I'm John Bachelor, Bill Rajo, Senior Fellow Foundation for Defense of Democracy,

my colleague and co-host,

and we're very pleased to welcome Edmund Fitton Brown, former ambassador from the United Kingdom to Yemen,

longtime UN official in the Middle East during the wars of the 20th and 21st century.

But now the Iran crisis. Headline in the Financial Times, Pakistan steps up as go-between in Trump's

Iran crisis. Subhead, London writing. Military strongman Assim Minir is the chief of the army in

Pakistan, uses his Tehran ties and a warm relationship with

U.S. President Trump to boost a mediation effort. This follows within hours of Mr. Trump on

social media declaring that there had been productive talks with Iran on ending the war.

Following that, Iran, in some fashion, what's left to the regime responded, no, there

haven't been any talks.

And Mr. Trump said, yes, there have been talks.

Edmund, I come to you because as a veteran diplomat, you're aware that there have not been is often the language of

formal declaration that there have been. How do you read these competing headlines? Should we

overinterpret them? Should we interpret them? Should we dismiss them? Help us, Edmund. Good day to you.

Good day, John. Great to be with you and hello Bill as well. Yeah, we are at a strange juncture of this conflict. The idea of Pakistan being a useful mediator is, frankly, fanciful. They can't manage their own relationship with Afghanistan. They can't manage their own

relationship with India. And they don't have a particularly good relationship with Iran either.

There are tensions over Balochistan. So I think that's a red herring, but probably does indicate

that people are, you know, looking for any sort of scrap of hope of a way forward.

I don't see much evidence of, you know, sort of direct links between Iran and the US in terms of talks.

I mean, clearly they're contradicting each other about what's happened or hasn't happened up to now.

I would say that, you know, Trump tends to

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