A US negotiating team, including US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, will no longer be traveling to Pakistan for US-Iran talks, US President Donald Trump told Fox News on Saturday.
Trump stated that he canceled the trip to prevent his team from taking an 18-hour flight “to sit around talking about nothing.”
“We have all the cards,” he continued, adding that “they can call us anytime they want,” in reference to Iran’s negotiators.
"You probably heard that we canceled the trip," he told reporters in Palm Beach Florida.
"We have all the cards. We’re not going to spend 15 hours in airplanes all the time, going back and forth, to be given a document that was not good enough. So, we’ll deal by telephone, and they can call us any time they want."
Later, Trump told reporters that he would "deal with whoever runs the show."
"There's no reason to wait 2 days, have people traveling for 16, 17 hours... When they want, they can call me, we have all the cards," he said.
"That whole deal is not complicated: Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon."
Shortly before Trump announced the cancellation, two Pakistani government sources told Reuters that the Iranian delegation had left Islamabad. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was among those who left after conducting a round of talks with Pakistani officials, according to Iranian state media.
Iranian officials, Pakistani PM claim fruitful talks without US participation
In a post on X/Twitter, Araghchi claimed that his visit to Pakistan was "very fruitful."
He stated that he had shared Iran's position regarding a "workable framework to permanently end the war" with the US, but noted that he has "yet to see if the US is truly serious about diplomacy."
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif shared later on Saturday that he spoke on the phone with Iranian President President Masoud Pezeshkian regarding the situation, describing the call as “warm and constructive” in a post on X/Twitter.
Sharif stated that he had reaffirmed to Pezeshkian that Pakistan “remains committed to serve as an honest and sincere facilitator” for talks between the US and Israel.
He also confirmed that he had met with Araghchi earlier on Saturday, prior to the foreign minister’s departure.
Notably, in response to Trump's statements, the Iranian embassy in South America said that it did not "know whom we are speaking to, representatives of the United States or of Israel."
Reuters contributed to this report.