” — the difficulties of implementing the Gaza agreements alongside Lebanon and the Houthis, with a communicated American preference against an additional West Bank flashpoint, Cuba, his meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and a follow-up on boat strikes and terrorist designations after the previous day’s Shield of the Americas meeting.

Why it matters

This is the Secretary’s fullest UNGA-week press record: dated American positions across four theaters fixed in a single sitting, in his own words — the Hormuz traffic claim, the Sudan external-actors argument, and the West Bank preference among them — against which the following weeks can be measured.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the dated Hormuz claims as the Secretary stated them on September 23, 2026 — the southern lane open, oil volumes rising daily, and an Iranian launch on shipping that morning. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: U.S. Department of State, “Secretary Rubio Delivers Remarks to the Press in New York” (official upload, embedded above; New York City). Remarks as delivered; transcript reviewed in the site’s private research store; full transcript at state.gov.