America’s allies and adversaries alike were pinning their hopes on Vance to find a way out of a conflict that has upended the global economy and expanded to the wider region. Instead, he left with nothing.
After more than 16 straight hours of closed-door meetings that stretched into early Sunday morning, US Vice-President JD Vance ambled into an ornate ballroom in Pakistan and let out a sigh. When he arrived at the lectern to speak to the press, he grimaced.
He talked about “shortcomings”, “bad news” and not being “able to make headway”. The United States and Iran did not reach any agreement.
Exhausted and frustrated after 21 hours on the ground, Vance provided few details, took three questions and departed. He did not address whether the two-week ceasefire with Iran would hold or what would happen to the Strait of Hormuz or if President Donald Trump would now follow through with his threat to wipe Iranian civilisation off the map.
It was a remarkable conclusion to a high-stakes diplomatic trip for Vance, who made his opposition known to a full-scale war in Iran. America’s allies and adversaries alike were pinning their hopes on Vance to find a way out of a conflict that has upended the global economy, frayed alliances and expanded to the wider region.
Instead, he left with nothing. He blamed Iran for the failed talks, saying the United States sought a commitment that Iran would not seek a nuclear weapon, and it refused.
That it was Vance who found himself in this position was extraordinary in itself. The man inside Trump’s inner circle most opposed the war was tasked with leading the highest-level talks between the United States and Iran in nearly 50 years. Trump, for his part, was thousands of miles away at the Kaseya Center in Miami, watching a UFC fight alongside Marco Rubio, his secretary of state and national security adviser.
For Vance, the trip represented the highest-profile assignment of his tenure, which has largely been marked by domestic politics. White House officials had hoped he would be spending the months leading up to the midterms travelling the country to boost the Republican Party. Instead, he spent the early part of the week in Hungary campaigning for Prime Minister Viktor Orban [who conceded defeat this morning] and concluded it in Pakistan trying to negotiate the end of a messy and complicated war.
The United States and Israel have spent more than five weeks bombing Iran. They have assassinated the supreme leader and other senior officials, hit 13,000 targets and, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, killed more than 1,700 civilians. Iran responded by launching attacks at countries across the region, including US military bases, and effectively closing the Strait of Hormuz.
And now, Trump must decide what to do next: return to the negotiating table or resume a deadly and costly conflict that has already created the largest energy disruption in modern times. On Sunday (Monday NZT), he partly answered the question by announcing a naval blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, which is generally considered an act of war.
‘Extend the open hand’
Vance started his trip to Pakistan striking a cautiously optimistic tone, telling reporters that the United States would “extend the open hand” if Iran was “willing to negotiate in good faith”.
But as Vance set off from Washington, with a brief refuelling stop in Paris, the details of how the negotiations would take place remained unclear.
Iranian officials repeatedly threatened to refuse direct meetings if the US did not accede to various demands, including unfreezing Iran’s overseas assets and expanding the ceasefire to include Lebanon. The latter demand underscored the degree to which many events of this war are out of US control: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has expressed the desire to continue fighting with Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy.
And in the hours leading up to the meeting, even once the vice-president was on the ground in Islamabad, disagreements were spilling out into the press. Some Iranian officials told media outlets that the United States had agreed to unfreeze Iranian assets held in Qatar and foreign banks before the meetings began as a sign of good faith. The US said those reports were false.
Iranian state media then reported the US team was confused.
Foreign trips by US presidents or vice-presidents are usually highly-scripted affairs, with detailed schedules and planned deliverables. Advance teams travel far ahead of the principal to iron out the details, building minute-by-minute timetables.
Vance’s team had only a few days.
In Islamabad, Vance’s movements were strictly guarded. The announcement of his arrival was embargoed until 15 minutes after his motorcade left the Nur Khan air base. His visit to the US Embassy could not be publicised until he arrived at his next location: the Serena, the five-star hotel hosting the talks.
No reporters were allowed in the room when the US delegation met with the Iranians or even when they held a bilateral meeting with the Pakistanis.
Back in Washington, senior White House officials were searching for details, too, calling around as negotiations dragged to figure out what was unfolding in Islamabad.
A sceptic from the start
Vance did not want the United States to go to war with Iran.
