The U.S. delegation, led by Vice President JD Vance and including special envoy Steve Witkoff and adviser Jared Kushner, was en route to the Pakistani capital after a stop in Paris. The Iranian side, headed by parliamentary speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, arrived on Friday.

Qalibaf said Iran did not trust the United States based on past negotiations and warned that talks would not proceed unless Washington fulfilled earlier commitments, including unblocking Iranian assets and securing a ceasefire in Lebanon.

Iranian officials have linked progress in the talks to developments in the parallel conflict involving Hezbollah, a stance rejected by Washington and its allies.U.S. President Donald Trump said on social media that Iran “has no cards,” adding that Tehran’s leverage was limited to disrupting international waterways.

Vice President Vance, speaking en route, expressed cautious optimism about the negotiations but warned that the U.S. would respond firmly if it perceived bad-faith tactics.The talks come amid a fragile ceasefire announced earlier this week following weeks of U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran and retaliatory actions by Tehran.

While the ceasefire has paused direct attacks, it has not resolved Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which continues to disrupt global energy flows.Pakistan imposed extensive security measures in Islamabad ahead of the negotiations, with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif describing the meeting as “make-or-break.” Thousands of security personnel were deployed across the city.

Parallel tensions persist in Lebanon, where Israeli operations against Hezbollah have continued despite diplomatic efforts. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun has called for a ceasefire as a condition for broader negotiations, while Israeli officials have signaled that upcoming talks with Lebanese representatives in Washington would proceed without linking them to a truce.

Iran has also pushed for broader concessions, including the lifting of sanctions and recognition of its authority over transit through the Strait of Hormuz, a proposal that would significantly alter regional power dynamics. While Iranian vessels were reported to be moving freely through the strait, shipping by other nations remains constrained.

The disruption to energy supplies has contributed to inflationary pressures and slowed global economic activity, with analysts warning that the impact could persist even if negotiations lead to a reopening of the route.Iran’s leadership has maintained a firm stance ahead of the talks.

Mojtaba Khamenei said Tehran would seek compensation for wartime damage and hold those responsible accountable.Despite U.S. claims of degrading Iran’s military capabilities, Tehran retains missile and drone capacity and a significant stockpile of highly enriched uranium, underscoring the challenges facing negotiators in reaching a comprehensive agreement.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Zarif said Iran should offer to limit its nuclear program and reopen the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for a comprehensive lifting of U.S. sanctions, a proposal he said Washington had previously rejected but might now consider under changed circumstances.

The remarks come as the United States has put forward a 15-point ceasefire framework that includes restoring maritime access through the Strait of Hormuz, though there has been no indication of progress in negotiations.

Zarif, who played a central role in negotiating the 2015 nuclear agreement, no longer holds an official government position but remains an influential figure. Analysts note that such proposals are unlikely to be published without at least informal alignment with senior leadership in Tehran.

Iranian officials have repeatedly pointed to past instances in which negotiations with Washington coincided with military action, including the current conflict, as a source of distrust.

Zarif also criticized previous U.S. negotiating representatives, including Jared Kushner, questioning their expertise in geopolitics and nuclear policy.

The proposal underscores tentative signals of diplomatic maneuvering amid ongoing hostilities, even as military exchanges and tensions in the region continue.

In a televised address, Trump said U.S. forces had delivered “swift, decisive” results during 32 days of operations launched after joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran on Feb. 28. He added that Washington was “on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly,” while warning of further heavy attacks if no agreement is reached.

The conflict has triggered widespread regional instability, with Iranian retaliatory strikes targeting Israel, U.S. bases and Gulf states, and opening a parallel front in Lebanon. Thousands have been killed across the region since the escalation began.

Trump reiterated that the U.S. military campaign aimed to neutralize Iran’s strategic capabilities, including its nuclear program, saying recent strikes had prevented Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons. He did not provide evidence to support the claim.Despite the escalation, diplomatic prospects remain uncertain.

