Arriving at the United Nations General Assembly on Monday, US President Donald Trump did not rule out a meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.
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"We'll see what happens," Trump told reporters in New York, a day before the General Debate of the 74th Session of the UN General Assembly was set to begin.
Last week Trump said that he would prefer not to meet Rouhani at the UN, despite his previous statements saying he was open to meeting the Iranian leader without preconditions.
Trump also imposed heavy sanctions on the Islamic republic over the weekend after an attack launched from Iranian soil hit Saudi oil installations and disrupted exports from Riyadh and caused temporary jitters in the global energy market.
France and Britain were at odds on Monday over who to blame for an attack on Saudi Arabia's oil facilities, potentially complicating efforts to defuse tensions between the United States and Iran at the UN General Assembly.
France has led a European push to try to defuse tensions between Washington and Tehran and sees the annual gathering of global leaders as an opportunity to revive diplomacy.
But those efforts have stalled, with Iran reducing its commitments to a 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, from which Washington withdrew last year, and the United States refusing to ease sanctions that have strangled its oil exports, a mainstay of the Iranian economy.
Hopes at the end of August that Trump and Iranian Rouhani could meet at the United Nations now seem slim.
"We haven't received any requests this time, yet, for a meeting and we have made it clear a request alone will not do the job," Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told reporters in New York. "A negotiation has to be for a reason, for an outcome, not just for a handshake."
He said there were prerequisites for a meeting and then there could be a meeting between Iran, the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Russia, and China.
