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President Trump abruptly cancelled a planned diplomatic mission to Islamabad on Saturday, pulling back two senior advisers who had been set to travel to Pakistan for talks aimed at ending the war with Iran, as Tehran's military issued fresh threats over an American naval blockade of its ports.
Steve Witkoff, the president's special envoy, and Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, had been scheduled to fly to the Pakistani capital Saturday as part of ongoing indirect negotiations between Washington and Tehran. Trump called off the trip hours before departure, saying the United States held the upper hand in the standoff.
"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,'" Trump said. He added that Iranian officials were free to reach out, but that his team would no longer make the journey to "sit around talking about nothing."
Pakistan has been serving as a go-between in the negotiations, with both American and Iranian officials expected to gather in Islamabad, though it remained unclear whether the two sides would meet face to face or communicate through Pakistani mediators. Iran had maintained from the outset that its negotiators would not hold direct talks with their U.S. counterparts under present conditions.
Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, had already left Pakistan on Saturday following his own round of discussions with Pakistani leaders, Iranian state media reported. His departure came before Trump's announcement that the American envoys would not be making the trip at all.
The diplomatic reversal came as Iran's military issued a pointed warning over the American blockade of Iranian ports, which Trump ordered after Tehran moved to close the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway through which a significant share of the world's oil supply passes. "If the aggressive U.S. military continues its blockade, banditry, and piracy in the region, it should be certain that it will face a response from Iran's powerful armed forces," the military said in a statement carried by Iranian state media.
The blockade appeared to have done little to compel Iran toward American terms for a diplomatic settlement, with the two sides still far apart on the conditions for ending more than a month of conflict in the Middle East.
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