21 hours. That is how long the Islamabad
talks lasted. From Saturday morning through
the night and into Sunday's early hours.
American and Iranian negotiators sat in the Serena Hotel while
Pakistani officials shuttle between them and eventually
beside them as the proximity format gave way to direct face
to face contact. The highest level US Iran
engagement in 47 years. Technical papers were exchanged
and reviewed repeatedly. 5 major issue areas were discussed.
The sun went down and came up again.
And then just after 7:00 in the morning local time on Sunday, JD
Vance walked out, held a brief press conference and boarded Air
Force 2 for Washington. No deal, final offer left on the
table, The two week ceasefire technically still in place and
the question of what comes next with no clear answer.
It is Sunday, April 12th, 2026, day 44 of Operation Epic Fury.
The Islamabad talks are over. The war has not ended.
The ceasefire continues for now with 9 days left on the clock.
And Vance said departing Pakistan with Kushner and
Witkoff at his side. I think that is bad news for
Iran much more than it is bad news for the United States of
America. We left the final offer on the
table. We will see what they do with
it. This is episode 44 of Epic Fury,
the US Iran War podcast. Follow on Spotify and Apple
Podcast to stay with this story as it develops.
Let's get into it. Start with what the 21 hours
actually produced because something did happen in that
hotel, even if a deal did not emerge from it.
The talks began as proximity talks, 2 delegations in separate
rooms, Pakistani officials carrying messages between them.
Within hours, according to Al Jazeera sources close to the
mediation, that format shifted. The two teams moved to direct
negotiations with Pakistani mediators present in the room
alongside both delegations. That transition from indirect to
direct is significant in itself. The US and Iran have spent 47
years not sitting in the same room.
The last time American and Iranian officials of comparable
seniority were in direct diplomatic contact was during
the Carter administration, in the earliest stages of the 1979
hostage crisis, before those channels collapsed entirely.
The fact that Vance and Arachi were in the same space,
exchanging positions directly for hours across the full range
of substantive issues is the first such encounter at that
level since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
It did not produce a deal. It produced something rarer in
US Iran diplomacy. The direct conversation.
That conversation has now happened.
It cannot be undone. And whatever comes next, renewed
bombing, ceasefire extension or a revised Iranian response to
the US final offer will be built on the precedent that direct
engagement at this level is possible.
During those 21 hours, both sides exchanged technical papers
and reviewed them repeatedly, according to CNN's reporters on
the ground who watched the sun go down in Islamabad and then
come up again as the marathon talks continued.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry confirmed that intensive
negotiations continued uninterrupted until the early
hours, covering the Strait of Hormuz, the nuclear issue, war
reparations, lifting of sanctions and what Iran
described as the complete end to the war against Iran and in the
region. The breadth of that list, five
major issue areas discussed in a single session, suggest that the
talks were substantive rather than merely procedural.
The two sides were not arguing about whether to talk.
They were arguing about the substance of what a deal would
contain. The substance is where the talks
collapsed. Vance was direct about the
central sticking point. He said he would not get into
the full details, but that the US needed a firm commitment from
Iran that it would not seek a nuclear weapon.
Iran was unwilling to give that commitment.
Iranian state media, through Tiznim News Agency, blamed the
failure on what it described as US overreach and excessive
demands, specifically citing the removal of nuclear materials
from the country and the reopening of the Strait of
Hormuz as the two points that Iran could not accept on
American terms. Iran's position on the nuclear
question is rooted in a strategic calculation that
predates this war and will outlast it.
Iran's nuclear program is not simply a weapons development
project. It is the foundational deterrent
that Iran's leadership believes is the only reliable guarantee
against future military action by the United States and Israel.
The logic is the specific lesson that Iran's leadership draws
from the fates of Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein,
leaders who gave up their weapons programs and were
subsequently removed from power by Western military force.
From that perspective, agreeing to permanently abandoned all
nuclear capability is not a concession that ends a war.
