Live updates: Follow the latest news on the Iran war
US-Iran peace talks have failed, US Vice President JD Vance announced in Islamabad, after more than 20 hours of negotiations with Iranian officials in a hotel in the Pakistani capital.
“The bad news,” he said, “is we have not reached an agreement. We just could not get to a situation where the Iranians would accept our terms.”
Announcing he would depart Pakistan, Mr Vance said his team was leaving Iran with “a very simple proposal” – “our final and best offer. We’ll see if the Iranians accept it”.
A statement by the Iranian Foreign Ministry released on social media just before Mr Vance spoke did not announce the talks had broken down or reference Washington’s “final offer” directly, but called on Washington to refrain from “excessive demands and unlawful requests”.
Less than an hour after he spoke, Mr Vance boarded Air Force Two, the vice-presidential jet, and departed Islamabad for Washington.
The sense of exhaustion and disappointment in Islamabad – among both sides, their hosts and observers – has been palpable. Almost immediately after Mr Vance left Pakistan, Iranian state media began quoting Iranian delegation sources saying the US side was “looking for an excuse to leave”.
Mr Vance described the US approach as “flexible”, and said the US side had spoken with President Donald Trump “half a dozen times, a dozen times” during the course of the talks. He also thanked Pakistan for doing “an amazing job” and “trying to help us and the Iranians bridge the gap and get to a deal”.
The negotiations in Islamabad had been very complex, with various stages involving Pakistani mediators first shuttling between the two sides before hosting them together. Later in the talks, the Americans and Iranians switched to a text-only format, exchanging written proposals and consulting on them with their respective expert teams.
Yet, in the end, a key area of disagreement was an old one: Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The Vice President said in his remarks that Iran’s nuclear programme has been “destroyed” but that Washington has still seen no “affirmative commitment that [Iran] will not seek a nuclear weapon and they will not seek the tools that will enable them to quickly achieve a nuclear weapon”.
