United States Vice President JD Vance has departed for Pakistan to engage in talks on ending the US-Israeli war with Iran, saying he expects “positive” results. Vance spoke briefly to reporters on Friday as he boarded a plane bound for Islamabad, where talks with Iran were set to be held the following day. I think it’s going to be positive.
We’ll, of course, see,” he said. Vance added that President Donald Trump had given him “pretty clear guidelines” for the meeting. Witkoff and Kushner, who will still attend Saturday’s talks, had twice led indirect negotiations about Iran’s nuclear programme.
Those talks were ongoing when Israel initiated a 12-day war on Iran in June 2025, which ended with the US striking three of Iran’s key nuclear sites, and when the US and Israel launched the latest war on February 28. While deeply loyal to Trump, Vance is also viewed as less hawkish than many of the president’s other top officials. A former member of the US Marine Corps during the 2003 Iraq war, Vance has become representative of the anti-interventionist wing of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement.
He hasn’t played much of a role to date,” Al Jazeera correspondent Mike Hanna reported from Washington, DC. The format of negotiations, and whether the US and Iranian officials would speak face to face or through intermediaries, was not revealed as of Friday. The talks on Saturday will cap an extraordinary week in the war, which saw Trump threaten strikes on Iran’s civilian infrastructure, including power plants and bridges, if Tehran did not agree to his terms.
International law experts have said such strikes would likely constitute war crimes. On Tuesday, just hours before the temporary ceasefire was announced, Trump went further, pledging that a “whole civilization will die tonight” if a deal was not reached. While the pause in fighting has generally held, both sides have offered conflicting messages on the agreed-upon terms.
The Trump administration said it agreed to a 10-point plan put forward by Iran, but maintained the points are different from an earlier 10-point proposal it previously rejected. No clarity has emerged on key issues, including control over the Strait of Hormuz, the future of Iran’s nuclear programme, and whether Israel’s invasion of Lebanon is subject to the ceasefire. Both the US and Israel have maintained that pausing the fighting in Lebanon was not part of the initial ceasefire agreement, contradicting claims from Iran and Pakistan.
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