Glenn Diesen interviews Trita Parsi on the Iran ceasefire negotiations and threats to deport him
Glenn Diesen speaks with Trita Parsi, Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, about the Iran war negotiations and threats of deportation against Parsi.
Summary
Glenn Diesen interviews Trita Parsi about the state of US-Iran ceasefire negotiations, recorded on June 13th, with the Pakistani Prime Minister claiming a peace deal would be signed within 24 hours. Parsi explains that a memorandum of understanding appears close but faces significant internal obstacles on the Iranian side, particularly around the new Supreme Leader consolidating authority and achieving consensus among hardliners. Parsi also addresses a campaign — which he attributes to pro-Israel elements inside and outside the Trump administration — to have him investigated and deported, a campaign he says backfired after the State Department publicly denied any investigation was underway. The conversation covers the broader deterioration of foreign policy discourse, the Trump administration's fundamental misreading of Iranian resolve, and what Iran hopes to achieve from the war beyond the immediate ceasefire.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the deportation campaign against Trita Parsi
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. We are joined today by Trita Parsi, the Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He's also an award-winning author, and the Washingtonian magazine named him one of the top influential voices on foreign policy in Washington DC for six years in a row. I would advise everyone to look at the Substack — the link is in the description.
I really wanted to ask you today about the developments in the Iran war, because today — Saturday the 13th of June — the Pakistani Prime Minister has argued that a peace deal will be signed within the next 24 hours. I'm not sure if he's basing it on something, but I'm guessing something is bound to happen this weekend. But first I must ask: is the Trump administration currently attempting to expel you personally for having criticized the US approach or engagement in this war?
Trita Parsi: Glenn, great to be with you again, and thank you for the opportunity to talk about this. I wouldn't go as far as saying it's the Trump administration. There are certain elements within it who I believe — and I don't have full evidence — have tried to do this. You have some of these pro-Israeli social media influencers who for weeks have been pushing for this. They even created an AI video of me getting deported, which was the first time I've seen AI recreate my image. I was actually kind of amused by that. But nevertheless, there's been this effort from the outside, from some of those elements. And I think there are certain elements inside the government that have also been sympathetic to this and may have tried to push it.
That hit piece that was published against me two or three nights ago in the Free Press — Bari Weiss's Free Press — seemed to claim that there was an investigation. But the State Department came out within hours and denied that there was an investigation, which is very unusual. My own theory, partly based on conversations I've had, is that there were some elements inside who thought that by generating additional external pressure, this would help move along a bureaucratic effort to actually get an investigation that would lead to a deportation. But the State Department has come out and said that is not taking place.
I don't know if that may change in the future. I don't think these people will give up for a second. But I think what we can say is that this is a long-term trend. For 25 years I've been fighting the neocons and warmongers in Washington. They've always tried to cancel me, silence me, discredit me, slander me, accuse me of being an Iranian agent and all of these different kinds of lies. This is the first moment I see them very publicly trying to escalate it towards a deportation operation. I don't think this round worked out that well for them because there was a massive amount of public support that was completely organic. At the Quincy Institute we were still trying to figure out exactly where the story was going, making phone calls, and it came out by itself. I was quite heartened by it, I have to admit. And I think this frankly backfired, because there were also elements inside the administration that pushed back against it. So it's a little bit more complicated than to say the Trump administration tried to do this. There are certain elements that clearly are trying to, but others were not in favor.
The collapse of foreign policy discourse
Glenn Diesen: It is interesting how the discourse around wars and conflicts has changed. I often miss the more objective approach of, say, the likes of Henry Kissinger — whenever he would write something, he would take himself out of the analysis and just explain what is happening. But these days, one only uses labels. Especially with the Iran war now, the assumption is that if you're pro-Israeli you will praise the war, and if you're a critic of the attack on Iran, well, then you're pro-Iranian. But it doesn't really make much sense. It doesn't matter who you think you're for or not, or what you think about Iran — if you like Iran or hate Iran, you need an honest analysis of the war. Because this war was a disaster for US strategic interests. Do you get the impression that the quality of the discourse has dropped significantly?
Trita Parsi: I would go one step further. It has qualitatively deteriorated remarkably, but it has done so outside of the US as well. And I think that is one of the big differences. I was here in 2003 and it was very clear — the Bush administration was essentially saying that if you're against the war, you're unpatriotic. So it was very much at that level, perhaps not as low as it has become now. But you didn't have that on the European side. You could still have a rational conversation in Europe about the causes of the war, about the context, about trying to understand Saddam Hussein's motivations and calculations. Understanding is not to sympathize. Explaining is not to defend. It's just to try to better understand so that you yourself can calculate your best options and calibrate your best way forward by having a realistic understanding of what the actual lay of the land is.
