And now what's next? Variants of Trump and the regime in Tehran after declaring the failure of the negotiations in Islamabad

Eyes are now primarily on Donald Trump. After the previous deadlock in the talks, the one in Geneva in February, the president attacked. How today's situation is different.

Following the fruitless end of the US-Iran peace talks, the Iranian Foreign Ministry said in a statement: “The heavy loss of our great elders, loved ones and countrymen has made our response to pursue the interests and rights of the Iranian nation stronger than ever.” This was while JD Vance was on his way to a military base in Islamabad, of the Pakistani army, to take off for the US.

The Iranians also sent the president of the Central Bank to Islamabad, as well as radical parliamentarians

The Iranians came to Islamabad with a large delegation. “Unusually numerous,” as exiled publication Iran International noted in an analysis.

Moderate and radical currents were found in the delegation, the publication notes. A sort of Iranian politics of the moment, in a nutshell: “The delegation included not only Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf and his political allies, but also Ali-Akbar Ahmadian, the Secretary of the Defense Council, and more moderate technocrats, such as Iran's Central Bank Governor Abdolnaser Hemmati. And the presence of Mahmoud Nabavian – a hardline lawmaker known for his staunch opposition to negotiations with the West – generated a special surprise”.

A failure with many of the cards on the table

There were also premieres in Iranian state media. A muqawama regime, a regime of revolutionary resistance, as Iran declares itself, does not traditionally make concessions.

Now, however, voices in the official media have pointed to historical precedents, noting that several Shiite imams have engaged in dialogue or cooperation with their opponents, suggesting that negotiation, in itself, is not incompatible with ideological principles.

The failure of the negotiations is, in this context, the failure in the face of what is apparently now more representative of Iran as an establishment. To what extent the regime can really afford a resumption of the conflict can only be glimpsed in the coming days.

Iran's criminal network

What will Donald Trump do? Will he continue the peace talks or treat the episode in Islamabad as he treated the deadlock in Geneva at the end of February? After the previous failure, the US president unleashed the war.

Iran is, however, in the Middle East, the great power beyond the Persian Gulf. Its durability has been tested. From the Middle East to Africa, Iran has over the decades consolidated an autocratic regime as well as a network of criminal complicity. Robert D. Kaplan described “a veritable map of the Al-Qaeda network as well as disparate groups involved in the smuggling of hashish and other illegal products. Indeed, Iran supplied Hamas by sea from the Persian Gulf to Sudan, then by land through Egypt.”

Public support for the war is also falling in Israel

The noxious influence that no Iranian regime has yet relinquished is one of the reasons why reactions in Israel remained uneasy before, during and after the Islamabad negotiations. “The United States has the luxury of withdrawing from the conflict in Iran. The Israelis are not so lucky,” says journalist Haviv Rettig Gur.

The Israelis fear that Iran is basically sending the following message: “If we've already managed to get the Americans to cave in on gas prices, then this must be the time when America will come down hard on the Israelis to get them to stop completely.”

There is, in Israeli society, a strong current against the belligerent spirit embodied by Prime Minister Netanyahu. And this current is also beginning to manifest itself on the subject of the war in Iran, where public opinion in Israel was massively favorable.

“The overwhelming enthusiasm shown by Jewish respondents in the first two weeks quickly faded, from 74 percent of Jewish respondents at the beginning who 'strongly' supported the war, to only 50 percent who now strongly supported the continuation of the war,” notes Dahlia Scheindlin in Haartez.

Hope beyond the curtain was better

There could be another chance, several commentators claim: that public reactions simply express a reality that, behind the scenes of the negotiations, would have been much more nuanced.

“We're hoping that what we saw publicly was just a show of force and that there was real progress behind the scenes, and that's something we'll only find out in the coming days,” Ross Harrison, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told Al Jazeera.

The Iranian people have paid the price for the war and “will not return to the pre-war status quo ante,” Harrison believes. But he still says: “There is very little chance of reaching an agreement if what we saw in public also happened in private.”