An informed source told Al Jazeera that President Trump had a telephone conversation with Pakistani Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir last week; Trump discussed the Iran issue and asked him to use Pakistan's influence to resume negotiations

Back-channel outreach of this kind, routed through a third-party military interlocutor rather than formal diplomacy, fits a recurring pattern in US-Iran episodes where escalation and negotiation tracks run in parallel and the headline flow alternates between the two. Pakistan's army chief is a plausible conduit: Islamabad has historically maintained working channels with Tehran that Washington lacks, and the choice of a field marshal rather than a civilian official signals the security rather than diplomatic character of the message. The sourcing matters for how much weight the tape gives it: a single unnamed source to a regional outlet sits at the lower end of the credibility ladder, and past rounds of reported outreach have frequently been denied or walked back within the news cycle. The established market sequence in these episodes is a modest give-back of the crude risk premium and a softening in haven demand, with the move fading quickly absent confirmation or a named follow-on such as an agreed meeting or an official acknowledgement. The distinction worth drawing is between genuine negotiation feelers, which in prior episodes have eventually surfaced through Omani or Qatari channels as well, and tactical signalling designed to cap oil's geopolitical bid. The tells are corroboration from either capital, any statement from the Pakistani side, and whether crude's term structure and options skew retrace the recent risk premium.