JD Vance’s announcement from Islamabad in the middle of the night chilled the world: “The United States has not reached an agreement with Iran.” According to the American vice president «there is no promise from Iran to definitively abandon nuclear weapons. We were quite flexible, but we couldn’t make any progress. We could not reach a situation where the Iranians were willing to accept our conditions. I think we’ve been pretty flexible, we’ve been pretty accommodating.”
According to Tehran, however, “the negotiations failed due to the unreasonable demands of the USA”. There is only one small but significant addition in the text: “No one expected an agreement in the first round of negotiations.” Strait of Hormuz, war in Lebanon, use of nuclear power, economic sanctions: there were various obstacles that prevented an agreement. Pakistan, a mediator state, asks the USA and Iran to respect the ceasefire in any case.
And now? Iran «is in no hurry to start a new negotiation with the United States. There will be no change in the situation in the Strait of Hormuz unless the US accepts a reasonable settlement. The Americans should have been realistic, but they were looking for a pretext to leave the negotiations. Now the ball is in their court,” reports the Iranian Fars agency. The spokesperson of the Foreign Ministry, Esmaeil Baghaei, took matters further, claiming that the failure of the talks was due to “excessive requests from the United States” on issues such as the Strait of Hormuz and the nuclear dossier. However, he continued, “diplomacy never ends.”
