President Trump on Saturday abruptly called off a trip by two of his top negotiators to Islamabad, Pakistan, the latest sign that Iran and the United States remain far apart on a deal to end the war.
The president said he pulled his team from the flight shortly before takeoff, and he told the Iranians they could negotiate by telephone instead.
“They can call me,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “We have all the cards. We’ve won everything.”
Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, had been scheduled to travel to Pakistan on Saturday, along with top aides to Vice President JD Vance, who participated in talks in the Pakistani capital earlier this month. Officials in Pakistan have been relaying messages between Iran and the United States to try to end around two months of war.
But the Americans appear no closer to persuading Iran to turn over its stockpile of enriched uranium and curtail its nuclear program. The two sides are also in dispute over control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil supply normally flows. Mr. Vance’s trip to Islamabad two weeks ago proved unsuccessful, but an administration official said that the vice president remained on standby to re-engage in the talks.
When asked what had changed for him to call off the trip — it was never certain that the two sides would meet in person — Mr. Trump told reporters on Saturday that Iran gave the United States a “paper that should have been better,” presumably referring to a peace proposal. After the president canceled the trip his envoys were set to make, he said that Iran made a new offer that was “much better,” but still short of U.S. demands.
“They offered a lot but not enough,” Mr. Trump said, without giving details.
The president also complained that the Iranian officials scheduled to talk with his representatives were not high enough in rank.
“We’re not going to be traveling 15, 16 hours to have a meeting with people that nobody ever heard of,” he said, adding: “They weren’t meeting with the leader of the country. They were meeting with other people. And I said, ‘We’re just not going to do it.’ Too much traveling, takes too long, too expensive. I’m a very cost-conscious person.”
The United States and Iran now appear to be engaged in a contest to see which side can outlast the other. Iran is aware that Mr. Trump is reluctant to restart the war during the run-up to the midterm elections, given its unpopularity in the United States and the toll it is taking on the global economy and energy markets. The White House is calculating that Iran’s economy cannot withstand the U.S. blockade.
But there were some indications that Iran might have decided to scuttle talks this weekend.
Mr. Trump called off his envoys’ trip after Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, who had been in Islamabad for talks with Pakistani officials, left the country and traveled to Oman. Iranian officials had said on Friday that Mr. Araghchi was expecting to meet with U.S. negotiators in Pakistan. But after he arrived, a spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry said that no meeting had been planned.
After leaving Islamabad, Mr. Araghchi said in a social media post that he had shared with Pakistani officials Iran’s position on a “workable framework to permanently end the war on Iran.” He did not give details of the latest proposal. “Have yet to see if the U.S. is truly serious about diplomacy,” he added.
Later on Saturday, Iranian state media said that Mr. Araghchi would return to Islamabad after his visit to Oman. He will be joined on Sunday by other members of the Iranian delegation, who have traveled back to Tehran from Islamabad for further consultations on “ending the war.”
In a phone call with Pakistan’s prime minister on Saturday, Iran’s president said that Tehran would not re-enter peace negotiations so long as the United States maintained its naval blockade of ships traveling to and from Iran’s ports, according to Iranian state media.
Masoud Pezeshkian, the Iranian president, told the Pakistani leader that Iran would not enter negotiations “under pressure, threats and blockade,” the reports in state media said. The Iranian president added that the U.S. blockade had sown distrust among Iran’s leaders and contradicted the Trump administration’s stated willingness to engage diplomatically.
Earlier this week, Mr. Trump unilaterally extended a cease-fire between the United States and Iran that was about to expire, saying he wanted to give Tehran a chance to come up with a new proposal to end the war.
In a Truth Social post on his decision, the president repeated his contention that the Iranian government was divided, and argued that those disagreements were complicating talks.
“There is tremendous infighting and confusion within their ‘leadership,’” he said. “Nobody knows who is in charge including them.” Several top Iranian officials put out statements on Thursday denying that the country’s leaders were divided.
The United States recently transmitted a written proposal to the Iranians intended to establish points of agreement that could frame more detailed negotiations. The document covers a broad range of issues, but the core sticking points are the same ones that have bedeviled Western negotiators for more than a decade: the scope of Iran’s uranium enrichment program and the fate of its stockpile of enriched uranium.
The U.S. military has displayed its overwhelming might during the war, successfully striking thousands of targets. But Iran’s theocratic regime, even after its top leaders were killed, has remained in power and asserted tight control over the Strait of Hormuz, limiting shipping, driving up the price of oil and shaking the world economy.
Luke Broadwater covers the White House for The Times.
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