A senior Iranian source told Reuters that Tehran is demanding a guaranteed ceasefire before halting its attacks and has not engaged in indirect talks on a temporary truce. Iran has also denied U.S. assertions that it requested a ceasefire.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, in a message addressed to the American public, said Iran holds no hostility toward ordinary U.S. citizens, though official positions suggest limited willingness to enter negotiations at this stage.The war has disrupted global energy markets, particularly after Iran effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz, a critical route for roughly 20% of global oil and gas shipments.

Trump dismissed the strategic necessity of the passage for the United States and urged allies dependent on Gulf energy supplies to take steps to reopen it.Financial markets reacted negatively to the lack of a clear diplomatic roadmap, with global equities falling and oil prices rising following Trump’s address.

The International Monetary Fund, World Bank and International Energy Agency warned the conflict was having “substantial, global and highly asymmetric” economic effects and signaled coordination on potential support measures.U.S. officials said backchannel discussions involving intermediaries, including Pakistan, were ongoing, though no breakthrough has been reported.

Trump indicated he remained open to a deal but warned that failure to reach one could result in expanded strikes, including potential targeting of Iran’s electricity infrastructure.The U.S. president also renewed pressure on allies, suggesting countries reliant on Middle Eastern energy should take a more active role in ensuring maritime security in the region.

European officials, however, have cautioned against military operations in the Strait of Hormuz, citing concerns over international law.

Trump has also raised the prospect of reassessing U.S. commitments to the NATO, criticizing what he described as insufficient support from European allies in addressing the crisis.

After the sixth round of nuclear talks in Vienna about reviving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), where Rouhani’s administration and the P5+1 negotiators made positive comments about the outcome of the talks, the international community expected an agreement to be reached soon.

However, now, four months after the talks were stopped and three months after Ebrahim Raisi took office in Iran, apparently the talks are at a complete standstill, and it is not even possible to set a date for the resumption of the talks. Meanwhile, the main parties of the talks, the United States, and Iran have accused each other of stalling the talks.

On the Iranian side, although Ali Khamenei is the primary decision-maker since he does not want to take responsibility for the consequences of his decisions, he avoids making public comments on the negotiations and has left it to Raisi’s administration.

But Raisi and his negotiating team are also in a very difficult situation. On the one hand, Iran desperately needs the lifting of sanctions in order to sell oil and to get access to its blocked money to inject some kind of relief to the catastrophic economic situation that has caused inflation to rise above 50% and the majority of people to be pushed below the poverty line, causing public discontent and dissatisfaction.

On the other hand, they know any setbacks and concessions in these negotiations will lead to further setbacks not only in the nuclear program but also in long-range missile production, human rights violations regime’s terrorist activities, and adventurous interventions in the region.

Submission to any of these demands will have serious consequences and could bring the regime to the verge of collapse.

As a result, by killing time they are trying to advance their nuclear program as much as they can, and by increasing the enriched uranium stockpile well above their commitment under the JCPOA accord, as well as raising the enrichment level to 60%, and imposing various access restrictions on monitoring their nuclear activities at various sites, including on the cameras installed by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and also fostering news that the time required to build an atomic bomb has been reduced to a few weeks they want to indirectly put pressure on the United States and Europe to give in to their demands and lift the sanctions imposed by Trump without introducing new issues.

As Rafael Grossi, Director General of IAEA, in his report to IAEA Board of Governors mentions: “the Islamic Republic of Iran has refused to answer the IAEA’s questions and ambiguities, leaving the IAEA unable to carry out its mission. That is, to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons”.

Meanwhile, Iran is counting on creating a rift between the United States and Europe and is banking on Europe’s desire to lift the sanctions so it can both import oil and gas from Iran and enter again in Iran’s profitable market.

To this end, each time Iran has set different conditions for the resumption of negotiations. For example, at first, they asked all sanctions to be lifted and after ‎it was verified, then ‎they would resume the talks‎.

But when the United States did not give in to this request, it dropped that condition, and the regime’s foreign minister, Abdullahian, raised the issue of releasing $10 billion of Iranian frozen assets as a goodwill sign to return to negotiations.

But when confronted again with a negative response from the United States, in order to deny responsibility for the stalemate, the spokesman for the regime’s foreign ministry said that Iran had not set any preconditions for the talks, and thus withdrew from that condition too.

