US hopes to convince China to play more active role to settle situation with Iran — Rubio

NEW YORK, May 14. /TASS/. The US administration hopes that it will be able to convince China to influence Iran in order to settle the conflict in the Middle East and stabilize the situation in the Gulf, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said. "It’s in [China’s] interest to resolve this. We hope to convince them to play a more active role in getting Iran to walk away from what they're doing now and trying to do now in the Persian Gulf," he said in an interview with Fox News. He noted that Chinese ships "stuck in the Persian Gulf." According to Rubio, the conflict in the Middle East is "a huge source of instability." "It threatens to destabilize Asia more than any other part of the world because it's heavily reliant on the straits for energy," he stated.