I've seen that on the European side — particularly after 2022 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine — just completely deteriorate. Not just on the issue of Ukraine and Russia, but on almost all of the other major conflicts. I see it on Gaza and I clearly have seen it on the Iran side as well, in which again news is not about explaining, it's not about facts, it's about essentially sloganeering for your team. Part of the reason why individuals like myself, you, and many of the people you have on your show end up becoming a problem is that if you want to have a war of choice, you have to get rid of all nuance, you have to get rid of all context, you just have to reduce everything to black and white, good versus evil, and have no one ask any questions. And people who do ask questions, who try to explain the context, who try to explain what the other sides may perceive their situation to be, become obstacles to these wars of choice. As a result, you have to go after them, chase them out, cancel them, discredit them, accuse them of being sympathetic to the Ayatollah, to Putin, or to Saddam simply for trying to explain how we think they're seeing the situation.
This was seen before in the US, and the US is so often at war, so it's not unusual that that type of war atmosphere brings the discourse down. But now I'm seeing it in Europe in a way that is frankly terrifying, even on conflicts they're not directly involved in.
Glenn Diesen: I often make the point that moralism can be deeply immoral. I'm always asked, do you condemn Hamas for what they did on that day? Or do you condemn Russia for invading? And all the arguments are always anchored in condemning someone. But what makes it moral if one is forced into a language where one side is all good and the other is pure evil? That makes it impossible to actually discuss the security concerns of your opponents, and it undermines the ability to find compromise and peace. The moralism can become deeply immoral because you no longer have the ability to advance your own security interests.
I've noticed this with the Ukraine war as well. When I criticized the toppling of Yanukovych in 2014, I was told that's a pro-Russian argument. The failure to implement the Minsk agreements — if you criticize that, it's also pro-Russian. If you are against sending weapons or in favor of diplomacy, well, that's pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian. And nobody actually explains how any of this benefited Ukraine or NATO. Imagine if we could go back to 2014 and not topple Yanukovych — the Ukrainians would have all their territory including Crimea, all their men would still be alive or not having fled the country, the infrastructure would be intact, they could be a formidable bridge between east and west. How was this good for us? Now NATO is disintegrating. But we don't take that point of departure — what is good for us — and then discuss the different approaches. It's always going back to this concept of being pro-this or anti-that, and it's a concept nobody likes, and then they fill it up with any content they want. It's very manipulative.
Trita Parsi: And ultimately terribly, terribly counterproductive. Just look at how Europe is faring right now. Look at how the United States is faring right now. I had conversations with the administration before the war. I argued ferociously that they are completely misreading Iran. They're thinking that Iran is much weaker than it is. And beyond that, they think that the Iranians fear war more than they fear surrender. As a result, Trump's approach was to just amass more military towards the region and think that eventually the Iranians would surrender, and as a result he would never actually have to actualize his bluff of attacking. I was trying to make it clear to them that they don't understand — the Iranians will never surrender. They fear surrender far more than they fear war. They think they can survive war, perhaps even come out looking good from a war, but they can never survive a surrender. As a result, the entire fundamentals of your approach are erroneous.
I think that was proven right. The Iranians did not flinch. They in fact seem to have thought that some level of war was necessary to correct Trump's false perception of Iran's weakness, and then go to the negotiating table from a position in which Trump had understood that they're not as weak as he thought — in fact, they're quite strong — and as a result he's going to have to agree to a compromise rather than Iran just essentially accepting America's terms for surrender. Which is exactly where we are right now. If there is an MOU, whether it is more beneficial to Iran or the US, there's going to be a long debate about it. But we're no longer talking about in any way, shape, or form the terms of surrender that Trump had in mind on February 28th. All of them are out the window. And it is because of this miscalculation, this misperception.
The debate has never really been allowed for the last decades to be nuanced on Iran. Iran is similar to the case of Israel-Palestine — it's been going on for so long and has been a deeply felt issue in the United States, going back to the hostage crisis. It's always been extremely difficult to have a nuanced conversation about Iran in the United States, much more so than it ever has been in Europe. But ultimately it has been clearly to the detriment of the US itself, because when you have incomplete information or wishful thinking, you will make wrong policy decisions, and those wrong policy decisions will end up costing you far more than the other side.
