Trump cancels Iran talks in Islamabad, cites infighting and confusion
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Days after Iran’s leadership envisioned a united front that undermined the long-standing divide between moderates and hardliners, President Donald Trump canceled scheduled talks with Tehran in Islamabad, Pakistan, citing “infighting and confusion” within the regime.
Iranian-American experts argue that social media posts by Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, President Masoud Pezeshkian and other key officials reveal that the “good cop, bad cop” tactic used by the regime to deceive its enemies and secure generous concessions in nuclear negotiations has collapsed.
In a post on Truth Social on Saturday, Trump announced he was canceling the trip, citing “too much time wasted on the trip” and “too much work done.”
“In addition, there is tremendous internal conflict and confusion within the ‘leaderships’,” he said, adding that “no one, including them, knows who is responsible.”
President Donald Trump speaks in Cross Hall of the White House in Washington, D.C., on April 1, 2026, updating the country on the war in Iran. (Getty Images)
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“Besides, we have all the cards and they don’t have any!” Trump wrote. “If they want to talk all they have to do is call!!!”
Experts say the explosion of the hard-moderate divide within the regime could have profound consequences for Trump’s approach to nuclear negotiations in Islamabad. Trump appeared last week to address an unspecified division between factions in Iran.
“Iran is having a hard time figuring out who their leader is! They just don’t know! There’s an infighting between the ‘Hards’ who are losing BADLY on the battlefield and the ‘Moderates’ who are not at all moderate (but are gaining respect!) and it’s CRAZY!” Trump wrote in an X post on Thursday:
Mojtaba Khamenei, the new religious leader of Iran and the second son of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, attended a meeting in Tehran, Iran. (Hamed Jafarnejad/ISNA/WANA/Reuters)
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Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei immediately responded by claiming that “a fracture in the enemy has occurred due to the strange unity created among the citizens.”
“With practical gratitude for this blessing, unity has become even greater and more steely, and the enemies will become even more miserable and weaker,” Khamenei wrote in a response. “The enemy’s media operations aim to undermine national unity and security by targeting the minds and souls of the people; let our negligence not allow this treacherous intention to be realized.”
Mariam Memarsadeghi, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and founder and director of the Cyrus Forum on the Future of Iran, told Fox News Digital that the Islamic Republic has deceived Western policymakers for decades by sending moderates into negotiations as “window dressing for terror and subjugation.”
A poster of Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei was pasted on the windshield of a motorcycle while government supporters gathered in Tehran on April 9, 2026, the 40th day of the murder of his father, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. (Vahid Salemi/AP)
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Officials would later tell their counterparts that they were under pressure from hardliners, implying that the West should make concessions to strengthen them internally.
“Because of the war, the Trump administration has a huge advantage over the imperial terrorist state; this has never been tried before and has been much less successful,” Memarsadeghi said. he said. “But every time Trump says regime change has already occurred, he denies America the opportunity to finally and truly rid itself of the world’s greatest sponsor of terrorism and the existential threat it poses not just to the Iranian people but to the entire world.”
Navid Mohebbi, a Persian media analyst in the State Department’s Bureau of Public Affairs, warned that while rivalries and factions exist within the Islamic Republic, they are united on the regime’s core principles.
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“Their disagreements are mainly about tactics, not fundamental aspects,” Mohebbi told Fox News Digital, emphasizing that real decision-making authority in Iran always belongs to the supreme leader and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
“So-called moderates have never had the final say on important strategic issues and are often used to soften the regime’s image abroad,” he said. “From the Iranian people’s perspective, there is little difference. Between administrations labeled ‘moderate’ or ‘hard’, the system has consistently relied on repression.”
Mohebbi cited the example of Iranian regime President Hassan Rouhani, who presented himself as a moderate but whose security forces violently killed 1,500 protesters during the November 2019 uprising.
Members of security forces monitor the crowd during a funeral ceremony for Revolutionary Guard Marine Commander Alireza Tangsiri and other senior naval commanders killed in U.S.-Israeli strikes in late March in Tehran, Iran, April 1, 2026. (Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)
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“The same pattern continued under Masoud Pezeshkian during the protest massacre in January 2026, reinforcing the fact that these labels did not translate into meaningful change on the ground,” he said.
But a regional official insisted there were clashes between moderates and radicals in Iran. The official told Fox News Digital that Pezeshkian was moderate but “couldn’t even deliver on his campaign promise about internet freedom. He couldn’t even do that, to be honest.”
“The joint reaction from the heads of the three branches of power was in response to Trump touching on the issue of division and also the fact that there are indeed hardliners and moderates,” the official added. “Look, every time Iran wants to make concessions, it throws the moderates under the bus so the moderates can make a deal, and then the hardliners blame them for the concessions they all agreed to make.”
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Lawdan Bazargan, who was imprisoned by the Islamic Republic in the 1980s for his political opposition activities, told Fox News Digital that what authorities are seeing now is not the disappearance of the division, but the revelation of that division for what it really is.
“In reality, all of these figures – Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf [speaker of Iran’s parliament]Saeed Jalili [member of the Expediency Discernment Council]Pezeshkian, Ahmed Vahidi [head of the IRGC]Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei [head of Iran’s judiciary] Bazargan said: “They are all determined to preserve the system, spread power in the region and confront the United States and Israel, which they describe as the ‘forces of evil’.”
