US-Iran talks fail to overcome their most basic obstacle

After 21 hours of talks in Islamabad, the US and Iran have steered clear of the worst possible outcome: a complete collapse of peace negotiations.

Only by the narrowest of margins, though.

The two delegations were so divided that they walked out of the five-star Serena Hotel without even locking in another meeting — a modest benchmark that even hardened sceptics had assumed was within reach.

Although Iran had all but signalled it might stay away, and the opening of the talks slipped behind schedule, there was early cause for optimism when both sides agreed to meet directly instead of relying on Pakistani intermediaries to carry messages from room to room.

In the end, however, they could not even settle on keeping the conversation going.

For all the obstacles in their way, even recent talks between Russia and Ukraine produced at least broad promises of more negotiations.

“We have been at it now for 21 hours, and we have had a number of substantive discussions. That’s the good news,” US Vice President JD Vance said at a press conference in the early hours of this morning.

“The bad news is that we have not reached an agreement.”

Compounding the impasse, both sides left the room believing the next move belonged to the other.

‘Final and best offer’

Mr Vance said he had left behind a “final and best offer” for Iran to weigh.

The US Vice President is presumed to have given Tehran a deadline.

But people close to the Iranian delegation told news agencies that the US appeared to be searching for a reason to walk away and that, from their perspective, “the ball is in America’s court”.

The central issue, Mr Vance said, was Iran’s refusal to commit to forgoing the development of nuclear weapons.

“We haven’t seen that yet. We hope that we will,” he said.

US Vice President JD Vance said the US had left negotiations with the ‘final and best offer’ to Iran on the table

That point will surprise no one who has tracked the dispute over time. The JCPOA — the 2015 nuclear agreement reached under Barack Obama that imposed strict limits on Iran’s nuclear programme — emerged only after 20 months of formal talks.

The two sides convened 18 times in 11 different cities.

Donald Trump, of course, abandoned the JCPOA in 2018, branding it the worst deal ever made.

Since then, Iran has sharply increased its nuclear stockpile and now possesses more than 400kg of highly enriched uranium, well above the level it held before the agreement was in place.

From the vantage point of Islamabad this morning, the JCPOA looks far more favourable than Mr Trump ever acknowledged.

At first, Iranian officials were signalling that “excessive demands” had doomed the chances of a deal — reinforcing the view that the Americans’ expectation of securing agreement in a single round of talks was always unrealistic and ultimately became the decisive stumbling block.

But Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of Iran’s parliament, who led Tehran’s delegation alongside Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, has since offered a different account. The core problem, he said, was not the detail of the talks but the absence of trust.

“My colleagues in the Iranian delegation proposed forward-looking initiatives,” he said, “but the other side ultimately failed to gain the trust of the Iranian delegation in this round of negotiations.”

It is not hard to see why. Last year, while talks over Iran’s nuclear programme were still under way, the US and Israel struck Iran’s nuclear sites. And barely six weeks ago, Iran was engaged in another round of negotiations when the US and Israel launched a war that killed its supreme leader.

Strait of Hormuz remains a sticking point

Iran’s foreign ministry said the discussions covered the Strait of Hormuz, the nuclear issue, war reparations, sanctions relief and a full end to hostilities.

Unsurprisingly, the Strait of Hormuz also appears to have been one of the main points of friction.

The US has reason to be angered by that, given the Strait of Hormuz was not even meant to be on the agenda in Islamabad.

Its reopening had been the condition for holding these talks — Iran had agreed to let ships pass under the ceasefire reached last Tuesday. The fact that the waterway remains effectively shut indicates Tehran arrived in Pakistan with far more leverage than it was supposed to retain.

Iran understands that perfectly well. And it has no intention of giving up control of the strait — after showing it can hold the global economy at risk through the waterway, Tehran has little reason to surrender that advantage.

Iran has no intention of relinquishing control of the Strait of Hormuz

More broadly, Iran’s leadership believes it has come out of this war in a stronger position than the one it occupied at the outset. It endured nearly six weeks of the heaviest US and Israeli bombardment in the region’s modern history.

Its supreme leader was killed — and replaced. Its military was weakened — but not wiped out. And in Islamabad, it sat across the table from the US with its own 10-point framework serving as the foundation for negotiations.

That this is where matters now stand is exactly why so many analysts see the war as one of the biggest strategic miscalculations of Donald Trump’s presidency.

A conflict launched in part to weaken Iran has instead left it more confident. It is little surprise that Tehran felt no pressure to accept Mr Vance’s demands.

But with no agreement even to meet again, what happens next is anyone’s guess.

What is worth keeping in mind through all of this is that every move may be less a fixed position than a negotiating tactic — because both sides have a strong interest in looking like the one that holds the upper hand.