US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Friday that negotiations with Iran on a return to the nuclear deal have gone “backwards.”
Speaking from NATO headquarters in Belgium, Blinken told a press conference that he was not going to ”negotiate in public” in response to reports that discussions to finally a renewed deal had hit a roadblock.
"In past weeks, we closed some gaps. Iran had moved away from some extraneous demands, demands unrelated to the JCPOA itself," Blinken said. "However, the latest response takes us backwards, and we are not about to agree to a deal that doesn't meet our bottom-line requirements."
For over a year Washington and Tehran have been communicating terms of a potential nuclear deal through the European Union as an intermediary. But details around negotiations have not been publicly released.
Blinken said on Friday that Iran’s latest offer included "extraneous demands" irrelevant to the “JCPOA itself."
"If we conclude a deal, it's only because it will advance our national security," he said.
The IAEA said this week that Iran has increased stockpiles of uranium needed to attain a nuclear bomb.
(Israel National News' North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Israel National News articles, however, is Israeli time.)