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

And now he's owing another 180 towards war.

And at some point he will probably try to do a 180 towards diplomacy again.

So that type of a path dependency that at some point, you know, it's good to have some of it at least, he doesn't have it.

And I think he makes these impulsive decisions that doesn't seem to have been particularly well thought through, because if they were, we should have seen something happening right now.

We're not.

So I think this is also then having a second effect, which is now the Iranians are increasingly convinced that even if Trump genuinely wants diplomacy down the road, he's just not capable of seeing diplomacy succeed because he doesn't have the discipline or the patience for it.

I think this, I mean, there certainly is a part of the story that when it comes to nuclear expertise, yeah, Witkoff and Kushner clearly do not have that.

There is this rather comical scene in the Geneva negotiations in which at one point they actually had to go to the head of the IAEA to come into the room.

and explain some of these, you know, some fundamentals of nuclear physics to Kushner and Witkoff, who thought the Devonian proposal was some sort of a devious scheme, whereas in reality it was very straightforward if you understood just the fundamentals of nuclear physics and nuclear energy.

So you definitely have that issue, but I think there's a different, real, deeper problem here.

Yes, I'm sure they have their issues with Kushner in particular.

And I think this is kind of like the frontline story.

But the behind the scenes story that I think in some ways is more important is that they're looking for someone who can deliver Trump, someone who can negotiate on behalf of Trump.

And if he at the negotiating table says, yes, Trump will accept this, the Iranians can buy it.

Kushner and Witkoff said to the Iranians in Geneva back in February that they think that Trump is going to be very happy with this proposal.

They went back, and it turned out that he had already made up his mind he wanted to go to war.

It's part of the reason why the Omani foreign minister, who was mediating this deal, flew to Washington, hoping to see Trump.

Trump never saw him.

Instead, he had to have a meeting with the vice president.

But this was a last-ditch desperate effort to try to make sure that this deal would—the deal that they had negotiated back then would have been accepted.

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