Twenty-one hours of face-to-face talks in Pakistan. The highest-level US-Iran engagement since 1979. And the negotiations collapsed on the nuclear question — exactly as the structural logic of this war suggested they would.
By David Cohen
When JD Vance walked out of the Serena Hotel in Islamabad early on Sunday morning and told reporters that the United States and Iran had “not reached an agreement,” the conventional wisdom in Western capitals reached immediately for the familiar language of missed opportunity. The talks had been so close. Both sides had shown flexibility. If only Trump hadn’t pushed too hard on the nuclear question. If only Iran had been willing to accept a face-saving compromise. If only, if only.
I’d like to offer a different reading, and it’s the one I’ve been arguing since I wrote one weeks ago that this war was justified and necessary for Israel’s survival: the Islamabad collapse was not a missed opportunity. It was the inevitable resolution of a negotiation whose core terms were never bridgeable, and its failure vindicates the strategic logic that started the war in the first place.
What Iran was actually asked to give up
Let’s be precise about what the US delegation put on the table in Islamabad, because the reporting has been vague about the substance and specific about the theatre. According to a US official who briefed the press anonymously after the talks broke down, Washington’s red lines included five non-negotiable items: Iran would never obtain a nuclear weapon; Iran would end all uranium enrichment; Iran would dismantle its major enrichment facilities; Iran would allow the United States to retrieve its stockpile of highly enriched uranium; and Iran would end its funding of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthi movement in Yemen. A sixth demand, on the Strait of Hormuz, required Iran to fully reopen the waterway and renounce any right to charge transit tolls.
Read that list again, slowly. This is not a negotiating position that can be met halfway. It is, in its totality, a demand that the Islamic Republic of Iran cease to be the Islamic Republic of Iran as currently constituted. Take away the nuclear enrichment programme, the regional proxies, and the leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, and what remains is not a chastened version of the existing regime. What remains is an entirely different country, governed by different people, committed to different ends. The Supreme Leader’s office in Tehran understood this. So did the 70-strong Iranian delegation that Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi led into the Serena Hotel on Saturday morning.
And this is where the critics of the hawkish position need to be honest with themselves. The argument for giving diplomacy more time always rested on an unstated assumption: that there existed some package of concessions Iran could accept without ceasing to exist as the regime it is. Islamabad was the most serious test of that assumption in nearly half a century of US-Iran hostility. Twenty-one hours of face-to-face talks, led on the US side by the one senior Trump administration figure Iranian officials were willing to engage with — Vance was chosen precisely because Iranian negotiators saw him as the administration’s reluctant skeptic on the war — and the talks collapsed on exactly the point every serious analyst warned they would collapse on. The nuclear question. The one Israel cannot compromise on. The one Iran will not yield.
Why the nuclear question was always load-bearing
The Strait of Hormuz demand and the Hezbollah demand are significant, but they are not, in the final analysis, the load-bearing pillar. A theoretical Iran that gave up its regional proxies and renounced its toll rights over Hormuz but retained its enrichment programme would still, within a decade, be an Iran with nuclear weapons. And an Iran with nuclear weapons is, by the Begin Doctrine that has governed Israeli strategic thinking for four decades, an Iran that Israel cannot live beside. Everything else in the negotiation was secondary to this single question, and every sophisticated observer — Israeli, American, Iranian, and Gulf Arab — knew it.
This is why Trump’s zero-enrichment demand was not, as some European commentators have suggested, a maximalist opening position designed to be negotiated down. It was the floor. It was what Israel actually requires for the war to have been worth fighting. The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in February that Iran had stored highly enriched uranium in an underground facility that previous strikes had not reached. As long as that uranium exists and as long as Iran retains the enrichment capability to produce more of it, the strategic clock is ticking toward the same outcome the war was launched to prevent. A ceasefire that left the enrichment programme intact would not end the threat. It would merely pause the conflict until Iran completed the programme and the threat became acute enough to require a second war, fought from a worse strategic position.
This is also why Iran’s “right to peaceful enrichment” framing, which the European foreign policy establishment has treated as reasonable, is actually the core of the problem. The technical distinction between peaceful and weapons-grade enrichment is smaller than the political rhetoric suggests. The centrifuge cascades are the same. The uranium is the same. The step from 20% enrichment to weapons-grade is measured in weeks, not years, once the infrastructure exists. Iran’s insistence on preserving this infrastructure during the talks was not a minor sticking point. It was the regime telling the United States, quite clearly, that it intended to retain the option of a bomb regardless of whatever else was agreed on paper. Vance understood this, which is why he walked.