It is a concession that makes the next war easier for the
other side. Whether that strategic logic is
correct in the current context, given that Iran's military has
just been devastated by 44 days of the most intensive American
air campaign since 2003, is debatable.
But it is the logic that the Iranian delegation carried into
Islamabad. Those two issues, give up your
nuclear program entirely and reopen the waterway you have
been using as your primary strategic leverage are precisely
the two things the United States defined as non negotiable from
the beginning. The gap that existed before the
Islamabad talks began still exists after they ended.
Vance called the US offer quite flexible and described it as the
final and best offer the United States would make.
He said he was leaving the proposal on the table for Iran
to accept. He said Iran had chosen not to
accept US terms. He said the US team had been at
it for 21 hours and had a number of substantive discussions.
And then he said, so we go back to the United States, having not
come to an agreement. It was a measured professional
statement of failure or of deferred success, depending on
how the next 9 days unfold. Delivered at a press conference
in the early morning light in Islamabad, with Kushner and
Witkoff flanking him before he climbed the stairs of Air Force
2 and departed, Iran's Foreign Ministry said it was studying
the US position and that its response would come through
appropriate channels. That is not a rejection, that is
a delay. And in the 9 remaining days of
the ceasefire window, delays may be the most significant form of
diplomacy still available. There is a further dimension to
what the 21 hours produced that goes beyond the negotiating
deadlock. two US Navy guided missile destroyers, the USS
Frank E Peterson and the USS Michael Murphy, transited the
Strait of Hormuz on Saturday while the Islamabad talks were
underway. CENTCOM confirmed they were
conducting operations as part of broader mission to clear sea
mines previously laid by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps. This is the first transit of
American warships through the Strait of Hormuz since the war
began 44 days ago. The significance extends beyond
the symbolic Iran laid mines in the Strait during the conflict
as a physical enforcement mechanism for its blockade.
Those mines represent an ongoing threat to commercial shipping.
Even after the ceasefire, tankers cannot transit a
waterway that may be mined, regardless of whether the IRGC
is actively attacking them. the US mine clearing operation,
conducted simultaneously with a diplomacy in Islamabad, is doing
two things at once. It is physically restoring the
conditions under which commercial shipping can operate,
and it is establishing the American position that the
Strait is an international waterway that the US Navy will
clear and open regardless of what Iran says about its
sovereignty over transit protocols.
That is coercive diplomacy and military positioning executed in
parallel, which is how the Trump administration has conducted
this entire conflict from its first day.
Trump, speaking to reporters before departing from Miami on
Saturday, was characteristically emphatic about the outcome.
He said regardless what happens, we win.
He said the US had totally defeated Iran.
He said whether we make a deal or not makes no difference to
me. And when asked if he was hopeful
about the talks, he replied whatever, otherwise we'll reset.
We're ready to go. That commentary, whatever,
otherwise we'll reset. Is Trump setting the domestic
political table for what comes next with the specific
architecture of a president who cannot lose?
If Iran accepts the final offer, Trump announces A historic deal
and takes full credit. If the ceasefire expires without
a deal and bombing restarts, Trump can point to 21 hours of
good faith negotiation, a flexible final offer that Iran
refused. In Iran that chose war over the
reasonable terms. Washington put on the table the
framing of Iranian obstinacy. They had their chance. the US
was more than accommodating. Iran chose not to is politically
available to Trump regardless of what actually happened in those
rooms. Reset is not the language of
escalation. It is the language of
restarting. The specific framing that allows
the war to restart without Trump having to describe it as a
failure of diplomacy. Whether that framing is accurate
to the facts of the Islamabad talks is a separate question
from whether it will be effective as a political
narrative based on the 1st 44 days of this conflict.
The answer to the second question is almost certainly
yes. The ceasefire's technical status
as a Sunday morning is that it remains in place.
Vance did not announce that the ceasefire was over.
He did not announce that bombing would restart.
He announced that no deal had been reached and that the US
team was going home. The two week window that began
on Tuesday, April 7th expires on Tuesday, April 21st.
