The weekend talks, which were brokered by Pakistan and represented the highest level engagement between an American official and Iranians since the 1979 Islamic revolution, were aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz and resuming the flow of roughly a fifth of the world’s oil through it. Reopening the strait has become an economic imperative for Trump, whose approval ratings have sagged amid spiking oil prices and growing anxiety about the war’s toll on an already turbulent global economy.
But the talks ended early Sunday morning without movement on the question Trump said rendered the rest of the discussion moot.
“They have chosen not to accept our terms,” Vice President JD Vance told reporters in Islamabad before departing for Washington. “The simple fact is that 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.”
A U.S. official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said that no members of the negotiating team remain in Islamabad, including Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff or members of the technical teams.
Iran, meanwhile, said the peace talks fell apart because of a lack of trust. Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said in a post on X on Sunday that the U.S. “failed to gain the trust of the Iranian delegation” during the peace talks. He said that “due to the experiences of the two previous wars, we have no trust in the opposing side.”
The announcement of the blockade, which Trump said would begin “shortly,” also comes a day after CENTCOM confirmed that two U.S. destroyers transited the strait as part of a mine-clearing mission, the first such passage since fighting began six weeks ago. Iran declared the move a ceasefire violation and has separately moved forward with its plans to charge ships $1 per barrel of oil for safe passage through the strait.
Trump, in an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures,” said that he would resume attacks on Iran if the country does not give up its nuclear weapons program. But he also sought to frame the meeting as a productive one, saying that the points the two countries agreed to were better than the U.S. carrying out its plans to, as Trump has said, bomb Iran into the “stone ages.”
Already, some of the president’s allies are arguing that the blockade represents a negotiating tactic — not an end to the fragile two-week ceasefire the president announced last week.
“I think he’s calling Iran’s bluff,” Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday morning. “This is a game of chicken. It’s who caves first. The Iranian regime is hoping that Trump will cave. Today, he showed he’s not.”
Trump himself seemed to hint at that in the interview with Bartiromo, characterizing his threat last week that “a whole civilization will die” as a bargaining chip to get Iran to the negotiating table.
“They haven’t left the bargaining table. I predict they come back and they give us everything we want,” Trump said. “And I tell my people, I want everything. I don’t want 90 percent, I don’t want 95 percent. I told them, ‘I want everything.’”
Still, he conceded that the military operation in Iran has likely come with a political cost — particularly on gas prices. He told Bartiromo that while he hoped gas prices would lower before the midterms, they may remain the same or even be “maybe a little bit higher.”
“I think this won’t be that much longer,” he said.
Cheyanne Daniels contributed to this report.
