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(Bloomberg) — Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. will know quickly whether Iran is serious about making progress in talks underway in Vienna about restoring compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal. 

Blinken said Thursday the U.S. won’t allow Iran to build up its nuclear program while dragging out talks that restarted this week, saying time is running out for the country’s leaders to reverse course.

“We’re going to know very quickly in the next day or two whether Iran is serious or not,” Blinken told reporters at a news conference in Stockholm. “We will not accept the status quo of Iran building its program on the one hand and dragging its feet on the other. That’s not going to last.”

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In some of his most downbeat remarks about the prospects for a renewal of the nuclear deal, Blinken said Iran’s recent moves and rhetoric “don’t give us a lot of cause for optimism.” 

U.S. officials say they want to return to the 2015 accord that former President Donald Trump abandoned in 2018, but they demand that Iran end its enrichment of uranium to high levels and other activities that it began in violation of the agreement after Trump quit the deal and reinstated punishing sanctions on Tehran.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said in a call with his Japanese counterpart on Thursday that he “wasn’t optimistic” about the intentions of Western powers in the talks. Among its demands, Iran wants the U.S. to rule out any future exit from the deal, but the Biden administration has said it can’t tie the hands of successor governments. 

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At the talks in Vienna, Iranian officials are meeting directly with representatives of Europe, China and Russia. There are no direct U.S.-Iran talks so far. 

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Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator told state television on Thursday that he presented European diplomats with a set of amendments to existing draft agreements on the removal of U.S. sanctions and how Iran intends to roll back advances in its nuclear activities.

The drafts were submitted to European diplomats on Wednesday night and were “a demonstration of our seriousness,” Ali Bagheri Kani said, adding that he expected to hear feedback during meetings on Thursday, including with European Union envoy Enrique Mora.

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The negotiations in Vienna are the first since the election in June of Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi, with U.S. officials pessimistic on reaching an agreement with his hard-line administration. The two countries have criticized each other’s approach to the talks so far.

Disagreements over the sequencing of U.S. sanctions removal and how Tehran scales back a significant expansion of its nuclear program emerged as major sticking points in the talks, which restarted Monday after a five-month lull.

Restoring the landmark deal would enable OPEC-member Iran to rapidly increase oil exports and re-enter a market that’s been tightly supplied since pandemic lockdowns began to ease. 

As the diplomacy grinds on, developments in Iran are raising the stakes.

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On Wednesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has been seeking access to a site on the outskirts of Tehran that’s involved in the production of centrifuges, said the Islamic Republic had escalated its nuclear work by feeding a line of advanced centrifuges to produce uranium enriched to 20% purity.

Nuclear negotiator Bagheri Kani met IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi on Thursday and described their discussions as “fruitful” and “aimed at continuation of technical cooperation,” according to a tweet. 

European diplomats are keen to secure some form of early breakthrough to ease a standoff that destabilized the Persian Gulf and could weaken post-Cold War efforts to limit nuclear proliferation.   

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