Vice President JD Vance summed up the failure of 21 hours of talks with Iran in one sentence: “They have chosen not to accept our terms.”
To Iranian officials, it also reflected their biggest problem with the talks: The United States, they argue, did not actually want 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.’”
The United States, he added, must learn that “you can’t dictate terms to Iran.”
Both Washington and Tehran sent their mediators to the talks — which began Saturday morning in Islamabad, Pakistan — asserting that they had arrived with 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 critical piece of leverage. 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, an adviser to Iran’s former supreme leader, put it even more bluntly: “Today the key to the Strait of Hormuz is firmly in our powerful hands.”
The idea that a day of diplomacy would unlock decades of entrenched issues was always a bit of a long shot. Before the war started in late February with the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, Washington spent months pressuring Tehran to relinquish its uranium stockpiles and halt nuclear 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.”
The negotiations have now gotten even thornier because Iran is determined not to give ground over the strait. Iran not only seeks to control the waterway, it hopes 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.
If diplomacy ultimately fails and fighting resumes, Iranian officials are banking that they can get President 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 maintains about half of its missile stockpiles, said Ali Vaez, the head of the Iran program at the International Crisis Group, a think tank.
“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.
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