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The US vice-president, JD Vance, left Islamabad on Sunday after failing to reach a deal with Iran in a marathon 21 hours of negotiations.
Vance cited shortcomings in the talks, saying that Iran had chosen not to accept American terms, including to not build nuclear weapons.
“The bad news is that we have not reached an agreement, and I think that’s bad news for Iran much more than it’s bad news for the United States of America,” Vance said.
“So we go back to the United States having not come to an agreement. We’ve made very clear what our red lines are.”
Vance said he spoke with the US president, Donald Trump, at least half a dozen times during the talks, and one of the most significant points of difference between the two sides was around Iran’s nuclear program.
“We need to see an affirmative commitment that [Iran] will not seek a nuclear weapon, and they will not seek the tools that would enable them to quickly achieve a nuclear weapon,” he said, “That is the core goal of the president of the United States, and that’s what we’ve tried to achieve through these negotiations.”
Iran’s foreign ministry downplayed the apparent breakdown, saying that no one had held any expectation that talks with the US could have reached an agreement within one session.
“Naturally, from the beginning we should not have expected to reach an agreement in a single session. No one had such an expectation,” ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei said, according to state broadcaster IRIB.
He said Tehran was “confident that contacts between us and Pakistan, as well as our other friends in the region, will continue”.
Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency meanwhile noted that “excessive” US demands had hindered reaching an agreement.
Neither Washington nor Tehran has indicated what will happen after the 14-day ceasefire initially agreed to by the US, Iran and Israel, but Pakistani mediators called on the US and Iran to maintain the ceasefire.
“It is imperative that the parties continue to uphold their commitment to ceasefire,” Pakistan’s foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, said, adding that his country would try to facilitate a new dialogue between Iran and the US in the coming days.
The talks in Islamabad were the first direct US-Iranian meeting in more than a decade and the highest-level discussions since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The final outcome could determine the fate of the fragile two-week ceasefire and the reopening of the strait of Hormuz, a choke point for about 20% of global energy supplies that Iran has blocked since the war began. The conflict has sent global oil prices soaring and killed thousands of people.
Vance, the special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner met the Iranian parliamentary speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and the foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, for two hours before a rest, according to a source from the mediator Pakistan.
The Iranian delegation arrived on Friday dressed in black in mourning for late supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and others killed in the war. They carried shoes and bags of some students killed during the US bombing of a school next to a military compound, the Iranian government said. The Pentagon has said the strike is under investigation but Reuters has reported that military investigators believe the US was likely responsible for it.
“There were mood swings from the two sides and the temperature went up and down during the meeting,” another Pakistani source said in reference to the first round of talks.
For the US-Iran talks, Islamabad, a city of more than 2 million people, was locked down with thousands of paramilitary personnel and army troops on the streets. Pakistan’s mediating role is a remarkable transformation for a nation that was a diplomatic outcast a year ago.
As the talks started, the US military said it was “setting the conditions” to start clearing the strait of Hormuz.
The strategic waterway is central to the ceasefire talks. The US military said two of its warships had passed through the strait and conditions were being set to clear mines, while Iran’s state media denied any US ships had transited through it.
Before the talks began, a senior Iranian source told Reuters the US had agreed to release frozen assets in Qatar and other foreign banks. A US official denied agreeing to release the money.
As well as the release of assets abroad, Tehran is demanding control of the strait of Hormuz, payment of war reparations and a ceasefire across the region including in Lebanon, according to Iranian state TV and officials.
Tehran also wants to collect transit fees in the strait of Hormuz.
Trump’s stated goals have shifted, but as a minimum he wants free passage for global shipping through the strait and the crippling of Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme to ensure it cannot produce an atomic bomb.
