United States Vice President JD Vance has departed for Pakistan to have interaction in talks on ending the US-Israeli war with Iran, saying he expects “positive” outcomes.
Vance spoke briefly to reporters on Friday as he boarded a aircraft certain for Islamabad, the place talks with Iran had been set to be held the next day.
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“We’re looking forward to the negotiation. I think it’s going to be positive. We’ll, of course, see,” he mentioned.
Vance added that President Donald Trump had given him “pretty clear guidelines” for the assembly.
“If the Iranians are willing to negotiate in good faith, we are certainly willing to extend an open hand, that’s one thing,” he mentioned.
“If they’re going to try to play us, they’re going to find that the negotiating team is not that receptive.”
Some observers have seen the last-minute transfer to have Vance lead the US delegation as an indication of Iran’s wariness with US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Witkoff and Kushner, who will nonetheless attend Saturday’s talks, had twice led oblique negotiations about Iran’s nuclear programme.
Those talks had been ongoing when Israel initiated a 12-day war on Iran in June 2025, which ended with the US putting three of Iran’s key nuclear websites, and when the US and Israel launched the newest war on February 28.
While deeply loyal to Trump, Vance can also be seen as much less hawkish than most of the president’s different high officers.
A former member of the US Marine Corps in the course of the 2003 Iraq war, Vance has develop into consultant of the anti-interventionist wing of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) motion.
“It’s interesting that JD Vance has been singled out to head this delegation. He hasn’t played much of a role to date,” Al Jazeera correspondent Mike Hanna reported from Washington, DC.
“One of the reasons, possibly, is because the Iranians had expressed their preference for dealing with Vance, rather than the other envoys who they have been dealing with.”
Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi are anticipated to guide the Iranian delegation, though it isn’t clear if any consultant from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) would attend.
The format of negotiations, and whether or not the US and Iranian officers would converse nose to nose or by intermediaries, was not revealed as of Friday.
From risk to ‘destroy civilisation’ to talks
The talks on Saturday will cap a unprecedented week within the war, which noticed Trump threaten strikes on Iran’s civilian infrastructure, together with energy crops and bridges, if Tehran didn’t conform to his phrases.
International legislation specialists have mentioned such strikes would likely constitute war crimes.
On Tuesday, simply hours earlier than the non permanent ceasefire was introduced, Trump went further, pledging {that a} “whole civilization will die tonight” if a deal was not reached.
While the pause in preventing has typically held, either side have provided conflicting messages on the agreed-upon phrases.
The Trump administration mentioned it agreed to a 10-point plan put ahead by Iran, however maintained the factors are completely different from an earlier 10-point proposal it beforehand rejected.
No readability has emerged on key points, together with management over the Strait of Hormuz, the way forward for Iran’s nuclear programme, and whether or not Israel’s invasion of Lebanon is topic to the ceasefire.
Both the US and Israel have maintained that pausing the preventing in Lebanon was not a part of the preliminary ceasefire settlement, contradicting claims from Iran and Pakistan.
However, on Thursday, in a cellphone interview with an Israeli journalist, Trump mentioned he informed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make the operations in Lebanon extra “low key”, so as to not derail the talks in Pakistan.
In a cellphone interview with the New York Post on Friday, Trump re-upped his risk, saying the US was “loading up the ships with the best ammunition, the best weapons ever made” within the occasion the talks fall by.
Ghalibaf, in the meantime, solid doubt on whether or not the negotiations would transfer ahead.
In a submit on X on Friday, he maintained two circumstances of the preliminary settlement had not but been fulfilled. They included the “ceasefire in Lebanon and the release of Iran’s blocked assets prior to the commencement of negotiations”.
“These two matters must be fulfilled before negotiations begin,” Ghalibaf wrote.
Lack of belief
Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister for Political Affairs Majid Takht Ravanchi, in the meantime, informed a gathering of overseas ambassadors on Friday that Iran welcomed the Pakistan dialogue.
But Ravanchi added he remained cautious that it may very well be used as a deception, to cowl for renewed escalation within the preventing. He mentioned Iran seeks an settlement with ensures that it’ll not be attacked once more.
Before the negotiations, the 2 sides look like “miles apart, and there’s tremendous amounts of mistrust” earlier than the assembly, in accordance with Ali Vaez, the Iran undertaking supervisor on the International Crisis Group.
“In fact, I would argue that they’re beginning from a negative starting point now, because of their recent experience of the Trump administration bombing them twice in the middle of negotiations in the past year,” Vaez defined.
“However, the reality is that every option possible has been tried: Sanctions, economic coercion, military coercion, and both sides ended up in a lose-lose scenario towards the end of this conflict.
“And if they are practical, they’ll realise it is so much better and less costly … to do concessions at the negotiating table,” he added. “But that is much easier said than done.”
Reporting from Islamabad, Al Jazeera correspondent Osama Bin Javaid cited a number of sources as saying some “ground progress is already being made” earlier than the arrival of the marquee negotiators.
But he famous it stays to be seen whether or not the US and Iran resume their negotiations from February, when talks about Iran’s nuclear programme had been unfolding in Oman and Switzerland.
“Now the question is: Where does that framework begin? Is it going to be where they left off in Oman and in Geneva?” Bin Javaid mentioned. “Or after the evolution of the last six weeks, it is going to start from scratch?
“What are the modalities that they will have to agree upon?”
