US vice-president JD Vance said on Sunday that the US and Iran had failed to reach an agreement after marathon negotiations in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.
“We have been at it now for 21 hours, and we’ve had a number of substantive discussions with the Iranians. That’s the good news,” the US vice-president told a press conference. “The bad news is that we have not reached an agreement, and I think that’s bad news for Iran — and, more broadly, bad news for the United States of America.”
He left without responding to questions on whether the two sides would return to war. Vance told reporters that the US had not yet seen a “fundamental commitment of will” from Iran not to develop nuclear weapons.
“We’ve made very clear what our red lines are: what things we’re willing to accommodate them on and what things we’re not willing to accommodate them on. And we’ve made that as clear as we possibly could, and they have chosen not to accept our terms,” he said.
“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.”
Vance said Washington needed to see an “affirmative commitment” that Iran would not seek to develop nuclear weapons or the tools to build them quickly.
“That is the core goal of the president of the United States, and that’s what we’ve tried to achieve through these negotiations,” he said.
“But the simple question is: do we see a fundamental commitment of will from Iran not to develop a nuclear weapon — not just now, not just two years from now, but for the long term? We haven’t seen that yet. We hope that we will.”
Earlier in the day, in a sign the talks were faltering, US President Donald Trump said that “regardless” of what happens in Islamabad, “we win”.
Esmaeil Baqaei, a spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, earlier described the talks — which began on Saturday and ran into the early hours of Sunday — as “intensive”.
“Mediation has continued without interruption until now, and numerous messages and texts have been exchanged between the two sides,” he wrote on social media.
He added that the discussions covered “various dimensions of the main negotiation topics, including the Strait of Hormuz, the nuclear issue, war reparations, lifting of sanctions, and the complete end to the war against Iran and in the region”.