When talks between the United States and Iran ended just before dawn on Sunday morning without a permanent cease-fire, the Americans said they had made their final best offer and that Iran had not accepted.
“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,” Vice President JD Vance said after 21 hours of meetings with top Iranian officials at the Serena Hotel in Islamabad.
Mr. Vance did not say what those red lines were. In the days leading up to the talks, both sides had issued public statements suggesting they remained far apart on several critical issues. They did not even agree on whether the two-week truce they reached on Tuesday applied to fighting in Lebanon, a dispute that nearly derailed the meeting.
By early Sunday, three main sticking points remained, according to two Iranian officials familiar with the talks: the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz; the fate of nearly 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium; and Iran’s demand that about $27 billion in frozen revenues held abroad be released.
The United States had demanded that Iran immediately reopen the strait to all maritime traffic. But Iran refused to relinquish leverage over the critical choke point for oil tankers, saying it would do so only after a final peace deal, according to the two Iranian officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic negotiations.
Iran also sought reparations for damage from six weeks of airstrikes and asked for frozen oil revenues held in Iraq, Luxembourg, Bahrain, Japan, Qatar, Turkey and Germany to be released for reconstruction, the officials said. The Americans refused those requests.
Another point of contention was President Trump’s demand that Iran hand over or sell its entire stockpile of near-bomb-grade enriched uranium. Iran made a counterproposal, but the sides were unable to reach a compromise, the officials said.
“When two serious teams with an intention for a deal come to the table, it has to be a win-win for both. It is unrealistic to think we can come out of this without making any serious concessions; the same holds true for the Americans,” said Mehdi Rahmati, an analyst in Tehran, in a telephone interview.
Even though the meetings ended without an agreement, the fact that they took place at all was a sign of progress. Just six weeks earlier, the United States and Israel had killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in an airstrike, and Iranian officials vowed to avenge his death. At the time, the prospect of any high-level meeting between Iranian and American officials seemed remote.
Still, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the head of Iran’s Parliament and an influential military commander, led the Iranian delegation and met face-to-face with Mr. Vance. The two men shook hands, and the talks was described as cordial and calm, the two senior Iranian officials familiar with the talks said. While no diplomatic breakthrough was reached, a taboo — shaped by decades of hostility, sharp rhetoric and chants in Iran of “death to America” — was broken.
The meeting between Mr. Vance and Mr. Ghalibaf was the highest-level face-to-face engagement between representatives of Iran and the United States since diplomatic relations were severed in 1979 after the Islamic Revolution. Shortly afterward, Iran’s new rulers stormed the U.S. Embassy and took American diplomats hostage.
“This is the most serious and sustained direct talks between the U.S. and Iran, and it reflects the intention of both sides to end this war,” said Vali Nasr, a professor and Iran expert at Johns Hopkins University. “And there has been clearly positive momentum for the talks to go as long as they have and not break down.”
Farnaz Fassihi is the United Nations bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the organization. She also covers Iran and has written about conflict in the Middle East for 15 years.
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