Iran’s latest tactic to create a rift between the United States and other JCPOA members was to propose negotiations in Brussels instead of Vienna, where the United States is not present. But European countries, realizing that the Iranian regime is no longer able to impose its conditions on them, rejected this offer and threatened that they might consider referring Iran’s nuclear dossier to the Board of Governors if Iran did not return to its commitments to verify its nuclear program. In a way, they warned the regime that the time for negotiations was coming to an end. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called Iran’s nuclear program unprecedentedly dangerous and called the rescue of the nuclear deal a critical moment.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken also said during a visit to Israel that if the talks fail, all options will be on the table, which clearly meant a military option. Meanwhile, President Biden’s special envoy for Iran, Robert Malley, traveled to Iran’s southern neighbors and held talks on the nuclear issues and Iran’s meddling in the region with United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia representatives, then he traveled to Paris and met with representatives of Britain, France, and Germany and negotiated and discussed alternative plan B.

In other words, in the next step, Iran will be condemned for violating the JCPOA in the IAEA’s meeting of the Board of Governors, and Iran’s nuclear file will be returned to the Security Council. In that case, in addition to re-imposing all the UN sanctions on Iran under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the United States will be free to take military action against the regime’s nuclear facilities.

The question now is how to get this situation out of the impasse and prevent Iran from acquiring an atomic bomb?

Pro-appeasement politicians want to make concessions to the regime, that is, lift sanctions, in the hope that they can prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon under the JCPOA agreement, arguing that since Trump’s withdrawal from JCPOA, Iran has gotten closer to the acquirement of a nuclear weapon and if United States had not withdrawn from JCPOA, Iran would not be at this stage now to have advanced centrifuges and to store this amount of enriched uranium.

But these politicians do not pay attention to the fact that the regime is not trustworthy at all, and according to regime officials such as Ali Akbar Salehi, the former head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, they secretly pursued their nuclear program even before Trump left the JCPOA. Therefore, any agreement with this regime based on trusting them is fundamentally doomed to fail, because this regime considers the acquisition of nuclear weapons as a guarantee of its survival and follows the North Korean model, and only waits for the right time to pass its final stages of atomic bomb testing.

If we proceed in the same way Iran will certainly acquire nuclear weapons, which would be a disaster not only for the people of Iran and the region but for the whole world.

The only real way to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear state is to stand with the people of Iran and support their quest for regime change. A free, democratic, and nuclear-free Iran is what the people of Iran genuinely want, and expect the international community to echo their wishes and help them make it a reality.

This is the overwhelming desire of the Iranian people which was clearly and peacefully expressed by boycotting the recent sham presidential election.

Cyrus Yaqubi is a Research Analyst and Iranian Foreign Affairs Commentator investigating the social issues and economy of the Middle East countries in general and Iran in particular.

Under a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, the Islamic republic shut down the original Arak reactor in Markazi province so that it could not produce military-grade plutonium.

It also pledged that a replacement of the original reactor with a new one would support “peaceful nuclear research”.

Quoted on Sunday by the Fars news agency, Mustafa Nakhai, spokesman of the legislature’s energy commission, said “the Arak IR-20 reactor will be launched in a year from now”.

Nakhai said he was in turn quoting Mohamed Eslami, newly-appointed to head the Iranian Atomic Energy organization (AEOI).

He also quoted Eslami as saying the new IR-20 reactor at Arak will feed into the generation of a planned 8,000 MW of nuclear power, to be achieved by the construction of additional reactors, state news agency IRNA reported.

Nuclear chief Eslami also said in mid-September during a site visit to Arak that Iran wanted to establish the long-planned research facility “as quickly as possible”.

The AEOI had said early this year that it would cold test the new reactor in the first three months of the Iranian year, which began on March 21.

The 2015 nuclear deal gave Iran sanctions relief in return for tight controls on its nuclear program, monitored by the UN.

Tehran has gradually rolled back its nuclear commitments since 2019, a year after then US president Donald Trump withdrew from the multilateral deal and began reimposing sanctions.

Talks began in April in Vienna in a bid to bring the US back inside the deal, but the dialogue has been stalled since June, when ultraconservative Ebrahim Raisi was elected as Iran’s president.