Glenn Diesen: That's also in Machiavelli's work — men see the world as they wish it was, and then they're destroyed. But I think this is a key problem in Europe as well. Everything here is very normative. If you're saying the Russians are winning, oh well then you're supporting the Russians, because if you're saying they're winning then you reduce public support for financing the war. So everything is normative — nothing is a reflection of reality.
Trita Parsi: Can I add one thing to that? If you actually had a war that was seen deeply as justified by the population, you would not need to do any of these things. It is precisely when it is either a war of choice, or in the case of Ukraine an option not to actually have a real negotiation — because from the outset we've seen this rejection of negotiation, an effort to think that the war can set back the Russians 10, 15, 20 years and that will give Europe another generation of peace, as one European official argued to me very ferociously, saying this is an opportunity to set back the Russians and as a result diplomacy is not needed. When you have situations like this, that's when you really need to clamp down on the debate. If there was a strong level of support — for instance, if the United States had been invaded by another country — I don't think there would be any need for a clampdown of the debate, because it would have been a genuine desire to expel the invaders and support for what would be a defensive war. These types of things only come in when you're going in the direction of some variation of a war of choice. And this is also why there's such low self-confidence in the government in being able to have just a reasonable conversation about this.
Misreading Iran before the war
Glenn Diesen: Before the attack on Iran in February, I was making the point that Iran is quite powerful — but this was considered to be a pro-Iranian argument. I said they have significant support among their own population for the government — also considered a statement of support. I also made the point that this is an existential threat for Iran, which was dismissed because they said, oh, we just want to help protesters. But if you could accept what I consider to be realities, you could predict how the Iranians would behave. If it's an existential threat, they will absorb a lot of pain and they will be able to fight. And they are quite powerful. Once you kill a leader, it's not as if people will rush to the streets and topple the government. All of this was very flawed. And also, if they would have recognized this was an existential threat to Iran, it would have been predictable that they would have gone up the escalation ladder — that is, to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, strike all the US bases in the region. All of this could have been predicted if reality wouldn't be considered treasonous.
Trita Parsi: I was in several different meetings with folks in government or outside of government prior to this, in which there were discussions about what the Iranians would do, options that existed, and pathways that could have been pursued. I do have to say that there were elements in the intelligence community that were trying to get the right intelligence to the president, and he was dismissive of it and was choosing to listen to the Israelis. But I can tell you that at least from what I saw, there were plenty of people in the US government who were completely dismissive of the idea that the Iranians would straightforwardly close the Strait of Hormuz or that they would be attacking the other GCC countries. I had to really emphasize: you have to take all of these options into account. Yes, it is true they have not exercised them before, and in the past they were very restrained in their attacks and their responses because they wanted to de-escalate. But this time around they will see it as escalatory. So you have to take into account the striking possibility that they will do this. And it was dismissed or viewed with significant skepticism.
We should not belittle how much the drinking of Kool-Aid and groupthink can set in very quickly when you're not allowing not just one or two voices, but a critical mass of critical voices to always be present in conversations.
Glenn Diesen: I remember on this podcast, weeks and months before the attack, I often had Professor Marandi from Iran as a guest, who has a good finger on the pulse in terms of what the government is thinking. He was just stating as common sense: well, of course, in the past we didn't want to escalate because that might draw the Americans in. But if the Americans are going to join, if they're going to attack, and the purpose will be regime change, and there is no government in the rear to take over — that means we're going to be a new Syria, a new Libya, destruction of a key central power which the US would see as an obstruction — so of course on the first day we're going to have to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, go after all the bases. He was essentially outlining the whole logic, which makes a lot of sense. But still I heard Trump give a speech saying no one could have predicted this, like why would they take out the bases? It's quite remarkable.
But it's similar to the Iraq war. Who knew that there were Sunnis and Shia in Iraq? Who knew that there would be an insurgency? It's absolutely stunning to see the level of miscalculation that can happen in extremely sophisticated governments and bureaucracies. Not necessarily currently in the United States, but at least under the Bush administration a lot of the policy processes were still very functional. It's just amazing how quickly they can be reduced to something far less sophisticated if you do not allow for a plethora of evidence and opinions to be included in the process.
Moralism as a tool for selling wars
Trita Parsi: Yeah, exactly.
