The United States and Iran ended a historic round of face-to-face talks early Sunday without reaching an agreement to end their six-week war that has killed thousands of people and shaken global markets.
Vice President JD Vance, who led the US delegation during the 21 hours of talks in Pakistan's Islamabad, said negotiations to end the war, which is now in its seventh week, finished without a deal after Tehran refused to accept American terms to refrain from developing a nuclear weapon.
"The bad news is that we have not reached an agreement, and I think that's bad news for Iran much more than it's bad news for the United States of America," JD Vance told reporters shortly before he left Islamabad.
Iran said that the "unreasonable demands" by the US were behind the deadlock.
"The Iranian delegation negotiated continuously and intensively for 21 hours in order to protect the national interests of the Iranian people; despite various initiatives from the Iranian delegation, the unreasonable demands of the American side prevented the progress of the negotiations. Thus the negotiations ended," Iranian state broadcaster IRIB said on Telegram.
All Eyes On Trump's Next Move
The Middle East, which this week saw a two-week pause in the fighting, is now on the edge again, with the world awaiting what US President Donald Trump, whose military launched strikes on Iran alongside Israel on February 28, triggering the war, is going to do next.
Hours before JD Vance spoke to reporters, Trump said that he was not bothered about the outcome of US-Iran talks.
"Whether we make a deal or not makes no difference to me. The reason is because we've won," he told reporters.
"We're in very deep negotiations with Iran. We win regardless. We've defeated them militarily," he said.
He also repeated the US military's statement that American Navy warships on Saturday transited through the Strait of Hormuz - a key gateway waterway for about a fifth of global oil flows - to begin clearing it of Iranian mines, an account denied by Iran.
US-Iran Talks Fail: What Next?
Donald Trump on Friday said that US warships are being reloaded with weaponry to strike Iran if talks in Pakistan fail to produce a deal.
"We have a reset going. We're loading up the ships with the best ammunition, the best weapons ever made -- even better than what we did previously and we blew them apart," he told the New York Post.
"And if we don't have a deal, we will be using them, and we will be using them very effectively," he said.
In a brief and cryptic message on his Truth Social network earlier, he had spoken of the "WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL RESET!!!"
Trump's stated goals have varied during the six-week campaign, but as a minimum, he wants free passage for global shipping through Hormuz and the crippling of Iran's nuclear enrichment programme to ensure it cannot produce an atomic bomb.
The US is now expected to step up its naval and air presence in the Middle East.
Iran, however, may also respond via its proxies in the region. Iran-backed Hezbollah had already joined the war in early March and has been trading strikes with Israel.
Tehran is also likely to tighten its grip on the Strait of Hormuz, which it has effectively blocked since the war broke out. It may also move to impose a toll on the ships crossing the key route.
