Vice President JD Vance was expected to board a plane Tuesday and lead a U.S. negotiating team back to Islamabad. Instead, he was called back to the White House amid uncertainty over whether Iran would send a delegation at all.
CNN’s Alayna Treene reported that Vance would not leave for Pakistan as planned and would attend policy meetings in Washington instead. Sources told Treene it remained unclear whether the trip would happen later. “We don’t know if this trip is definitely off,” she told Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown on The Situation Room. “All we do know is that it is definitely delayed and that we should expect to see now the vice president at the White House for meetings today, not leaving this morning on that plane as we had previously reported.”
The aborted departure followed Vance’s earlier visit to Pakistan this month, when he led talks in Islamabad with special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump adviser Jared Kushner. Those negotiations produced no deal. Vance said Iran refused the central American demand: an “affirmative commitment” that it would not pursue nuclear weapons.
“The bad news is that we have not reached an agreement,” Vance said at the time. “And I think that’s bad news for Iran, much more than it’s bad news for the United States of America.”
Since then, the United States has enforced a maritime blockade of Iranian ports. U.S. Central Command said Tuesday that American forces had directed 28 ships to turn around or return to port. A U.S. official declined to say whether any vessels had already entered Iranian harbors, but added that any that had would be unable to leave through the Gulf of Oman while the blockade remained in force.
The two-week ceasefire among the United States, Israel, and Iran is scheduled to expire Wednesday. It is still not clear whether Iranian officials will come to Islamabad. Pakistani Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said that as of 7:30 p.m. local time (10:30 a.m. Eastern), a “formal response from [the] Iranian side about confirmation of delegation to attend Islamabad Peace Talks is still awaited.” Tarar added that Pakistani mediators remained in “constant touch” with Tehran and called the talks “critical.”
A public signal from Tehran was less encouraging. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian criticized President Trump and the talks on X, writing that “the level of understanding and comprehension of the requesters from Iran regarding their presence in Islamabad is even lower than Trump’s level of understanding and comprehension…!”
In Islamabad, U.S. Chargé d’Affaires Natalie Baker, who heads the American embassy there, met Tuesday with Pakistani Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar to discuss diplomatic efforts to end the war with Iran, which Pakistan has tried to mediate for weeks. Dar “underscored Pakistan’s consistent emphasis on dialogue and diplomacy as the only viable means to address challenges and achieve lasting regional peace and stability,” the Pakistani Foreign Ministry said in a readout posted on X. He “stressed the need for engagement between the United States and Iran, urged both sides to consider extending the ceasefire, and to give dialogue and diplomacy a chance.”
President Trump has shown little interest in stretching the truce. “I don’t want to do that. We don’t have that much time,” he told CNBC of extending the two-week ceasefire, which he said would end Wednesday. “Iran can get themselves on a very good footing if they make a deal. They can make themselves into a strong nation again, a wonderful nation again.”
The result is a narrow window. Vance is in Washington rather than on a plane. Iran has not confirmed it will sit down in Islamabad. Ships are being turned away from Iranian ports. And a ceasefire that was meant to create space for diplomacy is hours from expiring, with no new date on the calendar and no guarantee that the next meeting will take place at all.