Glenn Diesen: When everyone goes into war, there's always also the discussion about the morality of it. That's usually how they shame people away — it's always the people who are cheering for war who have the moral argument. There's always: what about the girls in Iran, we want to liberate them? Or what about the girls going to school in Afghanistan? It's always these moral arguments. And first of all, I think they're very deceptive. But even if all of this were genuine, one also has to look at strategy. How do you think you're going to achieve what you set out to achieve? Because if you look at our track record over the past 30 years, it hasn't been great. Twenty years in Afghanistan to replace the Taliban with the Taliban. All this money and lives wasted in Iraq only to essentially make it into something closer to an Iranian ally. The attack on Libya which essentially brought back slavery. The attack on Syria which has now made us allied with ISIS through al-Jolani. This is not a great track record. I wish there would be more substantial arguments and discussions in terms of strategy — what exactly do we want to achieve and how can this be achieved?
Trita Parsi: Your comment about the immoral aspect of moralism is really well taken. It's part of the reason I've always been more attracted to realism, because it takes that dimension out of it. It assumes that all actors at the end of the day are pursuing some definition of their own self-interest. And by trying to understand how they define their self-interest, you have a better way of predicting what their next steps will be. And if you can do that, you will have a better way of dealing with them — deceiving them if you need to. But you need to understand how they see the world in order to be able to do so. Moralism only makes that all the more difficult, because you are confusing yourself about how they actually see the world. You think there's some sort of single moral truth that guides these things, rather than the actions of decision makers based on flawed but nevertheless real calculations of what their self-interest is. And if you can understand that, you can predict them. Moralism gives you almost no predictive value at all.
Glenn Diesen: That's also in great power politics — states usually want to sell war as peace. This is not a new phenomenon. This is core political propaganda. When it came to the Afghanistan war, we learned from Wikileaks documents from the CIA which showed that the Europeans were losing a little bit of support for the occupation of Afghanistan. So they essentially concluded that the Europeans cared a lot about women's rights, and the solution was to frame the war as: we're occupying Afghanistan for 20 years to help little girls go to school. It's quite absurd that we think this is why great powers go to war. It's a little bit childish. It's absurd that the US suddenly became Amnesty International with nuclear weapons. But after this point you had articles coming out — I think it was in the Guardian — with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and Angelina Jolie co-authoring an article together, a little bit of NATO, a bit of Hollywood, about why NATO is now the leading provider of women's rights.
Trita Parsi: It's just extraordinary, and people eat it up. And then if you oppose it, well, I guess you don't care about little girls. This is where the moralism comes in, and at the end we fool ourselves because we can't discuss the motivation for war, we can't discuss the strategic aspects of it.
The Iranian-American community and 25 years of fighting the neocons
Trita Parsi: If I could go on a small tangent here — it is relative to the attacks I've been enduring from the neocons. When we started the National Iranian American Council, about 25 years ago, at first it was not even supposed to be involved in politics. We were just trying to get the Iranian-American community to become a little bit more sophisticated in understanding and participating in American democracy. This was done because the first community that was targeted after 9/11 was the Iranian-American community. The Enhanced Border Security Act was passed immediately after 9/11 and it restricted visas to Iranians. It did nothing about Saudis and Egyptians and others who actually were part of the 9/11 attacks. It was a very clear manifestation that if you don't have any political representation, you end up getting the shorter end of the stick all the time, even if this had nothing to do with Iranians or the Iranian government.
Over time, because the conversation in Washington was increasingly going in the direction of should we attack Iran or not, we had pressure from our own membership to start taking positions on these matters, and we eventually did. We realized that we were a very small organization, relatively small community, but we thought there's one thing we may be able to achieve: to make sure that unlike in the Iraq war, in which the neocons paraded their favorite Iraqi Americans on TV left and right, begging for the United States to bomb their ancestral home, at a minimum we could make sure that if there is a war, at least the American public will know it was not because of the Iranian-American community. That our voice would be clear on this issue. We may not be able to prevent the war, but we will be able to prevent exactly the argument that this is some sort of a moral favor to the people inside of Iran. And by having Iranian Americans oppose the war, we would take that argument away from the neocons.
That's part of the reason why the neocons came after us and many different things that we did that were countering their agenda. And I have to say, for 20 or so years, we were very successful. It was very clear that the Iranian-American community, the majority of it, favored diplomacy. An overwhelming majority favored the JCPOA, strongly opposed the Iranian government and its repression, but nevertheless wanted to pursue a peaceful path between the US and Iran — lifting sanctions, etc.
