Trita Parsi

speaker

214 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 21 Jul

Trita Parsi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Majority Report with Sam Seder · 3692 - Iran War Spirals After Trump Tanks Diplomacy w/ Trita Parsi · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

We're talking about the years, perhaps, if it is achievable at all.

So it completely undermined the MOU, and it's part of the reason why increasingly the MOU ended up becoming an empty agreement, because the US kept on doing other things on the side that was in contradiction to it, including the attempt to kind of fortify a southern channel in the Persian Gulf, in the Straits.

So now you have a situation in which the Lebanese government is working together with Israel, treating Hezbollah as if it's some sort of a joint Lebanese-Israeli problem.

And even toying with the idea of bringing in the former head of al-Qaeda in Syria, who's now the president of Syria, to join them in fighting Hezbollah, which essentially is what I said earlier on in the program.

This is a design to push Lebanon towards a civil war.

And it's just absolutely disastrous.

I can understand why the Israelis are terribly happy about it.

And it would be devastating for them if the MOU actually had been implemented, because it would have pushed Israelis out of Lebanon.

Gaza really didn't end up fitting into these negotiations, which I assume is because the Iranians simply didn't have the leverage to make demands on Gaza as well, because it was hard enough for the U.S.

to push back against Israel in Lebanon, and that ended up not being particularly long-lasting because you have people in the administration who are completely opposed to the idea of putting any pressure on Israel.

But the idea of Trump being able to push the Israelis both on Lebanon and on Gaza was clearly beyond the reach of the Iranians.

If they had the leverage, I'm pretty confident they would have at least tried.

And there were statements coming out of the IRGC that says that Gaza is no different from Lebanon.

But at the end of the day, in the real negotiations, there was a huge difference between the two.

I think it's also important to understand that for the Iranians, Lebanon and resurrecting what they call their forward defense is their first line of defense against Israel.

It is what prevented Israel from attacking Iran in 2006 because Israel didn't manage to defeat Hezbollah in 2006.

Gaza has never played that role in the Iranian security outlook.

So as a result, despite the ideological arguments the Iranian government would put forward in which, you know, Gaza is perhaps even more important than Lebanon, from a secure standpoint, it never has been.

And ultimately, despite the Iranian rhetoric, ideology is not the driving force of their foreign policy.

Well, in the case of many of the other Arab governments, I think, to be fair, they're actually helping the Israelis.

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