The collapse of talks in Islamabad on Sunday was not a surprise. What followed was. Within hours of Vice President JD Vance boarding his plane home from Pakistan — after the highest-level direct negotiations between the United States and Iran since the 1979 revolution — President Donald Trump announced that the United States Navy would begin blockading Iranian ports and enforcing restrictions on the Strait of Hormuz. The fragile two-week ceasefire that had paused a war begun by American and Israeli strikes in late February now hangs by a thread. Oil prices leapt more than 8 percent on Monday, with both Brent and West Texas Intermediate crossing the $100-a-barrel threshold. Tankers turned back. Markets priced in the possibility of a deeper energy shock than anything the world has seen since the 1970s. This is not the way great-power crises are supposed to end. It is the way they spiral.
Op-Ed
Why the US-Iran Talks Collapsed — and Why They Must Resume
The marathon negotiations in Islamabad ended much as they began: with both sides talking past each other across a chasm of mistrust that four decades of estrangement had only widened. After 21 hours of direct, face-to-face talks — the highest-level contact between American and Iranian officials since the 1979 Islamic Revolution — Vice President JD Vance stepped to the microphone in Pakistan’s capital and delivered a verdict that was polite in tone but blunt in substance. Iran had rejected Washington’s “final and best offer.” Tehran, for its part, accused the United States of making “excessive demands” and “unreasonable” requests on everything from the Strait of Hormuz to its nuclear program. No agreement was reached. No date was set for the next round. The two-week ceasefire that Pakistan had brokered on April 8 now hangs by a thread.
The Fragile Path to Peace in Islamabad
On Saturday morning, in the tree-lined diplomatic quarter of a capital better known for coups and crises than for brokering great-power peace, Vice President JD Vance will sit down with senior Iranian officials for the first direct negotiations between Washington and Tehran since the war began on Feb. 28. The meeting, hosted by Pakistan and involving Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff on the American side, carries the weight of a region already scarred by nearly six weeks of fighting, at least 3,800 dead and an economic shock that has sent oil prices soaring and left hundreds of ships idling in the Persian Gulf.
Pakistan Brokers a Breather — Now Comes the Hard Part
The announcement came just before dawn in Islamabad on Wednesday: a two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran, brokered at the last possible minute by Pakistani officials who understood what Washington’s bluster had obscured. President Trump had warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran refused to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by his deadline. Instead, the pause arrived not through American firepower but through quiet Pakistani channels — a small circle of diplomats and military leaders who shuttled messages between adversaries who no longer trusted each other to speak directly. Iran agreed to coordinate safe passage through the strait, the artery carrying one-fifth of the world’s oil. The United States suspended its strikes. And both sides, predictably, declared victory.
Fuel Shock Isn’t the Crisis. Dependence Is
In Karachi, Mohammad Kashif stood at a petrol station and filling his tank at the new price of 458 rupees a liter did not need an economist to explain what was happening to his life. He simply knew that the money he once stretched across rent, food and school fees had suddenly vanished into the petrol pump. Across Pakistan, millions are making the same grim arithmetic.
Trump’s Recycled Rhetoric and the Real Cost of More War
President Trump’s primetime address on the war with Iran was never going to be easy listening. But even by the standards of a conflict that has already claimed thousands of lives, drained billions of dollars and sent global energy prices soaring, Wednesday night’s 19-minute performance was astonishingly empty. Billed as a moment for Americans to hear how the fighting would end, it delivered only the same threats, the same boasts and the same timeline — two or three more weeks of ferocious bombing — that everyone has heard for weeks. There was no new diplomatic formula. No acknowledgement of Iranian demands. No realistic path to reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Just the familiar vow to “hit them extremely hard” and “bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.” This was not resolve. It was stalling.
The Perils of a War Half-Won
One month after the United States and Israel began their joint assault on Iran, the question that matters most is not whether American power has inflicted damage. It has. The question is whether that damage has brought the United States any closer to the decisive outcome President Donald Trump once described as both necessary and inevitable.
A $1.2bn IMF deal that cannot hide Pakistan’s deeper failings
When the International Monetary Fund signalled its staff-level agreement with Pakistan on 27 March, the timing was no coincidence. It came on the same day that Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif overruled the Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority and blocked a rise in domestic fuel prices despite soaring international costs. Four weeks into a conflict that has upended energy markets across the Gulf, the Fund’s move looks less like business as usual and more like reluctant recognition that geopolitics has rewritten the script.
Washington and Tehran Should Take the Exit Still Available
The United States-Israeli war on Iran, now well into its fifth week, has become intolerable — to the region, to global energy markets and, increasingly, to the governments trying to contain the damage. When Pakistan’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister, Mohammad Ishaq Dar, stood up at the end of the day-long talks between foreign ministers of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt and said Islamabad was prepared to host “meaningful talks” between Washington and Tehran “in the coming days” for a “comprehensive and lasting settlement,” he was not indulging in hopeful language. He was stating the only realistic path still open.
Pakistan Tries to Keep Diplomacy Alive
The bombs fell again on Friday, this time on two of Iran’s largest steel plants, a power station and civilian nuclear sites that Tehran insists have nothing to do with its military program. Israel also struck universities, according to Iranian officials. These were precisely the kinds of attacks on non-military targets that Pakistani diplomats had warned would kill any chance of talks. Yet even as the smoke rose over Iran’s industrial heartland, Islamabad was still trying to keep the door open. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif spoke for more than an hour with President Masoud Pezeshkian. Foreign ministers from Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are gathered in Islamabad on the Middle East crisis. And Pakistan’s de facto leader, Field Marshal Asim Munir, continues to shuttle messages between Washington and Tehran.