But it's not until just in the last year that the neocons managed to pull off something that I have to say I was frankly surprised by. Over the course of time they had worked very hard and cultivated alliances with these monarchist Iranians to really get them to become extremely pro-Israel and then ultimately pro-war, and in some ways, at least in the early phases of this, become the face of that war — with some of them dancing and singing in the streets celebrating the start of the war. That was a key thing that we had frankly managed to prevent for 20 years.
Plenty of studies need to be made on better understanding exactly how that was flipped. I have some theories. I've written some pieces about it. But there's still much more that needs to be done to fully understand it, because it is a remarkable shift in the psychology of not a majority — they were never a majority — but nevertheless a very significant minority that went to that side. A lot of it has to do with the fact that the repression in Iran became worse and worse. But a lot of it also has to do with the fact that these elements were trying to eliminate all other voices and all other pathways. Reform was wrong. Lifting sanctions was wrong. Dialogue was wrong. Essentially saying all of those things have failed, and the only thing that is left is war and foreign military intervention. Which meant they had to do exactly the type of cancel culture we just talked about earlier — discredit everyone who favored diplomacy, everyone who favored lifting of sanctions, opposed war — in order to create an atmosphere and a landscape in which they were seen as the only remaining option. That's how they sell the war. Everything else has failed, so war is the only option.
Now, of course, the war has gone disastrously. I don't see them singing and dancing in the streets in the same way any longer. But it was ultimately, I have to say, a failure for the Iranian-American community as a whole, that a minority of them could have been recruited and pushed in this direction, ending up becoming, in my view, a very repulsive base of this war by singing and dancing in the streets as their own countrymen and women were being bombed.
Glenn Diesen: To some extent you see this in the Ukraine war as well. Every poll — from Gallup and others — shows that the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians want immediate negotiations. They don't want four more years of boycotting diplomacy. Yet you will never see a single one of that majority of Ukrainians on TV. Never. You will only have the ones who will chant that weapons are the path to peace and that diplomacy is appeasement. You will never find them on TV because there's a goal of selling a war, and to sell the war they have to push the message that well, we stand with the Ukrainians — irrespective of any statistics. It's quite remarkable. It's a key component of the propaganda.
The state of ceasefire negotiations
Glenn Diesen: I did want to shift towards what's happening now in Iran. As I started off saying, the Pakistani Prime Minister was making the point that a deal will be signed within the next 24 hours. How are you reading the situation? When I first heard Trump say a peace deal is coming, I thought, well, I've heard this about 100 times before. But this is different, or is it? The memorandum of understanding is only a step towards a peace deal. Can you unpack what is going on?
Trita Parsi: I think it's not the hundredth time — I think this is the 39th time. Getting there, exactly. I do think conversations I've had with folks on both sides made it very clear there is something on the table. It is back in the Iranian court. The delays of the last couple of weeks are a challenge on their side to get the full buy-in of their system. This is very important to understand — it really makes Iran very different from any of the other countries in the region. Power is dispersed throughout the Iranian system. And you have now a new Supreme Leader who is not yet fully grown into his role. His authority has not been fully established. He's also suffering from several different physical problems given the attack he was enduring. So he may not have had the full ability to even try to assert his authority. His father ended up taking several years to grow into that position. But also, this is one of the most important decisions Iran has made in the last couple of decades. Having to do that in your first couple of weeks is clearly not going to be easy.
I think that's part of the reason why it appears — and I want to be careful because you hear a lot of different things, and even if I believe I have pretty decent sources in Iran, one has to be very careful knowing that we still don't know exactly what's happening — but what I'm hearing is that part of the issue is that he wants to make sure that there is as close to a full consensus within their system as possible. That is extremely difficult to achieve because you do have certain very hardline elements that will never agree to any type of deal with the United States. I think right now there is an effort to try to at a minimum minimize those. Whether that can be done within 24 hours remains to be seen, but the signals I've gotten make it very clear that at least the majority have already essentially agreed to this, and their answer is forthcoming.