There are 9 days remaining. Those nine days will unfold in a
specific political context that shapes what is possible.
Trump is heading to Miami and has publicly declared
indifference to the outcome of the talks.
The Iranian supreme leader must decide whether the written US
final offer contains anything worth responding to, and whether
responding to it publicly constitutes a capitulation that
his domestic narrative, a victory, cannot absorb.
The IRGC must decide whether to continue its drone operations
against Gulf states in ways that further erode the ceasefire's
credibility. The Strait must be progressively
cleared of mines and reopened to commercial traffic before the
ceasefire expires or the economic rationale for the
ceasefire evaporates. And the world's oil markets must
decide, in the absence of a deal, how to price the
probability that the ceasefire expires without renewal and the
bombing restarts on April 21st. Whether those nine days produce
a revised Iranian response to the US final offer, an extension
of the ceasefire under a new framework or a return to
military operations is the question that defines what this
war's next phase looks like. Galabaf, for his part, had
signaled before the talks began that Iran's experience with
American negotiations had always been met with failure and broken
promises. That framing, setting up the
expectation of failure before entering the room, is the
standard Iranian posture in high stakes diplomacy with the United
States, designed to lower domestic expectations and
preserve political space for walking away without being
blamed. Whether the Iranian delegation
went to Islamabad genuinely prepared to make concessions on
the nuclear question that their public framing made impossible
to acknowledge, or whether the talks were always destined to
end as they did, is a question that will be debated by Iran
analysts for years. There are reasons to believe the
Iranian side was not simply performing for domestic
consumption. Arachi told reporters in
Islamabad that he wanted to speak with European counterparts
in Berlin, Paris and London, suggesting he is thinking beyond
this round of talks to a broader diplomatic architecture that
involves the European parties to the original JCPOA.
Iran has also indicated that it will accept an extension of the
ceasefire if the US makes movement on the issues that
matter to Tehran. The Iranian rial slightly gained
on Saturday and the Tehran Stock Exchange rose 2.16%.
Small market signals that Iranian investors believe some
kind of agreement is still possible.
Pro government newspaper Kahan claimed Iran had the upper hand
and that nuclear disarmament was impossible, which is the hard
line position. But the fact that Common A
specifically told the supporters not to protest or insult the
talks is notable. It suggests the Supreme leader
was giving the diplomatic process space rather than
mobilizing domestic opposition to it.
What is observable is that the Iranian delegation of 70 people
with technical experts in nuclear, economic and security
fields spent 21 hours in detailed, substantive
discussions. That does not look like a side
that came to Islamabad to perform failure.
The talks moved from proximity to direct engagement, suggesting
that at some point both sides concluded the mediated format
was insufficient for the complexity of what they were
trying to negotiate. That is progress of a kind to
countries that have not spoken directly in 47 years, deciding
they need to speak directly to get anything done.
The problem is that direct engagement revealed the gap more
clearly, not less. In a proximity format, Pakistan
can smooth over the sharpest edges of each side's position
before delivering it to the other room.
In a direct session, Vance and Arachi hear each other's
positions unmediated, and what they heard apparently, was
irreconcilable. CN NS reporters described the
two sides as too far apart, not just in substance but in style
and temperament. the US delegation was looking for a
relatively quick solution, a framework that could be
finalized in the two week ceasefire window.
Iran typically negotiates over the long term, building position
and precedent across multiple sessions, refusing to be rushed,
treating every concession as a strategic decision requiring
internal consultation and supreme leader approval.
Those two negotiating cultures, the American instinct for
transactional closure and the Iranian instinct for protracted
process, have been the source of failure in every US Iran
diplomatic encounter of the past quarter century.
Where that leaves the ceasefire and what the next 9 days will
produce is genuinely uncertain. Vance left a written final
offer. Iran has it.
The ceasefire is still in place. The Strait is still partly
closed, but the US mine clearing operation is underway.
Trump says he does not care whether a deal happens.
The IRGC is still conducting drone operations against Gulf
states in ways that contradict the ceasefire's terms.
