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US President Donald Trump on Saturday said he has cancelled the scheduled visit of the US delegation, led by Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Senior Adviser and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, to Islamabad for talks with Iran for the second round of peace talks, aimed at achieving a comprehensive resolution to hostilities in West Asia.
The development was shared by Fox News White House correspondent Aishah Hasnie in a post on X, where she stated that Trump cancelled the visit by the delegation from Washington due to the long-distance engagements being unnecessary and unproductive. Hasnie was on a direct phone conversation with the US President. "I've told my people a little while ago they were getting ready to leave, and I said, 'Nope, you're not making an 18-hour flight to go there. We have all the cards. They can call us anytime they want, but you're not going to be making any more 18-hour flights to sit around talking about nothing'," Trump said as quoted by Fox News. This comes moments after the Iranian delegation, led by Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, departed Islamabad on Saturday evening (local time) after a day of high-level meetings with the Pakistan leadership, leaving Pakistan's ambitious claims of brokering a US-Iran peace deal as part of the second round of negotiations in tatters. As reported by Al Jazeera, the delegation left the Pakistani capital after delivering an "official list of demands" to Pakistani leaders for the US and Israel in order to achieve a complete solution to the conflict in West Asia. The departure effectively signals the end of Islamabad's hopes to facilitate the much-anticipated second round of direct dialogue, as Araghchi is now set to travel to Oman and Russia. According to a statement issued by Araghchi in Telegram, the Iranian foreign minister explained Iran's "principled positions regarding the latest developments related to the ceasefire and the complete end of the imposed war against" the Islamic Republic by US and Israeli forces to the Pakistani side. This weekend's diplomatic theatre is rapidly mirroring the failures of the past. The first round of talks hosted in Islamabad - featuring US Vice President JD Vance and Iranian Parliamentary Speaker MB Ghalibaf - dragged on for a gruelling 21 hours without yielding a single breakthrough. (ANI)
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