Hello and welcome to NewsHour for the BBC World Service.
We're coming to you live from London.
I'm James Menendez.
It 's hard to imagine a situation less conducive to substantive peace talks between the United States
and Iran due to get underway tomorrow in Islamabad.
For a start, the Pakistani hosts don't sound absolutely certain that they'll go ahead as planned.
And the ceasefire that was announced earlier in the week to allow the negotiations to take place is a sketchy one,
to say the least.
One of America's main conditions for the truce that Iran reopened the Strait of Hormuz to shipping hasn't happened.
On Hezbollah in Lebanon.
That was thought to be covered under the ceasefire.
Well, in the past few minutes, the US Vice President J.D. Vance,
who 's leading America's negotiations team, spoke to reporters before boarding his flight to Pakistan.
Look, we're looking forward to the negotiation.
I think it's going to be positive.
We'll foresee.
As the president of the United States said,
if the Iranians are willing to negotiate in good faith, we 're certainly willing to extend the open hand.
If they're going to try to play us, then they're going to find that the negotiating team is not that receptive.
So we're going to try to have a positive negotiation.