NEW YORK — Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered Iran's delegation to the United Nations General Assembly, including Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, to leave the United States immediately this week after behind-the-scenes negotiations between Washington and Tehran broke down, according to Axios, which first reported the diplomatic rupture.

Araghchi had been in New York for indirect talks with U.S. officials on the sidelines of the General Assembly, part of a fragile, on-again-off-again effort to de-escalate the standoff between the two countries. Axios reported that as late as Monday morning the White House still believed a breakthrough was possible — but by late afternoon, American officials concluded the talks had reached a dead end, and Rubio moved to send the Iranians packing.

A Rebuke, Then a Red-Eye to Doha

The Iranian delegation left for the airport several hours later, boarding a flight from New York to Doha at 1:20 a.m., according to the National News. The move was described by multiple outlets, including The Hill, as a highly unusual diplomatic snub that laid bare the depth of mistrust between the two governments even as both sides have periodically floated interest in winding down hostilities.

NO SUCH EXPULSION TOOK PLACE

Iran's mission to the UN pushed back hard on the American framing. Officials there said the delegation's departure had been scheduled well in advance — communicated to the State Department on September 17 — and denied being thrown out at all, according to reporting from Al Arabiya. The dueling accounts mean the public may never get a fully agreed-upon timeline of who moved first.

Whatever the sequence, the optics were unmistakable: America's top diplomat publicly moving to show his counterpart the door during the one week of the year when the world's foreign ministers are all gathered a few blocks from Times Square. The episode comes against the backdrop of the Trump administration's broader hard line on Tehran, which has included sanctions pressure, warnings over Iran's nuclear program, and — as the Observer reported Thursday — Israeli claims of an Iran-backed bomb plot targeting a U.S. airbase in Britain.

Neither the State Department nor Iran's foreign ministry has announced a path back to the table. For now, the UN General Assembly's annual high-level week closes with U.S.-Iran relations arguably further apart than when it began, and no clear timetable for when — or whether — Araghchi and Rubio's teams will speak again.