The fact that the Iranian Foreign Minister, JD Vance, and the Pakistani Premier all issued similar tweets within a very short time span in which they were criticizing media speculation about what's in the deal — I think that's also noteworthy. They recognize that there is an effort in some media to put forward exaggerated contents of this deal in order to make the final deal look very bad, to make it look as if expectations were not met. And from all three sides they started to push back against this. Then you had the very unusual — I think unprecedented — event of Donald Trump retweeting the Iranian Foreign Minister. So I do think that we are closer than ever before. I think that's even the language the Iranian Foreign Minister used. But we have also been closer than ever before and still not seen anything happen. So it could still go wrong.
And even if it goes right, I think we have to be very clear: this is a memorandum. It is a pit stop towards a final deal. A final deal is actually harder to get than the pit stop. And the pit stop has proven to be extremely difficult to get, taking much longer than it should. So we're still not in any way, shape, or form at a position where we can say that the war will really end or that there will really be a peace. And then of course you have the Israelis, who have a remarkable capability of sabotaging this whole thing. They don't even have to do anything against Iran or against the US. They just need to restart the war in Lebanon, and that can be sufficient to actually cause the collapse of the entire deal or the diplomatic process.
Glenn Diesen: Yes, critics would say a compromise is incredibly difficult given how far apart the two sides are, but also of course due to the existence of saboteurs on all sides. In the US they have the Lindsey Grahams, and in Israel — I don't know enough, but I assume the majority would like to see this deal cancelled and they have the tools to do so. But as you said, Iran also has its hawks who would now probably be riding high from the successes and would like to go for a full win. So I can see why there would be reason to constrain one's enthusiasm or optimism. But nonetheless, what do we know about what's inside this deal? I heard warnings about misinformation around what is in the deal, and even arguments that journalists should not speculate too much. But I heard some stories that the first step might be to release some of the seized Iranian funds. I thought this could make a lot of sense because the Iranians do not trust the Americans — if the US has to release some of the funds, they've already bought into this process, which makes it less likely they'd walk away. But do we know anything about what's in this deal?
Trita Parsi: We know that has been the Iranian position — that they want to make sure they have that buy-in from the United States. On their view, they're giving up opening the Strait of Hormuz, which is a major leverage, probably the main leverage they currently have. It is more of a leverage than the stockpile of 60% enriched uranium. And the US only gives up the blockade, which in many ways has also been counterproductive to the US. So the Iranians believe that exchange is imbalanced in favor of the United States, and that as a result there should also be some release of their frozen funds at the outset of this memorandum in order to really show balance, but also to really show the US's commitment to this.
They're asking for $12 billion upfront and then $12 billion at the end of the MOU. Six out of the $12 billion, incidentally, was already supposed to have been released by the Biden administration, which made a deal with the Iranians in August 2022 as part of a prisoner exchange. But that release of the funds never actually ended up happening because the Mahsa Amini protests started in Iran and the Biden administration decided to renege on that deal, having already secured the release of several Americans from Iranian prisons. So the Iranians believe those first six billion have already been promised — they're not going to renegotiate over that.
Now, the US side doesn't want to do that because they don't want to be compared to the Obama administration. They don't want to sound as if they've given up something at the very beginning of the process. Given the fact that Republicans heavily criticized Obama for having released some funds — though those were actually not these funds, that was a lawsuit that was settled between the United States and Iran — because they don't want to see any comparison to that, they've rejected this. So others have come forward with ideas that would essentially mean those funds will not be released, but some other country will give equivalent funds to Iran at the outset of the process, and then later on they can do the accounting afterwards. But at a minimum that allows the Iranians to say we got the funds, and it allows the United States to say we never released any funds — this was not those funds.
At first the Iranians were very negative to this precisely because of what you said — they wanted to see the commitment from the United States, and if it is not the US releasing the funds, it is not sufficient of a commitment. It appears to me, however, just listening to what some of the Iranians have been saying for the last 48 hours, that the Iranians have essentially accepted that there will not be a formal release of the money, but it will be some sort of other accounting arrangement that will ensure that they get the money, but it won't be the US itself that is actually unfreezing it — because at the end of the day, money is money. It's better to do it this way. It seems like this is the position they've moved to, and that's part of the reason why this issue is about to get resolved, because that was one of the main sticking points.
You have other issues on the Strait of Hormuz and I'm not entirely clear how they're exactly going to resolve that. But there you have the same issue in which the language may be made sufficiently vague so that both sides can interpret it in their own ways and sell it to their own publics. Because the vagueness allows for several different interpretations. That is not unusual in agreements like this. But it is highly problematic if there are too many of these vaguenesses in the MOU — it will turn into a Swiss cheese of an MOU, just as much as the ceasefire ended up becoming very much a Swiss cheese.
