When talks between the United States and Iran ended just before dawn on Sunday morning without a permanent cease-fire, the Americans said they had made their final best offer and that Iran had not accepted.
“We’ve made very clear what our red lines are, what things we’re willing to accommodate them on, and what things we’re not willing to accommodate them on,” Vice President JD Vance said after 21 hours of meetings with top Iranian officials at the Serena Hotel in Islamabad.
Mr. Vance did not say what those red lines were. In the days leading up to the talks, both sides had issued public statements suggesting they remained far apart on several critical issues. They did not even agree on whether the two-week truce they reached on Tuesday applied to fighting in Lebanon, a dispute that nearly derailed the meeting.
By early Sunday, three main sticking points remained, according to two Iranian officials familiar with the talks: the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz; the fate of nearly 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium; and Iran’s demand that about $27 billion in frozen revenues held abroad be released.
The United States had demanded that Iran immediately reopen the strait to all maritime traffic. But Iran refused to relinquish leverage over the critical choke point for oil tankers, saying it would do so only after a final peace deal, according to the two Iranian officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic negotiations.
Iran also sought reparations for damage from six weeks of airstrikes and asked for frozen oil revenues held in Iraq, Luxembourg, Bahrain, Japan, Qatar, Turkey and Germany to be released for reconstruction, the officials said. The Americans refused those requests.