And somewhere in Tehran, Common A and the Supreme National
Security Council are deciding whether to accept, reject or
counter propose to whatever Vance left on the table in the
Serena Hotel. The one thing that did not
happen in Islamabad is the thing that defines what the Islamabad
talks ultimately mean. A deal did not happen, but a
direct conversation between American and Iranian officials
at the vice presidential level for 21 hours on the full range
of issues that divide the two countries is something that has
not happened since 1979. Whether that conversation plants
the seeds of something that grows in the 9 remaining
ceasefire days, or whether it's simply demonstrates that the
seeds cannot grow in the current political soil is a question
that only the next 9 days can answer. the US left a written
final offer on the table in Islamabad.
The offer is there. Iran has it.
Whatever common 8 decides to do with it in the next 9 days is
now the hinge of this war. If he accepts, the deal happens.
If he rejects, the ceasefire expires and the bombs return.
If he counter proposes, a new round of diplomacy begins in
whatever time and venue is available before April 21st.
Those are the three pass. All of them remained open this
Sunday morning and this podcast will be here to cover whichever
one Iran chooses. The international reaction to
the Islamabad outcome was swift and measured.
Russia called for restraint from all parties and urged a
responsible approach, expressing hope for the success of the
talks even as they ended without agreement.
France's Macron said he had urged Iranian President
Poseskian to use the negotiations to achieve lasting
de escalation and work toward broader regional security.
The European framing, both Russia's and France's, is
notable for what it does not say.
Neither characterized the outcome as a failure, both left
open in the possibility of continue process.
The diplomatic language of hope and continued engagement is the
international community's way of keeping a door open that Vance
walked out of on Sunday morning. For the Gulf States, Saudi
Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, the outcome of
Islamabad is alarming in a specific way. 9 days remain on
the ceasefire clock. If the ceasefire expires on
April 21st without renewal and if US bombing of Iran restarts,
Iranian strikes against Gulf infrastructure will begin again
alongside it. The Gulf states have been
absorbing Iranian attacks for 44 days.
They did not start this war. They cannot end it and the
prospect of another cycle of escalation, this time without
the 12 day shock of the opening campaign but with the
accumulated damage of 44 days of prior strikes already in the
infrastructure, is not a prospect that any Gulf
government is welcoming. For global energy markets, the
outcome of Islamabad means the Strait of Hormuz remains a
geopolitical risk asset rather than a cleared waterway.
The mine clearing operation by the two US destroyers is a
beginning, not an end. Full commercial restart requires
weeks of clearing operations, insurance market stabilization
and the kind of Iranian cooperation on transit protocols
that Islamabad did not produce. The 13% oil price drop on
Tuesday night was built on the expectation of a ceasefire that
produced a deal. The reality of a ceasefire that
produced no deal and a final offer that is sitting unanswered
in a Serena hotel room in Islamabad is a different
economic picture. Oil markets on Monday morning
will price that difference. If this podcast is helping you
make sense of what is happening, please take 30 seconds to leave
a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
It makes an enormous difference to how many people find a shell.
For Vance personally, the outcome of Islamabad is more
complex than a simple failure. He spent 21 hours in the most
consequential diplomatic engagement of his career.
He led the United States into direct talks with Iran for the
first time in 47 years. He left a written final offer, a
concrete document that defines the American position and that
Iran must now respond to. He said the US was quite
accommodating and made its best effort in good faith.
Whether that narrative holds, whether the Islamabad talks are
remembered as a good faith American effort that Iran
refused, or as an American overcorrection that demanded too
much and got nothing, depends on what Iran does with the offer
over the next 9 days and on how the war's next phase unfolds if
the ceasefire expires. This has been episode 44 of Epic
Fury, the US Iran War Podcast Day 4421.
Hours of talks. The sun went down and came up in
Islamabad and still no deal emerged.
A final written offer is on the table.
A mind clearing operation is underway in the Strait, Trump
says. Whatever we reset 9 days left on
the ceasefire clock. Common A has the document.
We will be back very soon.