Glenn Diesen: I think that ambiguity is good though, because otherwise there can't be any deal. Trump has also really committed himself rhetorically to a strongman position — every time he talks it's we're not going to give a dollar to the Iranians, they're going to give up everything, peace through strength. So if he has to make any compromises, especially one comparable to anything Obama has done, it's going to make it close to impossible.
I just had a question about the Strait of Hormuz. I heard from the Iranian side that well, we never closed the strait, we're just managing the traffic — so they took some tolls. And they also said the Strait of Hormuz is not in international waters, it's in Iranian and Omani waters, so this is our water and we will keep it open but not in the same framework as before. So when the Iranians say they will accept opening up the Strait of Hormuz, what would that actually entail?
Trita Parsi: This is about the ambiguity of the word "open" — the Iranians can say it's open because they haven't closed it, they're just charging fees or tolls. I think they moved away from the language of tolls because it's very difficult to justify a toll in international law. Of course, there's a dispute as to whether this is international water or whether it is Iran and Oman's waters. The Iranians have never signed on to the treaty that manages these types of issues. Neither have the US, incidentally.
Glenn Diesen: Exactly.
Trita Parsi: So it's very interesting to see the US refer to that, mindful of the fact that the US itself has not ratified it. The US does so as well when it comes to the South China Sea — the Chinese have signed on to it, the Americans have not. But nevertheless, Trump can say it's open, the Iranians can say it's open, and that in and of itself does not clarify if there's an administrative fee being charged, or anything about who is controlling it. So sometimes that ambiguity is absolutely needed in order to make sure that both sides can say it's open, and Trump can go out and say I've opened the Strait of Hormuz without going into the details of who's controlling it and whether there are fees.
I don't find it likely at all that the Iranians will give up the Strait of Hormuz altogether. I think they have been very clear that they will try to make sure that whatever comes afterwards is different from the preexisting status of the strait. But that does not necessarily mean there's only one type of alternative scenario. There could be one in which the administrative fee or environmental fee would be managed and charged by all of the GCC countries or a larger number of them rather than just Iran. There are different ways of doing this. I don't know if that is what has been resolved in the MOU or if that is going to be left for the agreement afterwards, and at this moment they just settle on the fact that it's open in terms of making sure that traffic can flow.
Glenn Diesen: I know the Iranians seemingly wanted a more collective approach to this, which is why they were working on something with Oman to do together. But Trump essentially countered this by threatening to blow up Oman if they would do this — not the most diplomatic language. So it is interesting to see how this will develop.
Iran's attack on Israel and extended deterrence over Lebanon
Glenn Diesen: There were different things I wanted to ask you about, which is the change in the region. I noticed something that you had commented on as well, which is the extraordinary development that Iran attacked Israel without Israel first striking Iran — this was essentially in response to Israel bombing Lebanon. What does this mean for regional security? Is Lebanon now under an extended deterrence of Iran? How does this change the entire region?
Trita Parsi: This is what I think the Iranians are trying to establish — an extended deterrence. This is what the Israelis call a new equation. And it is not clear whether it's been successful or not. It's very clear that it's been attempted, which is again a very unusual situation in which Iran would attack Israel in a severe way. I'm not trying to belittle the Houthis' attacks against Israel, but those attacks are not really comparable — they're shooting one or two missiles. The Iranians can shoot two to three hundred missiles at Israel combined with drones and other things and really inflict significant damage. This is the first time in a very long time that you have a regional power that is willing to back up its warnings to Israel against a third country with hard power. We've not seen that for a very long time. And that's part of the reason why the Israelis have been able to continue to expand settlements, annex territory, and have this completely unrestrained maneuverability in the region. This would be a constraint on their maneuverability. This is something the Israelis find completely unacceptable. As a result, we've seen that they're going to do everything they can to prevent this new equation from being established.
It's important to understand that one exchange of fire does not establish that equation. It is a potential step in that direction. It's not clear whether it's been established or not. What has happened is that the Israelis struck Beirut despite US warnings and Iranian warnings. The Iranians struck Israel relatively hard. The Israelis struck Iran. The Iranians struck Israel again. The Israelis did not respond, probably because of pressure from the United States, but instead they struck southern Lebanon, not Beirut. And since we've not seen strikes by the Israelis against Beirut — particularly not against the Dahiyeh neighborhood in southern Beirut — even this is not sufficient to be able to say that a new equation has been established.
