US President Donald Trump claims Washington holds all the cards in its talks with Tehran. Photo / Bloomberg via Getty Images
US President Donald Trump claims Washington holds all the cards in its talks with Tehran. Photo / Bloomberg via Getty Images
United States President Donald Trump has cancelled sending his top envoys to Pakistan for a second round of peace negotiations with Iran.
Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner had been due to fly out for Islamabad on Saturday local time, despite conflicting reports from Tehran about whether direct talks would goahead.
Trump said he had cancelled the trip because he didn’t see the point of sending his envoys on an 18-hour flight “to just sit there”.
The US President said the Iranians could call them if they wanted to, while insisting that Washington had “all the cards”.
He posted to Truth Social: “I just cancelled the trip of my representatives going [to] Islamabad, Pakistan, to meet with the Iranians. Too much time wasted on traveling, too much work!
“Besides which, there is tremendous infighting and confusion within their ‘leadership’. Nobody knows who is in charge, including them. Also, we have all the cards, they have none! If they want to talk, all they have to do is call!!!”
US President Donald Trump's post to Truth Social on the cancellation of the Pakistan visit.
Minutes earlier, Trump told Axios that cancelling the visit “doesn’t mean” he was going to resume the war with Iran, adding: “We haven’t thought about it yet”.
“I see no point of sending them on an 18-hour flight in the current situation [of the negotiations]. It’s too long.”
The cancellation is the latest sign that the warring countries are far from reaching a deal.
Iran is refusing to curb its nuclear programme or hand over its stockpile of enriched uranium, the material needed to make a nuclear weapon.
Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian Foreign Minister who is considered a relatively moderate official, arrived in Islamabad on Friday night local time and was expected to meet the US envoys.
However, after holding talks with Pakistani leaders, he and his delegation flew out of Pakistan’s capital on Saturday with a military jet escort, government sources said. It was not immediately clear if or when he would return to Pakistan.
Trump claimed that Iran planned to make an offer aimed at satisfying US demands, but that he did not know what the offer entailed.
He declined to say who Washington was negotiating with, “but we’re dealing with the people that are in charge now”.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the US had seen some progress from the Iranian side in recent days and hoped more would come this weekend.
Trump’s position was that the US “has all the time in the world” to make a deal, while the “clock is ticking” for Iran.
On Saturday, Araghchi said that it remained to be seen whether the US was “truly serious” about diplomacy.
In a post on X after leaving Islamabad, he said he had “shared Iran’s position concerning [a] workable framework to permanently end the war”, but he had “yet to see if the US is truly serious about diplomacy”.
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