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12:01 13.04.2026 •
Vice President JD Vance after the talks…
Talks between the United States and Iran failed to reach a resolution over ending the war, Vice President JD Vance announced after more than 20 hours of negotiations here, ‘The Washington Post’ stresses.
“We just could not get to a situation where the Iranians were willing to accept our terms. I think that we were quite flexible,” Vance said around 6:30 a.m. local time, after working well into Sunday morning.
Vance said the U.S. team was “quite accommodating” to the Iranians and acted on instructions from President Donald Trump to “come here in good faith and make your best effort to get a deal.”
“We did that, and unfortunately, we weren’t able to make any headway,” Vance said.
Vance immediately left Islamabad at the conclusion of the brief news conference, but suggested the U.S. is still open to striking a deal based on its last proposal: “We’ll see if the Iranians accept it,” Vance said, declining to share specifics.Ask The Post AIDive deeper
He did not answer shouted questions about whether the ending of the talks meant that fighting would resume or about the status of ship traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.
The negotiations, led on the U.S. side by Vance, were the highest level of face-to-face engagement between leaders of the U.S. and Iran in decades, and the fact that the two sides agreed to speak directly was welcomed as a positive sign by diplomats and officials in the region.Ask The Post AIDive deeper
But the talks went through “mood swings” as they stretched into the early hours Sunday, according to a Pakistani official briefed on the progress, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive closed-door deliberations. The official said Vance left Pakistan without any plans for “any possible engagement again.”
Vance: The U.S. negotiating team failed to persuade Iranians to accept the U.S. terms for a deal
Vance said the negotiating team had “substantive discussions with the Iranians,” but failed to persuade them to accept the U.S. terms for a deal.
“The simple fact is that we need to see an affirmative commitment that they 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, referring to Iran’s program to enrich nuclear fuel, which could be put to civilian uses but could also be developed into a weapon.
U.S. and Iranian negotiators were aiming to build on the shaky ceasefire that both sides agreed to Tuesday and identify a more permanent end to the war. After both parties took their first break of the night late Saturday, talks moved to the technical level, signaling progress in the initial phase, according to the Pakistani official. However, the two sides struggled to bridge differences over the future of the Strait of Hormuz and Tehran’s demand that the U.S. unfreeze billions of dollars in its assets.
Vance’s presence, in particular, signaled the Trump administration’s seriousness, according to one Western diplomat based in the Persian Gulf. The vice president was seen in the region as more supportive of a peace deal because of his past opposition to foreign military intervention, the diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the media.
Witkoff and Kushner spoke to Trump anywhere from a half-dozen to a dozen times throughout the marathon negotiations
Iran and the U.S. originally planed to hold “proximity talks” — meaning the delegations would be seated in different rooms — to build confidence, according to Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. After the talks got underway Saturday, a senior White House official described the format as “a trilateral face-to-face meeting.”
“The talks have started from a point of deep mistrust and unwillingness to talk, so in that sense, Pakistan has already accomplished a great deal in bringing the two sides to its capital,” said Haqqani, who is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Joining Vance in the U.S. delegation were U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Witkoff and Kushner led talks with Iran over its nuclear program earlier this year.
The vice president said that he, Witkoff and Kushner spoke to Trump anywhere from a half-dozen to a dozen times throughout the marathon negotiations, which involved several breaks, as well as other Cabinet members, including Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
The Iranian delegation that arrived in Pakistan late Friday included more than a dozen senior officials. Led by the Iranian parliamentary speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the delegation also included Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who took the lead on nuclear talks, several senior security officials and Iran’s central bank governor.
Iran has refused to relinquish control of the Strait of Hormuz
In the lead up to talks, Iran and the U.S. clashed on some of the ceasefire’s central terms. Iran has refused to relinquish control of the Strait of Hormuz since a ceasefire was declared. Over the course of the conflict, Iran took control of the critical waterway.
Iran’s request that the U.S. unfreeze billions in assets emerged as the other key sticking point for talks, according to the Pakistani official. Ghalibaf mentioned the assets in a post on Friday, saying they were one of two measures “mutually agreed upon” that “have yet to be implemented.” The other measure was the ceasefire in Lebanon, he said. “These two matters must be fulfilled before negotiations begin.
Iran has emphasized the importance of some kind of reparations for the conflict since the war’s early days. Iranian leaders said the payment of war-related damages would be a key element of an assurance that the U.S. would not attack again, and the demand is included in Tehran’s 10-point plan to end the war that was released by Iranian state-run media this week.