And trust cannot exist as long as Raisi’s regime does.

The very selection of Ebrahim Raisi as an electoral candidate, and then his victory highlighted the sham that is Iran’s electoral process.

Known widely in Iran as the “Hanging Judge” or “The Butcher of Tehran” for his direct role in massacring thousands of political prisoners, Raisi as the president of the Islamic Republic should make clear to the world what has long been clear to the people of Iran: this regime cannot be dealt with because it cannot be trusted.

For nearly half of the regime’s bloody rule, many outside Iran have touted the notion of “reform” or “moderation” within the Islamic Republic establishment. Criminal clerics like Hassan Rouhani and their allies like Javad Zarif have been held out as figures with whom reasoning is possible and for whom Iran’s national interests outweigh those of the system.

Regime apologists who spent years diverting international attention from the Islamic Republic’s crimes against humanity at home and terrorism abroad by promoting the false notion of regime moderation have now pivoted to blame the United States for Raisi’s election. Some have even begun making the case that the man who personally handled the executions of children is not as bad as he may seem.

No matter how well-financed and well-spoken the Islamic Republic’s foreign propaganda machine is it will not be able to change the fact that the hardliners it long said could not be trusted now occupy every relevant position within the Islamic Republic. Their rhetoric, despite its eloquent English and well-placed publication, must defend Raisi’s reality rather than a Viennese fantasy.

In reality, the Islamic Republic cannot be trusted. The facade of trust manufactured by “moderates” like Zarif is now largely discredited and irrelevant due largely to missteps by the moderates themselves. The trust, or rather contrived confidence, during the Obama administration, was based largely on wishful thinking. Both President Obama and Secretary Kerry repeatedly referred to the purported fatwa, or religious edict, that Ali Khamenei had issued against the development of nuclear weapons.

Recently, however, the regime’s intelligence minister has disavowed the fatwa for which Secretary Kerry had “great respect” and said the Islamic Republic was not bound by the edict. Speaking on state television, he said that if Iran were pressured it may indeed develop a nuclear bomb. A theocracy that cannot be trusted to respect even its religious edicts can certainly not be trusted to be loyal to a treaty with countries it has sworn to destroy.

If abrogating a fatwa seems inconsequential, the Iranian regime has long proven itself an untrustworthy partner through various additional breaches of international treaties. Indeed, the very basis of the ongoing talks in Vienna, to the impartial observer, appear more comedy than drama. The P5+1 strategy is simple: diplomatic negotiations in an attempt to control the regime’s nuclear program via an international accord. What they ignore is the Islamic Republic’s long track record of ignoring and breaking international accords, both diplomatic and nuclear.

The Iranian “diplomats”’ sitting across from the French, Germans, and Americans in Vienna represent a regime with no respect for the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations which protects the very diplomats attempting to renegotiate the defunct JCPOA. From taking American diplomats hostage for 444 days as its diplomatic debut to the world, its attempted assassination of the Saudi Ambassador in Washington, and then its sponsored storming of the British Embassy in Tehran, the Islamic Republic has long shown a blatant disregard for diplomacy and indeed a violent animosity towards it.

Iran consistently violates the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty despite remaining an active signatory. It has blocked IAEA access to nuclear sites and continued on its enrichment path in clear breach of mutually agreed to IAEA deadlines and United Nations resolutions. If the regime in Tehran can’t be trusted to respect treaties on diplomacy and nuclear issues it has already signed, why should it now be trusted to respect a diplomatic agreement on its nuclear program?

It can’t. Ebrahim Raisi is a man who personally ordered and watched as Iranian prisoners were raped, newborn babies were thrown against the floor, and activists were executed. His regime violates its own religious edicts and dozens of international laws and conventions. Where trust does not exist, no relationship can exist. And trust cannot exist as long as Raisi’s regime does.

Now is not the time to make a deal with Raisi and his regime. Now is the time to focus on the vast majority of Iranians who boycotted the sham election and are saying, with one voice, “No to the Islamic Republic.”

Cameron Khansarinia is Policy Director National Union for Democracy in Iran. He is an alumni of Harvard University. He tweets under @Khansarinia.