The blockade and the calibration that matters
The Trump administration’s response to the collapse — a naval blockade of Iranian ports beginning at 10am Eastern Time on Monday — deserves more careful reading than most commentators have given it. Trump’s initial Truth Social post on Sunday threatened to blockade the entire Strait of Hormuz, including ships paying Iranian transit tolls. What CENTCOM actually announced, a few hours later, was narrower: a blockade of vessels entering or leaving Iranian ports, while explicitly preserving freedom of navigation for ships transiting the Strait to and from non-Iranian destinations.
That walkback, from the original maximalist threat to the narrower operational order, is not weakness. It is calibration. The United States is choking Iran’s economic lifeline without provoking a Strait-wide naval conflict that neither Washington nor Riyadh nor the UAE actually wants. The blockade pressures the regime by denying it export revenue and import access while preserving the broader flow of Gulf oil that keeps the global economy stable. This is exactly the kind of finely-tuned economic warfare that disciplined administrations use when they have a clear strategic objective and understand that pressure must be applied in a way that the target can feel but allies can tolerate.
The fact that the United Kingdom has publicly declined to participate in the blockade, and is reportedly working with France to assemble a separate “wide coalition to protect freedom of navigation,” is being reported as a diplomatic setback for Trump. It is nothing of the sort. The British position — supporting freedom of navigation while opposing Iranian tolls, but declining to join the direct blockade — is the kind of performative distancing European governments have always indulged in when the United States does necessary work they prefer not to acknowledge publicly. The British Royal Navy will not stop Iranian oil exports. The US Fifth Fleet will. Both facts are compatible with London and Washington pursuing essentially the same end through different means.
What the critics still won’t say
Here is what the “give diplomacy a chance” camp will not say out loud, even now, after Islamabad: there is no package of concessions the current Iranian regime will accept that leaves Israel secure. There has never been one. The entire diplomatic process from the 2015 JCPOA onward has been an exercise in finding formulas that allowed Western governments to pretend the core incompatibility did not exist, while buying Iran time to build the infrastructure that made the core incompatibility acute. Islamabad was the moment that pretence finally collapsed, in a hotel in Pakistan, after 21 hours, with a reluctant American vice-president and a 70-person Iranian delegation both walking away from a table that was never actually set for agreement.
The painful part of this reading is that it offers no comfortable off-ramp. If there is no diplomatic solution available at acceptable terms, then the war continues, and continuing the war means continuing the costs: the more than 3,000 Iranians killed since February 28, the 2,055 Lebanese, the 23 Israelis, the dozen or more Gulf citizens caught in retaliatory strikes. These are real numbers and real deaths, and a serious defender of this war does not wave them away. What a serious defender insists on is that they are the costs of confronting a threat now, at a moment of Iranian weakness, rather than later, after Iran has rebuilt its proxies and completed the programme the war was launched to disrupt. The calculus is grim. It is not, I think, wrong.
Where this leaves us
The ceasefire formally runs until 22 April, but in practice it has been a dead letter since Israel struck Hezbollah positions in Lebanon within hours of it being declared. What comes next, realistically, is not a return to negotiations. It is the slow tightening of economic pressure through the port blockade, combined with continued Israeli air operations against Iranian regional assets, until either the Iranian regime decides that its red lines are less load-bearing than it believed on Saturday — or until the underlying structural incompatibility that Islamabad exposed resolves itself in one of the other ways that such incompatibilities historically resolve.
I’ve argued from the start that this war was justified and necessary for Israel’s existence. Islamabad has not changed my view. If anything, the collapse has clarified it. Twenty-one hours of talks. The highest-level engagement since 1979. And the gap remained exactly where the hawks said it would remain, on exactly the question the war was fought to settle. Those who hoped diplomacy would find a seam through the structural incompatibility now have to face the possibility that the seam was never there. The hawks were right on 28 February. They are still right on 13 April. The road ahead is hard and the costs are real, but the alternative — a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic of Iran — remains, as it always was, unacceptable to anyone serious about Israel’s survival.
David Cohen is the editor of Crosswinds Daily and Head of Global BizDev at Shepha. His previous piece on the justification for the 2026 Iran war is available here. (c) David Cohen 2026 All rights reserved
Leave a Reply