LONDON – Pakistan has called on the United States and Iran to maintain their two-week ceasefire after direct talks to end their war concluded without an agreement on April 12 in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.
“It is imperative that the parties continue to uphold their commitment to the ceasefire,” Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said, vowing to continue facilitating dialogue between the two sides in the coming days.
But the diplomatic gap between the US and Iran remains unbridgeable, so the real question is whether the two sides are merely posturing before they resume negotiations, or whether the US escalates its military offensive against Iran even before the current two-week ceasefire expires.
For the moment, both sides threaten more violence.
There will be no change in Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil trade passes unless the US agrees to a “reasonable deal”, said Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency soon after the discussions in Pakistan ended with no agreement.
Meanwhile, US Vice-President J.D. Vance, who led the US delegation at the Islamabad talks, suggested ominously that the breakdown in negotiations “is bad news for Iran much more than it’s bad news for the United States of America”.
Given half a century of animosity between the US and Iran and the six weeks of the current war, it is unsurprising that both US and Iranian diplomats engaged in a great deal of bluff and brinkmanship before their Islamabad talks.
Hours before the negotiations started, Mr Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, who headed his country’s delegation, vowed that he would not even travel to Islamabad unless the US forced Israel to stop its offensive in Lebanon and the Americans started to release Iran’s financial assets, which have been frozen in banks around the world for decades.
And after both delegations arrived safely at the luxury Serena hotel in the Pakistani capital, the Iranians announced that they would not sit down to face-to-face talks with the US; Pakistani negotiators were asked to act as go-betweens.
In reality, however, Mr Galibaf and his delegation not only sat down with the Americans for long hours of negotiations, but also shook hands with Mr Vance, and avoided making any public statements derogatory of the Americans, as Iranian negotiators used to do in the past.
And despite their prior denials, the Americans also accepted that Israel’s current military offensive in Lebanon and the question of Iran’s frozen assets are part of any potential deal. Both sides used bluff to harden perceptions about their stances, yet both discarded their hardline claims.
So, although the Islamabad talks yielded no concrete results, they remain an important achievement. They were the highest level of diplomatic contacts between the US and Iran since the Iranian revolution and the establishment of the Islamic republic in 1979.
And although they come from very different political systems, both the Iranian and US top negotiators knew that their future careers may be affected by their handling of the talks.
For Mr Vance, the Islamabad trip was his most important diplomatic assignment to date, a potential booster to his anticipated presidential bid at the 2028 US elections.
Meanwhile, Mr Ghalibaf is widely regarded as Iran’s real leader, given that Mr Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s new supreme leader, has yet to be seen and is rumoured to have been gravely wounded in US or Israeli air strikes.
In short, the leaders of both delegations were incentivised to handle themselves with calm and appropriate decorum.
Still, the gap between them remains huge.
The US demands that Iran agree to hand over its estimated 440kg of highly enriched uranium, accept restrictions on the number of ballistic missiles it will have in the future, and immediately open up the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping without any restrictions on navigation, and without charging transit fees.
For their part, the Iranians are expecting an immediate release of their frozen assets, which they estimate to be worth at least US$100 billion (S$127 billion) but reject demands to either hand over their nuclear material or accept any limitations on their missile stocks. Furthermore, Iran is prepared to lift its stranglehold over Hormuz only as part of a peace treaty with the US, something which will take years to negotiate.
Notwithstanding this huge gap, there are plenty of possible compromises to allow both sides to claim victory without the resumption of war.
Iran’s nuclear disarmament – a “red line” for the US, as Mr Vance put it in Islamabad – will always take a long time, if only because all of Iran’s nuclear installations have been hit by the US and Israel and are now inaccessible.
So, Iran and the US could reach a compromise that allows international inspectors to tour the sites, leaving a final decision on the fate of the enriched uranium to a later date.
Restrictions on the number of missiles that Iran can hold have always been fungible, so they are hardly a deal-stopper. And Iran has already backpedalled on its insistence that any deal with the US must include a halt to Israel’s offensive in Lebanon.
Even on the thorny subject of unfreezing Iranian assets, a compromise is available, in the shape of US$6 billion worth of Iranian funds frozen in 2028 in banks in Qatar. These have been promised to Iran in 2023 as part of a prisoner swap, and could be released now as a first financial inducement to Iran’s battered economy.
The biggest sticking point remains the Strait of Hormuz, where no fudge is possible. The US wants the strait opened as quickly as possible, to avert another spike in oil prices and even bigger turmoil in the global economy. But for Iran, the strait is now the country’s most powerful weapon, much more significant and practical than Iran’s nuclear aspirations.
The time calculations of both sides also do not align.
The US needs a deal on Hormuz now; the Iranians have every incentive to drag the discussions as long as possible in the hope that the political and economic pressure on US President Donald Trump will force him to abandon his Gulf military adventure.
This is also why Iranians now claim that even if they agreed to open the strait unconditionally, they no longer know where the mines they planted in the Gulf’s waters are. The objective here is to continue hindering the movement of oil and liquefied gas tankers.
The US Navy is now tiptoeing into Gulf waters, slowly challenging Iran’s claims to control the international waterway. But it will take much more than the April 11 foray of two US guided-missile destroyers to reassure shipping companies that Hormuz is safe for passage.
Technically, the current ceasefire can last until next week, allowing some time for both sides to resume discussions. But if Iran does not come up with more realistic and concrete proposals to open up the waterway, a resumption of the war is guaranteed.
The question is whether the Iranians now believe that they have more to gain by daring Mr Trump to resume his military offensive.
Jonathan Eyal is based in London and Brussels and writes on global political and security matters.
