Trump cancels envoys' trip to Iran talks in Pakistan

US President Donald Trump said on Saturday he had ordered his envoys not to travel to Pakistan for peace talks with Iranian officials, but also that the move didn’t mean resuming the war.

Trump made the announcement in individual phone calls with reporters, and later in a post on social media, shortly after Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi departed Islamabad.

Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff had been scheduled to leave for Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, on Saturday for a second round of peace talks with Iran.

“I just cancelled the trip of my representatives going is (sic) Islamabad, Pakistan, to meet with the Iranians. Too much time wasted on traveling, too much work!” he wrote on his Truth Social media platform.

“Besides which, there is tremendous infighting and confusion within their ‘leadership.’ Nobody knows who is in charge, including them,” he continued.

However, Trump left the door open to further negotiations, saying if the Iranians “want to talk, all they have to do is call!!!”

Asked earlier Saturday by Axios whether the cancellation of the envoys’ trip meant he would resume the war, Trump said: “No. It doesn’t mean that. We haven’t thought about it yet.”

The United States has extended indefinitely a truce with Iran that took effect on April 8.

Speaking Saturday afternoon on the tarmac at Palm Beach airport in Florida, Trump said the Iranians “gave us a paper that should have been better, and interestingly, immediately when I cancelled it — within 10 minutes — we got a new paper that was much better.”

When asked by a journalist what was in the new document, he said: “We talked about they will not have a nuclear weapon, very simple.”

Iran’s state television said Tehran’s envoys had no immediate plans to hold face-to-face talks with the Americans, and that Pakistan would serve as a bridge to convey Iranian proposals.