Vance says Iranians refused to disavow nuclear program that would let them build bomb, makes no mention of Strait of Hormuz, cited in Iran as other key point of disagreement
The US and Iran failed to reach an agreement to end the war after historic, lengthy face-to-face talks that concluded early Sunday in the Pakistani capital Islamabad, leaving uncertainty over the fragile ceasefire.
Each side blamed the other for the failure of the 21-hour-long negotiations to end the deadly fighting that has swept the Middle East and sent global oil prices soaring since it began over six weeks ago.
“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,” US Vice President JD Vance, the head of the American delegation, told reporters shortly before he left Islamabad.
“So we go back to the United States having not come to an agreement. We’ve made very clear what our red lines are.”
The US delegation then left Pakistan, while the Iranians were to depart later on Sunday, two Pakistani sources said.
“We were negotiating in good faith,” Vance said, speaking at a podium in front of a pair of American flags with special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to his side.
“And we leave here, and we leave here with a very simple proposal, a method of understanding that is our final and best offer. We’ll see if the Iranians accept it,” he said.
“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. That is the core goal of the president of the United States, and that’s what we’ve tried to achieve through these negotiations,” the US vice president said.
The talks in Islamabad, after a ceasefire earlier in the week, were the first direct US-Iranian meeting in more than a decade and the highest-level discussions since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency said that “excessive” US demands had hindered reaching an agreement.
Other Iranian media said there was agreement on a number of issues but that the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s nuclear program were the main points of difference.
A spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry said the talks were conducted in an atmosphere of mistrust.
“It is natural that we shouldn’t have expected to reach agreement in just one session,” the spokesperson was quoted as saying by Iranian media.
“It is imperative that the parties continue to uphold their commitment to ceasefire,” Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said in a statement after the talks. The two sides agreed on Tuesday to a two-week ceasefire in an attempt to wind down a war that began on February 28 with airstrikes by the US and Israel on Iranian regime targets.
In his brief press conference, Vance did not mention reopening the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for about 20 percent of global energy supplies that Tehran has blocked since the war began.
Vance said he had spoken with US President Donald Trump as many as a dozen times during the talks, and also spoke with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Adm. Brad Cooper, head of the United States Central Command.
But even as the negotiations continued, Trump said on Saturday that a deal was not entirely necessary.
“We’re negotiating, whether we make a deal or not makes no difference to me, because we’ve won,” he told reporters.
The US delegation included special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Iran’s team included Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.
“There were mood swings from the two sides and the temperature went up and down during the meeting,” a Pakistani source said in reference to an early round of talks.
Islamabad, a city of more than 2 million people, was locked down during the talks, with thousands of paramilitary personnel and army troops on the streets.
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.
Despite the differences in Islamabad, three supertankers fully laden with oil passed through the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday, shipping data showed, in what appeared to be the first vessels to exit the Gulf since the US-Iran ceasefire deal.
Hundreds of tankers are still stuck in the Gulf, waiting to exit during the two-week ceasefire period.
While the talks were being conducted in Islamabad, the US military said two destroyers transited the strait ahead of mine-clearing work, a first since the war began. Iran’s state media, however, said the joint military command denied that.
Trump’s stated goals have shifted, but as a minimum he appears to want free passage for global shipping through the waterway and the crippling of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program to ensure it cannot produce an atomic bomb.
Tehran, which routinely calls for the destruction of Israel, maintains that its nuclear program is for purely civilian purposes. However, before the June 2025 war, Iran had been enriching uranium to levels far beyond what’s necessary for any peaceful application, and consistently obstructed international inspectors from checking its facilities. Israel has also said Iran was taking steps toward weaponization.
Israel launched its campaign against Iran, alongside the US, to degrade the Iranian regime’s military capabilities, distance threats posed by Iran — including its nuclear and ballistic missile programs — and “create the conditions” for the Iranian people to topple the regime, the military and other Israeli leaders have said.
Since the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, the most direct US contact had been in 2013 when president Barack Obama called newly elected President Hassan Rouhani to discuss Iran’s nuclear program.
Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, and counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif later met during negotiations toward the 2015 Iran nuclear deal — a process that lasted over a year.
Now the far broader talks featured Vance, a reluctant defender of the war who has little diplomatic experience and warned Iran not to “try and play us,” and Qalibaf, a former commander with Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard who has issued some of Iran’s most fiery statements since fighting began.
Since the war began on February 28, 20 Israeli civilians and foreign nationals have been killed in Israel in Iranian ballistic missile attacks, along with four Palestinians in the West Bank.
More than 3,000 people were killed throughout Iran during the war, Iran’s forensic chief told state media on Thursday.
US-based rights group HRANA said 3,636 Iranians have been killed since the war erupted. It said 1,701 of those were civilians, including at least 254 children.
The figures could not be independently verified. The IDF has estimated that some 5,000 Iranian soldiers have been killed in Israeli strikes, along with tens of thousands wounded, many of them members of the internal security forces and Basij paramilitary force.
Thirteen US military service members have been killed in the fighting, with more than 300 wounded.
Dozens more civilians and soldiers have been killed in Iranian attacks targeting the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Oman.
