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The highest-level talks between the United States and Iran since the 1979 revolution produced no breakthrough on Saturday and appeared to collapse by Sunday. Vice President JD Vance said in Islamabad that negotiations broke down after Iran refused to commit to not seeking nuclear weapons in the future. Tehran has separately refused to give up domestic uranium enrichment, which the White House has called a red line.
The collapse came after a day of high theater on Saturday, when two U.S. destroyers transited the Strait of Hormuz for the first time during the war, challenging Iran's control of the waterway even as negotiators were preparing to sit down. Iranian forces radioed warnings — "This is the last warning" — and the American ships responded that they were exercising passage under international law. U.S. Central Command said the destroyers departed as planned and kicked off a broader mission to clear mines from the strait.
But the symbolism cut both ways. The U.S. may have demonstrated it can sail through Hormuz, but Iran demonstrated something more durable: that it still controls it. The Revolutionary Guard Corps — not the conventional navy, most of which the U.S. has destroyed — continues to operate hundreds of fast-attack craft and speedboats, many hidden in underground pens along the rocky coast, and has also begun using waterborne drones against ships. More than 60% of the Guard's fast-attack craft and speedboat fleet remains intact. With Iran warning it has mined the main shipping channels and charging tolls as high as $2 million for the biggest supertankers, it has turned a strait that carries roughly one-fifth of the world's oil and gas trade into a chokepoint under its control.
The implications cascade outward. Oil prices have soared past $100 a barrel for the first time since 2022, and the pain is already showing up in American wallets: consumer prices rose 0.9% in March and 3.3% over the past 12 months, with energy costs fueling much of the increase. That March number — the first to account for the rise in energy prices from the Iran war — came in far hotter than February's 2.4%.
The oil shock is rattling even the sharpest traders. At Vitol, the world's biggest oil merchant, a team led by star trader Yaoyao Liu took a several-hundred-million-dollar hit early in the war after bets in the petroleum market went wrong. Among the suspected positions: wagers that Dubai crude would fall relative to benchmark Brent — trades that would have paid off if Trump had pulled back from a military buildup. Instead, when the war started and Hormuz shut, the positions blew up. Liu's team has since clawed back some losses, and Vitol as a whole is up for the year, but the episode underscores how the war's reverberations ripple through every layer of the global economy.
What makes Iran's position so confounding is the paradox of its survival. Across last year's 12-day war and five more recent weeks of fighting, U.S. and Israeli strikes destroyed labs and research facilities and damaged a yellowcake production site, while U.S. attacks wrecked much of Iran's conventional navy. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says Iran's missile program is "functionally destroyed." But U.S. intelligence tells a different story: Iran still retains thousands of ballistic missiles and could retrieve launchers from underground storage. It held on to its stockpile of nearly 1,000 pounds of near-weapons-grade uranium — half of it buried in caskets in a tunnel deep under its Isfahan nuclear site.
This is the dilemma facing Vance, who was deputized by Trump to lead the negotiations despite being the administration's most prominent skeptic of foreign intervention. Old allies like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly have turned into critics of the administration, and Vance is aware his political fortunes are now linked to its outcome. A close friend said Vance described feeling like he was sometimes walking on eggshells around Trump because of his antiwar views, though a spokesman disputed that characterization.
The broader picture is bleaker still. The era of free seas is unraveling. Iran's tollbooth sets a precedent that extends well beyond the Persian Gulf. If the world accepts tolls at Hormuz, the question becomes how to resist China's claims over the South China Sea, a passageway for more than a quarter of global trade. Ships in the Black Sea face Russian missile strikes; traffic through the Red Sea hasn't recovered since 2024. The system of open maritime commerce the U.S. built after World War II — the invisible infrastructure beneath globalization — is fraying at multiple points simultaneously. Iran, sailors noted, is collecting tolls in Chinese yuan or cryptocurrency.
Meanwhile, in Hungary, another pillar of the post-Cold War order faces a test. Voters go to the polls today in elections that could end Viktor Orbán's two decades in power. The prime minister who once began his career demanding Soviet troops leave Hungary is now jeered with the same phrase — "Russians Go Home!" — by critics who see him as too close to the Kremlin. His challenger, Péter Magyar of the Tisza Party, has surged ahead by nearly 15 percentage points in some polls, galvanized by anger over a moribund economy and what critics call a corrupt system enriching those close to the prime minister. An Orbán loss would be a sea change for the EU, which has withheld billions of euros over democratic backsliding and Orbán's pro-Russia stance, while his vetoes have stymied the bloc's pro-Ukraine foreign policy. Trump on Friday pledged to use America's "full economic might" to help Hungary — though it's unclear what that means in practice.
On lighter ground, the Masters heads into its final round Sunday with a leaderboard that tightened dramatically on Saturday. Rory McIlroy, who held a record six-stroke lead after 36 holes, stumbled with a double bogey and a bogey on consecutive holes before steadying himself to finish at 11-under, co-leading with Cameron Young. Shane Lowry provided the day's most electric moment — a hole-in-one at the sixth, making him the first player in Masters history to record two holes-in-one. The 39-year-old Irishman sits two shots back in fourth heading into what promises to be a scorching Sunday, with temperatures forecast to challenge the final-round record of 88 degrees.
And in a moment of unalloyed good news, the Artemis II crew splashed down Friday evening off the coast of San Diego, completing humanity's first trip to the vicinity of the moon since 1972. The astronauts returned voluminous data, tested life-support systems on the Orion spacecraft — and became unlikely celebrities along the way, after a jar of Nutella floated through the cabin on NASA's livestream, unsponsored and instantly iconic.
It is a Sunday morning of precarious pivots: a cease-fire that has halted the bombing but hasn't restored normal traffic through Hormuz, an election that could reshape Europe, a golf tournament baking under near-record heat and a space program reaching back toward the moon. It remains unclear whether the breakdown in Islamabad is temporary or lasting, even as Hungary's voters decide today between continuity and rupture. But the deeper currents — the rewiring of global trade, the price of energy, the question of who controls the seas — will take far longer to resolve.
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