Vice President JD Vance’s trip to Pakistan for a second round of negotiations with Iran has been put on hold after Iran failed to respond to U.S. positions, a U.S. official with direct knowledge of the situation said Tuesday. Iran, for its part, said it had not yet decided whether to resume talks with the United States.
With the two-week truce set to expire on Wednesday in Iran, it was unclear what steps, if any, Iran or the United States would take next. Talks could resume at a moment’s notice, though President Donald Trump has suggested that he did not want to extend the truce without a longer-term agreement.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, said Iran had not decided whether to even go to Pakistan. He blamed it on “contradictory messages, inconsistent behavior and unacceptable actions by the American side,” according to the nation’s state broadcaster, IRIB.
But in private, two senior Iranian officials said Monday that an Iranian delegation was planning to travel to Pakistan on Tuesday to resume talks. The Iranian officials said Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, would attend negotiations with the United States if Vance were there.
Speaking to CNBC on Tuesday, Trump expressed optimism about potential talks but said the U.S. military stood ready to bomb again if no deal was struck with the Iranian government. “We don’t have that much time,” he said.
Even if the sides return to the negotiating table, many sticking points remain — on Iran’s nuclear program, for instance, and on the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic conduit for oil and gas. The threat of Iranian attacks has throttled shipping traffic through the strait, prompting a U.S. blockade of Iranian ports that the Navy says has forced 28 ships to turn around.
Here’s what else we are covering:
— Energy: Oil prices approached $100 a barrel, and stocks faded Tuesday as uncertainty clouded the possibility of peace talks.
— Lebanon: Even though a separate 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon has mostly held since it went into effect last week, Israel on Tuesday blamed Hezbollah for firing rockets toward Israeli troops in southern Lebanon. The Israeli military has kept up repeated strikes since the truce. Hezbollah later confirmed firing on Israel, saying it was in response to ceasefire violations.
— Tanker: The U.S. military stopped and boarded a sanctioned ship in the Indo-Pacific region that was carrying oil from Iran overnight, the Pentagon said Tuesday.
— China: Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, called for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz — the first time he has done so — underscoring the war’s impact on Chinese economic interests.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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