In Pakistan Talks, Iran Saw a U.S. Trying to Dictate, Not Negotiate
Iran sees American demands as reaching far beyond what the United States achieved in war. Tehran is gambling that it can withstand further bombardment more than Washington is willing to sustain economic chaos, experts say.
Vice President JD Vance summed up the failure of 21 hours of negotiations with Iran in one sentence: “They have chosen not to accept our terms.”
To Iranian officials, that line reflected their biggest problem with the talks, too: The United States they argue, had not come to negotiate.
“Bingo,” Javad Zarif, the former foreign minister who led Iran’s negotiators in the nuclear deal negotiations with Washington and Europe in 2015, highlighting the comment from Mr. Vance, wrote on X. “No negotiations — at least with Iran — will succeed based on ‘our/your terms.’”
“We are open to dialogue and negotiation,” Medhi Tabatabei, a deputy to Iran’s president, wrote on social media on Sunday. “But we do not submit to force.”
Both Washington and Tehran sent their mediators to talks in Islamabad, Pakistan, on Saturday asserting that they had the upper hand. And both left those talks still thinking they had the edge, even as they left room open for diplomacy.
U.S. officials see their advantage in the devastating damage they have inflicted on Iran — killing most of the leaders who ran the country before the war, and hammering its military bases and infrastructure. On Sunday, Mr. Vance told reporters that “we’ve made very clear what our red lines are” and “what things we’re willing to accommodate them on.”
Iran’s government sees itself not only as victorious for having survived that onslaught, but also for having emerged with a new and strategic card. Since the war began, it has asserted control over passage through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil shipping corridor — and it is not willing to give up that leverage now.
“We will not stop for a moment in working to secure the achievements of the last forty days,” Gen. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s speaker of Parliament and the head of the negotiating delegation, wrote in a statement on social media on Sunday.
Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, framed the leveraging of Hormuz as a new chapter in Iran’s history of using its geography against foreign attackers. He compared Iranian forces’ ability to block maritime traffic in the strait to the ancient Persians’ use of Abu al-Hayat, a pass in the Zagros Mountains, to repel Alexander the Great.
“Just as the “Abu al-Hayat Pass” once symbolized the blocking of outsiders,” he wrote on social media, “today the Strait of Hormuz is firmly in our hands.”
Regional observers say the diplomatic impasse in Islamabad reflects a bigger geopolitical struggle between the two foes.
“This isn’t just a dispute over who was victorious — it’s a dispute over the meaning of the war itself,” said Ramzy Mardini, founder of Geopol Labs, a Middle East-based geopolitical risk advisory firm.
“For Tehran, this is a war that revises the regional order — one that redefines the rules and allows it to break out of the constraints and sanctions imposed on it.” Washington, he said, “still sees itself as enforcing an existing hegemonic order that others must conform to.”
The idea that a day of diplomacy would unlock decades of entrenched issues was always a long shot. Iranians were already embittered by President Trump’s withdrawal in 2018 from their previous nuclear deal with Washington. Before the war in February, Mr. Trump’s mediators pressed Tehran to relinquish its uranium stockpiles and halt uranium enrichment. The various rounds of talks went nowhere.
“We should not have expected to reach an agreement in a single session from the outset,” said Esmail Baghaei, the spokesman of Iran’s Foreign Ministry. “No one had such expectations.”
This round of negotiations are even thornier, now that Iran seems determined not to give ground over the Strait of Hormuz. Iran not only seeks to control the waterway, but Iranian politicians have also signaled they hope to extract money from it. If Iran can collect tolls from vessels going through the strait, the money could help finance the enormous reconstruction efforts that lay ahead.
A simple return to the era of free navigation before the war is not in the cards if Iran’s leaders get their way, said Sasan Karimi, a political scientist at the University of Tehran and the former deputy vice president for strategy in Iran’s previous government.
And yet Iranian negotiators say the United States’ aims went even beyond a return to that status quo, Mr. Karimi said, to demanding shared management of the strait.
“It is nonsense that America would have management of the Hormuz Strait,” he said. “Iran is not going to deliver such concessions to Donald Trump that he couldn’t grasp in the war.”
“Iran showed already it is not to be defeated easily — this is not an easy game like Venezuela,” he added, referring to the quick U.S. operation in January to remove the Venezuelan president and assert its own terms on the country’s remaining leaders.
Mr. Trump said on Sunday on his social media that his next move is to impose a U.S. naval blockade on Iran in the strait. “Any Iranian who fires at us, or at peaceful vessels, will be BLOWN TO HELL!” he wrote. “Iran will not be allowed to profit off this Illegal Act of EXTORTION.”
That will pose new risks for the global economy, said Ali Vaez, the head of the Iran program at the International Crisis Group, a think tank. Iran will likely urge its regional ally, the Houthi forces in Yemen, to block Bab al-Mandeb, another crucial shipping route at the southern tip of the Red Sea.
And if diplomacy ultimately fails and fighting resumes, Iranian officials are banking that they can get Mr. Trump to blink over the global economic chaos before they are exhausted by U.S. military blows.
Current U.S. intelligence assessments indicate that Iran has retained a significant amount of its weapons stockpiles and has been able to dig out its missile bunkers and silos faster than anticipated.
“They could hold their ground for another two months, if not more. And economically, I think there is no threshold for how much more pain the Iranians are willing to tolerate,” Mr. Vaez said.
“The question really is: Is the Trump administration willing to pay the high economic price?”
Sanam Mahoozi contributed reporting.