The first round of talks in Islamabad between the U.S. and Iran may go down in history as a wasted opportunity because even if the two sides were able to rebuild some trust - and it seemed initially they did - it was squandered.
After the meeting things looked like they may be moving in the right direction, the U.S. was able to get a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon and in return, on Friday, Iran promised to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping. Almost immediately, however, President Trump announced that the blockade would remain in effect and be enforced. He then went further, publicly suggesting that Tehran had agreed to give up its nuclear program. Suffice it to say, this is not the case and no agreement had been reached.
There is a tendency in the U.S. to either disregard Trump’s tendency for loose talk, or to read it as an attempt to quell the markets. In Tehran, however, these erratic statements are received in a very different way, as a signal that the U.S. is not serious; all the talk about negotiations, agreements, and the like is just political theater - a way for Trump to string Iran along while he moves the military into place and reignites the war.
This type of distrust is the number one thing that negotiators at the next round of talks have to focus on. If they are able to, Trump’s advisors have to make sure that the president doesn’t destroy their progress with a series of incendiary public statements. The Wall Street Journal reported today that Trump’s advisors kept him out of the room during the military’s efforts to find the pilots who had been shot down on April 3 for fear his “impatience” would infringe on the dangerous recovery effort. The same logic should be put in place as it pertains to the Iran negotiations - not only while they are going on, but in the aftermath.
Aides kept the president out of the room as they got minute-by-minute updates because they believed his impatience wouldn’t be helpful
-Wall Street Journal, 20 April 2026
The distrust between both sides predates Trump by decades, but his actions over the last several years have only exacerbated it. From Iran’s perspective, they negotiated the JCPOA in 2015 and fulfilled their end of the agreement, only to have Trump destroy it. They went to the negotiating table with his emissaries, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in 2025, only to have those end with a U.S. bombing campaign. Months later they once again went back to the table for talks in Geneva, offered to make more concessions and instead of being met with continued meetings or a counter offer, they were bombed once again.
There is a U.S. side to this as well and good reason for Americans not to trust Iran. None of that, however, negates the fact that if we want to make a deal, that trust needs to be built and Trump’s erratic public talk is counterproductive to that end.
Case in point, his post yesterday morning. To say out of one side of your mouth that negotiations will resume and out of the other, if Iran doesn’t agree to a deal we are going to bomb their power plants and bridges serves no one, including the U.S.