The plan also called for Iran to remain in control of the Strait of Hormuz and the withdrawal of U.S. forces from military bases in the Middle East. Both are likely problematic for the U.S.
This CNN article was published on the eve of the negotiations. It provides details on what was discussed:
CNN: What’s in the Iran war ceasefire? The two sides can’t seem to even agree on that
US vice president JD Vance (left) and Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf
Photo: patris.gr
This weekend’s talks to end the war with Iran are some of the most high-stakes negotiations not just of Donald Trump’s presidencies, but of recent American history, CNN notes.
One big problem, though: The US can’t even seem to agree with Iran on what they agreed to for the ceasefire.
The two-week truce seemed to come together rapidly on Tuesday, just hours before Trump’s 8 p.m. ET deadline for Iran to make a deal or else face the death of its “whole civilization.”
And if the ceasefire seemed a bit hasty on Tuesday, it looks a lot more so today.
The first two days of the truce not only haven’t gone smoothly — the Strait of Hormuz has remained a logjam, and attacks are still raining in the region — but they’ve also been marked by major disagreements about the terms of the agreement.
All of which would seem to augur quite poorly for negotiations over a more permanent peace.
Pic.: ‘India Times’
Lebanon
Perhaps the biggest problem looming over the ceasefire isn’t what’s happening in Iran. It’s the fact that Israel unleashed extensive attacks against Iran’s Hezbollah allies in Lebanon on Wednesday.
Iran says this violates the ceasefire; the United States and Israel say Lebanon wasn’t part of the deal.
When Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif first announced the ceasefire on Tuesday, he specified that Lebanon was a part of it.
He wrote that all parties had “agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.”
But Israel resumed its offensive in Lebanon in the hours after the ceasefire was announced and disputed that Lebanon was part of the deal.
Wednesday morning, Trump told PBS News Hour that Lebanon was not included in the ceasefire. “Because of Hezbollah, they were not included in the deal,” he said, calling what was happening in Lebanon a “separate skirmish.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt echoed that “Lebanon is not part of the ceasefire” from the briefing room podium that afternoon.
But Tehran is still insisting that what Pakistan’s prime minister said was right, with multiple high-ranking Iranian officials saying Israel is violating the ceasefire.
But importantly, Iran is getting some backup from Pakistan — the intermediary the United States chose to work through. Pakistan is standing by the claim that Lebanon was part of the deal.
In a statement, Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs cast what’s happening in Lebanon as “serious violations of the ceasefire.”
And the plot has thickened even more. CNN confirmed Thursday morning that top Trump administration officials had been in contact with Pakistan throughout the day Tuesday about what the US wanted to see from a ceasefire and had largely signed off on specific elements of Sharif’s post.
One interesting development: CNN reported Thursday that Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu spoke on Wednesday, during which the US president asked the Israeli prime minister to scale back attacks in Lebanon and enter into negotiations with Lebanon about disarming Hezbollah.
The Strait of Hormuz
One of the most striking aspects of the ceasefire was that it seemed to give Iran something it never had before the war: control of the Strait of Hormuz (at least temporarily).
As CNN’s Fareed Zakaria noted, that would be a very big deal. Iran has shown just how much leverage it has by holding the world economy hostage in the critical waterway.
Iran said in a statement Tuesday night that passage through the strait “will be possible via coordination with Iran’s Armed Forces and with due consideration of technical limitations.”
And Trump seemed to agree to that. He posted Iran’s statement to Truth Social Tuesday night. And while he said in his initial announcement of the ceasefire that it was conditional on the “complete, immediate, and safe opening” of the strait, he notably didn’t demand that Iran relinquish control.
The 10-point plan
Trump in his statement Tuesday night cited “a 10-point proposal from Iran,” which he called “a workable basis on which to negotiate.”
But then Iran began sharing a 10-point list that looked a whole lot like a grab bag of Iranian demands — the kinds of things the United States could never agree to.
By Wednesday afternoon, Leavitt said Trump had been referring to a different 10-point proposal from Iran that was more serious.
But Leavitt and the White House have not offered details about what is supposedly in this updated proposal.
And meanwhile, Iran keeps making clear it believes the 10 points it shared publicly are what Trump was referring to. On Wednesday afternoon, it pointed to supposed violations of the 10-point proposal, including via Israel’s strikes in Lebanon and the Trump administration saying Iran will have no right to enrich uranium.
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