Islamabad, Pakistan – Pakistan has invited top Iranian officials for talks as mediation efforts to end the war with the United States are reinvigorated.
A Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement late on Monday said Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar had spoken to his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, and invited him “to visit Pakistan at his earliest convenience”.
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Separately, National Assembly Speaker Ayaz Sadiq also extended an invitation to his Iranian counterpart and chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, according to government sources.
It remains unclear if and when the two Iranian officials would travel to Islamabad.
The outreach came as US President Donald Trump accused leaders in Tehran of being “unbelievably duplicitous” over their handling of talks meant to end the war launched by the US and Israel in late February.
“They ask for a meeting, some would say ‘beg,’ talks begin, with more scheduled in the immediate future, and they say, openly and proudly, that they’re not having any discussions,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
He separately told reporters this was Iran’s “last chance” to sign a “good document” before “decapitation”, warning again that Tehran faced “a deal or total surrender”.
His comments followed Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei‘s insistence that no talks with the US were under way, only technical discussions with Oman over the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway through which one-fifth of global oil supplies passed in peacetime.
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Baghaei, addressing reporters on Monday, reaffirmed that Pakistan remained “the mediator” in talks concerning Iran and the US while Qatar continued to offer assistance “if necessary”.
A conflict without an exit?
Pakistan’s position has remained broadly unchanged since the war began on February 28: advocating for restraint and calling for dialogue and a diplomatic solution.
In April, the Pakistani government hosted in Islamabad the first direct US-Iran talks in decades. They culminated in the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), signed in June by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Trump.
Yet each attempt at de-escalation has unravelled within weeks. An April ceasefire collapsed within days, prompting a US naval blockade on Iran’s southern ports, while the MoU lasted barely a month as the two sides exchanged attacks and the US reimposed its naval blockade.
Throughout successive weekly briefings in July, Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesperson Tahir Andrabi has repeated that the MoU remains the framework for peace, even as the ceasefire it was meant to underpin has collapsed several times.
This week, Pezeshkian said the MoU would act as “the centre of gravity” of Iran’s future foreign relations. “We must strive to compel the enemy to remain committed to what it has signed. The security of the country, the region and our allies will be enhanced by this memorandum,” he wrote in a social media post.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Asif Durrani, Pakistan’s former ambassador to Iran, described the memorandum as “a foundational document” rather than a dead one.
“Pakistan could only facilitate, and that is what it has done sincerely, and that sincerity has been acknowledged internationally,” he said.
Grace Wermenbol, a former US national security official and senior visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund, argued that the repeated breakdowns reflect a deeper problem.
“Persistent recurring conflict has eroded the trust necessary for a longer-term ceasefire,” she told Al Jazeera.
Mehran Kamrava, a professor of government at Georgetown University in Qatar, went further, arguing the repeated failures say little about Pakistan’s role.
“The United States has no exit strategy, no clear objectives and no sense of what the end game is or ought to be, and it continues to move the goalposts,” he told Al Jazeera.
Iran, he added, is determined to retain leverage over the strait but knows it can only do so “in conjunction with Oman and with the implicit, if not explicit, agreement of the rest of the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] states”.
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That, he said, “is the source of the intractability, not any failure of mediation”.
But Seyed Mojtaba Jalalzadeh, a Tehran-based international relations analyst, argued that repeated failures have downgraded Pakistan’s role “from that of a mediator capable of resolving the conflict to that of a facilitator with access to the parties”.
That access still matters, given the absence of direct US-Iran channels, but the goodwill is not unlimited, he warned.
“If Pakistan promises more than it is capable of delivering, … its reputational capital will also erode over the long term,” Jalalzadeh said.
Not the only actor
Pakistan is not the only country engaged in efforts to ease the tensions. Iran and Oman have separately been negotiating over reopening the Strait of Hormuz, a parallel track focused on maritime access.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has publicly warned against any arrangement that would allow Iran to essentially control the waterway, calling it a “very dangerous precedent” that could be repeated elsewhere.
Durrani argued against comparing the two mediation efforts. “Pakistan cannot be compared to Oman in that respect because Pakistan is not part of the strait,” he said.
Jalalzadeh described the split as a natural “diplomatic division of labour”.
The strait involves technical issues such as shipping routes, minesweeping and service costs that Iran and Oman, as the two littoral states, are better placed to manage.
Pakistan and Qatar, by contrast, can focus on “the political-strategic level of the conflict, including a ceasefire, the reduction of attacks, sanctions, the nuclear file and security guarantees”, Jalalzadeh said.
Kamrava also described the growing number of mediators as a strength rather than a weakness.
“There is a collective will across the region, among the GCC states, Pakistan, Turkiye and Egypt, to ensure this conflict ends as soon as possible,” he said. “There is a recognition that everybody needs to do their share. … The emergence of that division of labour is, in fact, a constructive development.”
Who blinks first?
Pakistan’s challenge is ultimately structural rather than tactical, analysts said. It can facilitate talks, issue statements and broker agreements, but it cannot compel Washington and Tehran to honour their commitments once they are made.
Commenting on Trump’s shifting rhetoric, Jalalzadeh said it was a deliberate act “seeking to create a sense of urgency and impose costs on Iran while preserving his own freedom of action over timing”.
Trump’s threats, Jalalzadeh argued, were less evidence that a deal is imminent than “a statement of intent and a bargaining tactic”.
Kamrava disagreed.
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“What we have seen from Donald Trump is erratic statements and postures, and the one thing conspicuously absent is consistency,” he said. “The mixed messages are not a negotiating tactic. They reflect the absence of a strategy.”
Trump, he added, “sees his own unpredictability as a source of power”, but the White House’s lack of a coherent approach to the war “only compounds that unpredictability further”.
Paris-based Wermenbol traced that inconsistency to domestic political pressure.
“Trump has for months now engaged in parallel tracks focused on both threatened military escalation and diplomacy without securing breakthroughs on either track,” she said.
The war remains unpopular in the US, she added, while its economic costs are “not making things easy for this administration”, which she said is “trying to engage in some manner of damage control by obfuscating the depth of the ongoing conflict and its hitherto failure to secure articulated objectives”.