And even if a new equation is established, it does not mean that the Israelis will never do it. It means only that if they think of doing it, they have to now take into account that there is a certain cost associated with it — a cost that did not exist before. And that may cause them to think twice. It may cause them to not do it nine times out of ten. And sometimes they still do it. But again, we don't know yet if that has been established or not.
If there is an MOU, however, I find it completely unlikely that the Iranians would sign it unless a region-wide ceasefire is part of that. That is partly because if the Israelis are allowed to just restart the war, what's the point of the MOU? Because if they can restart the war in Lebanon, that has a spillover capacity to spill over into Iran — we've already seen that happen twice. But also, I think it's starting to become clear that the Iranians are now going back to having some form of forward defense, meaning that Lebanon is part of their first line of defense against Israel. It's a deterrent, but it's also a retaliatory capability. It did function as that since 2006, because the Israelis did not manage to defeat Hezbollah and they never managed to expand the war into Iran, which was the plan at the time. That forward defense has taken a huge hit because of the fall of the Assad regime and the setbacks that Hezbollah has suffered. But now you have statements from Iranian leaders saying very clearly they're not going to go back to having their deterrence be on their own soil — their deterrence is going to be outside of Iran. And that is, I think, a very clear reference that they're going to rebuild their forward defense, and the first and most important element of that is Lebanon. So I find it extremely unlikely that they will agree to anything that allows the Israelis to continue to occupy Lebanese territory in the medium term, or to go back into attacking Lebanon in the short term.
Iran's wider strategic objectives
Glenn Diesen: My last question is: what do you think the wider objectives of Iran are in this war? I know they didn't start it, but they also don't want the war ending on terms that simply go back to the old status quo. I guess this is relevant in terms of what we can expect from Iranian demands in this memorandum of understanding. What do you think is the wider goal of the Iranians? One can dream up big objectives — the US packs up all its military bases and goes home, all sanctions are lifted — you can see the direction. But what you want and what you can achieve are different things. What do you think are the priorities for Iran in this war?
Trita Parsi: I think actually it's a lot of those different things. I think they do see it as quite likely that an outcome of this war — perhaps not in the immediate term — is that the US's military presence in the region is going to dramatically shrink. One outcome of this war is that a lot of these different GCC countries are not going to rely on American bases for their security. They're going to rely on American weaponry and all kinds of other agreements, but not just with the US — with plenty of other states. So security from the GCC perspective is going to start to be diversified rather than just being in the American basket.
All of these different things I think the Iranians will see as positive. I think you're also going to see — and I think they are going to be aiming for — a new type of relationship, not necessarily between the GCC and Iran as a bloc, because I'm not really sure that the GCC is a functional entity in any meaningful sense of the word at this point, but rather new relationships between Iran and key states on the southern part of the Persian Gulf. Some of them are going to have a much more intertwined approach with Iran. Not to say that they're not wary of Iran, not to say that they don't see Iran as a threat and a challenge, but they're going to recognize what the Europeans used to recognize and have given up on — which is that economic interdependence is a critical element of your security. And that in the past, the balance between containment of Iran and integration with Iran was too far in the direction of containment, and it led to this disastrous war that revealed the utter vulnerability of these GCC states. They're going to shift away from that.
So I think the Iranians are going to see this as a pathway towards their political, economic, and security rehabilitation in the region, within a United States that is no longer going to be in a position to constantly push for Iran's containment — and may not even want to do so because of its own deal with Iran. And this is going to be a massive opening for Iran. That doesn't mean that everything will be fine or frictionless, or that there won't be other types of problems that can emerge — and certainly will emerge. But it will more or less, I think from their standpoint, be an end of a 47-year era in which the US's organizing principle for the Middle East was the containment and isolation of Iran. And this is the nightmare of the Israelis, by the way.
Glenn Diesen: In security competition, one always has to manage the security dilemma by balancing deterrence with reassurance — making sure one doesn't provoke while still deterring. I think during the Cold War, because of the concentration of power, this balance was disrupted. We went all the way to deterrence and containment with no need for reassurance. And I think now there's a readjustment required — not just with Iran, but the wider world is going to have to make some changes and adjustments to the new distribution of power. Anyway, thank you very much for your time. I appreciate the insights, and I hope you don't get deported. But if you do, we will be very happy to have you back in Scandinavia.
Trita Parsi: I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Talk to you soon.