He warned about regional chaos and mass casualties. He worried about depleting America’s stock of munitions. He feared betraying the administration’s political base, many of whom backed the president because of his vow not to enter the United States into new wars.
Vance, whose political identity has transformed over time, from a harsh critic of Trump in 2016 to an ardent supporter, has focused his foreign policy ideology on opposing these very types of conflicts. It was his stated premise for supporting Trump during his third presidential campaign.
In January 2023, Vance, then a senator from Ohio, endorsed Trump for president, writing in The Wall Street Journal that his support centred on the most important part of former president’s legacy: “his successful foreign policy”. At the core of that argument, Vance wrote, was the fact that Trump did not start any wars during this first term.
The Iran war is not the only disagreement Vance has had with Trump’s approach to foreign policy. When the president was considering striking Yemen last year, Vance told other administration officials that he thought the operation was a “mistake” and appeared to question if Trump understood the potential consequences of the action, according to The Atlantic, which published parts of the exchange.
And for Vance, widely seen as the front-runner for the 2028 Republican nomination, the conflict risks his connection to the anti-interventionist wing of the MAGA movement. The war has scrambled Trump’s coalition: prominent conservative voices like Tucker Carlson, who is especially close to Vance, have emerged as some of the fiercest critics of the war.
Even as Vance and his allies make little secret of his private opposition to the conflict, he has publicly stood by the president. And as the leader of the delegation, he will find it challenging to separate himself from the war moving forward regardless of the outcome.
“If it doesn’t happen, I’m blaming JD Vance,” Trump said to laughter of Vance trying to secure a deal at an Easter lunch earlier this month. “If it does happen, I’m taking full credit.”
The US delegation was led by three men with limited traditional diplomatic experience. Vance’s political career before ascending to vice-president included a two-year stint in the Senate, and Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who is Trump’s son-in-law, built fortunes in the real estate business.
But Witkoff and Kushner have emerged as Trump’s fix-it guys, dispatched to conflict zones around the world to try to make peace. They’ve found some success with the Israel-Hamas conflict and much less with Russia and Ukraine. With Iran, they tried to strike a deal and the collapse of their negotiations led to the current conflict. But by closing the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has more leverage in this round of negotiations than it did before the war.
‘Regardless of what happens, we win’
As Vance travelled to Pakistan and even during the negotiations, the president repeatedly weighed in on Truth Social. He bashed the news media for reporting anything other than Iran is “LOSING, and LOSING BIG!” and bragged about what he described as absolute US military success.
“The Iranians don’t seem to realize they have no cards, other than a short term extortion of the World by using International Waterways,” he wrote on Truth Social as Vance was flying to Pakistan. “The only reason they are alive today is to negotiate!”
Later in the day, as Trump left the White House to travel to Florida, he said it did not matter to him if a deal with Iran is reached or not.
“Regardless what happens, we win,” he said. “We’ve totally defeated that country.”
In Islamabad, Pakistani officials were eager to promote their role as peacemakers. They announced a two-day holiday in the capital to clear out the city, deploying thousands of police officers to bulk up security ahead of the visit. As Vance’s motorcade made its way through the city, there were no vehicles on the road and few signs of any people.
Pakistani officials also quickly printed new signs, affixing them to lampposts and billboards around the city to celebrate the “Islamabad Talks”, featuring the American, Pakistani and Iranian flags to advertise the negotiations.
But still, most everyone was in the dark about what was happening behind closed doors.
Hundreds of reporters who had gathered in Islamabad to cover the negotiations spent the day scouring for any information about the talks. Stationed in the city’s Jinnah Convention Centre, directly across the street from the Serena Hotel, journalists sipped coffee from specialty branded “Brewed for Peace” cups while a band played traditional Pakistani music. A giant #IslamabadTalks sign sat on a green-carpeted stage with a lectern that went unused.
“No one knows when, where, or how these talks are taking place,” Nadir Guramani, a Pakistani journalist, said at the convention centre.
“We do not even know what is happening outside, as movement across the city is restricted,” he added.
It turned out, after 21 hours on the ground in Islamabad, not much had happened to bring a lasting peace between the United States and Iran.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Tyler Pager
Photographs by: Elizabeth Frantz, David Guttenfelder, Amit Elkayam, Arash Khamooshi and Kyle Mazza
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