President Trump faces new diplomatic tests as he prepares for weekend talks with Tehran amid doubts about the durability of his day-old cease-fire with Iran and the prospects for building it into a broader peace settlement.
A White House official said on Wednesday that Vice President JD Vance would lead a U.S. delegation to Pakistan for a meeting on Saturday with Iranian officials. Mr. Vance will be joined in the capital, Islamabad, by Mr. Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner as they work to bridge huge political differences, some dating back decades, under a two-week clock set by the cease-fire agreement.
But even as Trump officials finalized the Saturday meeting, fractures were already emerging in the limited cease-fire brokered by Pakistan on Tuesday night, just ahead of Mr. Trump’s deadline for a threatened “civilization”-ending attack on Iran.
Robert Malley, who served as President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s special envoy for Iran, said the cease-fire was filled with ambiguities. The United States and Iran are already arguing over them, he said, and that will complicate the path forward. “It’s hard to know not just where you go from here, but where you are to begin with,” he said. “The talks are starting on very weak grounds.”
In a statement on social media, Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, insisted that three clauses of what he said was a 10-point “agreed framework” between the U.S. and Iran had already been violated, including an end to Israeli attacks on Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon. The Trump administration says that was not part of the agreement.
Mr. Ghalibaf also condemned the Trump administration for reasserting on Wednesday that Iran would never be allowed to have a domestic uranium enrichment program, as Tehran has long demanded.
“In such situation, a bilateral cease-fire or negotiations is unreasonable,” wrote Mr. Ghalibaf, who Iranian state media has said will represent Iran in Islamabad this weekend.
At the same time, U.S. officials were watching to see whether Iran would deliver on its promise to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which Tehran militarized in response to the conflict. By Wednesday night, there was little evidence that significant shipping traffic through the mine-laden waterway was resuming.
While the United States and Iran will surely bluster and jockey for advantage in public, diplomats and Iran experts said, both sides may have enough incentives to muddle their way through to Islamabad without allowing the cease-fire to collapse. Iran’s military and political leadership has been devastated by the five-week war, while Mr. Trump is under heavy pressure from a skeptical public, rising energy prices and growing dissent among his supporters as the fall midterm elections approach.
“It’s going to be a very messy, imperfect cease-fire,” said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert and vice president at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution in Washington. “But my sense is that both sides want to at least test what’s possible at the negotiating table.”
Those possibilities may be limited, but the White House struck an optimistic tone.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Wednesday that the United States had received an Iranian proposal that provided “a workable basis on which to negotiate,” notably different from Mr. Ghalibaf’s description of the document as an “agreed framework.” She added that the proposal was “more reasonable and entirely different” from an earlier list of Iranian demands, which she said had been “thrown in the garbage.”
The newer proposal has not been released publicly. “These extraordinarily sensitive and complex negotiations will take place behind closed doors over the course of the next two weeks,” Ms. Leavitt said.
She also cautioned reporters against relying on statements from Iranian officials and state media, which have contained such maximalist Iranian demands as the lifting of all U.S. sanctions on Iran’s economy, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Middle East and a domestic uranium enrichment program.
But experts said it was unlikely that Iranian leaders had suddenly made major new concessions, given the consistency of Iran’s demands over several years and the economic leverage it has demonstrated by choking off vital energy and chemical shipments through the Strait of Hormuz.
Mr. Ghalibaf’s statement made clear, for instance, that Iran still insisted on what it called its sovereign right to enrich uranium, the refining process that produces fuel for nuclear power or atomic bombs. The Trump administration has said that Iran must agree to zero enrichment, and on Wednesday Ms. Leavitt told reporters that ensuring “the end of uranium enrichment in Iran” remained a nonnegotiable demand for the president.
Given such a wide gap, Mr. Malley said it was highly unlikely the Trump administration could quickly conclude a wide-ranging bargain with Iran, especially in such a short time. He called it more plausible that the two sides would find limited agreements that sidestep the most difficult matters, including the fate of Iran’s nuclear program and its stockpile of nearly 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium.
“It’s hard to imagine a comprehensive deal given the gaps and differing visions of both sides,” Mr. Malley said. “You can imagine a series of smaller deals that includes the Strait of Hormuz and some sanctions relief.”
Ms. Maloney and others said the addition of Mr. Vance to the U.S. negotiating team was a notable shift in Mr. Trump’s diplomatic approach.
It was Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner who led two previous rounds of talks with Iranian officials over the country’s nuclear program, one last spring and one in late February. Analysts said that Iran likely views them with profound skepticism given that Mr. Trump launched attacks after both, including on the day before the United States joined Israel in opening the latest conflict with a massive airstrike that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and several other senior officials.
The Iranians may be more receptive to Mr. Vance, a longtime skeptic of American military action who publicly warned, before he took office last year, that the United States would be foolish to start a war with Iran and shared private reservations as Mr. Trump weighed whether to attack earlier this year.
But veteran diplomats reiterated concerns that Mr. Trump was again assigning high-stakes talks to negotiators with very little background in Iran or nuclear issues.
R. Nicholas Burns, who negotiated with Iran as a senior State Department official during the George W. Bush administration, urged the Trump team to loop in Iran experts in the career Foreign Service who have been largely sidelined.
“The fact that these senior career diplomats were excluded from the Witkoff-led talks with the Iranian foreign minister before the war was diplomatic malpractice,” Mr. Burns said. “Our career diplomats who speak fluent Farsi and understand the negotiating behavior of the Iranians are a hidden strength of the U.S.”
Mr. Burns urged Trump officials to focus in the coming days on ensuring that Iran never gains access to its highly enriched uranium, much or all of which is believed to be buried under the rubble of airstrikes last summer and to ensure that Iran does not become a “gatekeeper” in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has made recent public demands for lucrative payments to allow commercial shipping through the waterway.
Mr. Trump may have simplified matters somewhat during a national address last week when he suggested that he might no longer demand that Iran surrender its uranium stockpile. Mr. Trump said that what he called Iran’s “nuclear dust” was deeply buried and that the U.S. could detect and stop any attempt by Iran to access it.
But Mr. Burns said he was skeptical about the prospect of a broad agreement. “Iran’s interest will be to drag out the talks, sticking to demanding U.S. concessions that President Trump cannot meet,” he said.
“The Iran government negotiators are experienced, cynical and adept at hiding the truth,” he added.
Further complicating the diplomatic mix is the role of Israel, which one senior U.S. official called an uncertain variable. Israel could push to renew the war and pursue its goal of sparking a popular uprising that would topple Iran’s surviving clerical leaders, which goes beyond Mr. Trump’s currently stated war aims.
Mr. Trump will also face pressure from Iran hawks at home not to cut a deal of convenience with Iran that ends the war without resolving long-term issues.
The influential talk radio host Mark Levin, who has Mr. Trump’s ear, has been highly critical of the cease-fire. The U.S. official said that Mr. Trump could sour on the agreement if those voices were not offset by prominent war critics like the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Mr. Trump could also be triggered by Iran’s boastful domestic messaging, which is consistent with the kind of posturing routine in Middle East diplomacy, but which might provoke a U.S. president highly attuned to appearances.
Hours after the Tuesday cease-fire, Iran’s National Security Council released a statement celebrating the country’s “undeniable, historical, and crushing defeat” of the U.S. and claiming that Mr. Trump had agreed to a list of huge concessions, such as a full U.S. military withdrawal from the region, that Trump officials call fictitious.
Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting.
Michael Crowley covers the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The Times. He has reported from nearly three dozen countries and often travels with the secretary of state.
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