Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 6/15/26 Trita Parsi on the Israeli Panic over Trump’s Peace Deal

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

Scott interviews Trita Parsi about the deal Trump has apparently made with the Iranians to end the war. They discuss the panic we’re seeing about it from the Israelis and what Trump must do to rein them in and prevent Tel Aviv from sabotaging the peace process. They also discuss Parsi’s recent appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show and The Free Press story that tried to start a deportation scare about him. Discussed on the show: Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States by Trita Parsi A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran by Trita Parsi Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy by Trita Parsi Parsi’s interview with Tucker Carlson Trita Parsi is the Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy. Parsi is the recipient of the 2010 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. Follow him on Twitter @tparsi   Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/43D82oY (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/4eMQblu Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/4a5fKvx Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tax Attorney Matt Sercely https://agoristtaxadvice.com; Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com; Expat Money https://expatmoney.com/; and Crowdhealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/ (use promocode Horton) Sign up for the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom at scotthortonacademy.com You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest. Reporting to the American people, what's going on in this country? Because the babies are making this. We're dealing with Hitler Revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show. Libertarian Foreign Policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not illegal. We're going to take out seven countries in five years.

They don't know what the fuck they're doing. Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host, Scott Porton All right, y'all, introducing Trita Parsi again. He is co-founder and executive director or something like that at the Quincy Institute

for Responsible Statecraft. Welcome back to the show, Trita, how you doing? Great to be with you. Thank you so much. Great to have you here. The big news is you just got back from doing the Tucker Carlson show. I was just starting to watch it over there on the YouTube's and looked like it was going good so far. So how was that? I was a great experience.

I haven't watched it, obviously, but as I recall it a couple hours ago, I thought it would came out pretty good. Great, great. It's just so crucial that his audience gets to hear from the likes of you. And I appreciate all you have done, Scott, over the years to get my name out in various places. And as I told you several times,

you're responsible for half of my book sales. Well, I hope that's true. And I actually get a lot of great feedback about that. book. You know, I tell people to read it and say, hey, you were right about that one, no mistake. And it's such a good treacherous alliance to everybody. And of course, I know you wrote books about the nuclear diplomacy and the Obama years that I bet there's all kinds of great stuff in there judging by treacherous alliance. I just never have had a chance to read the, was it, second roll of the dice or some single roll of the dice and losing an enemy.

Yeah, yeah. Anyway, and losing an enemy. That's right. Yeah, I still want to read those too. Not too late. So we're going to talk about the peace deal, so-called memorandum of understanding Halfway House peace deal that we may or may not have here, but looks like we have here, recording this on Monday, I think, the 15th of June, right? So, yeah.

So, but first, let's talk a little bit about your personal trials and travail here. made the news. I was really surprised to find out that some facts reported in the free press actually turned out not to be accurate. But apparently, they says that the State Department was investigating you looking for reasons to deport you from the U.S. of A. but then the State Department says that's simply not true to go ahead and ruin it for everyone.

But can you tell us what's about what's going on around that story? I know that they've been really for a little while. I mean, I got it confirmed from folks inside the government that there is no such investigation or effort to deport me. But as their statement said to media at this time, so they're keeping it open. What I suspect happened, I want to emphasize suspect, because I can't claim that I have smoking gun evidence, was that there were some elements inside state that wanted to do this. They had been pressured by Laura Lumer and all her tweets for the last couple of weeks.

And I think they thought that a hit piece at the free press would be helpful towards pushing the bureaucratic process forward. But it seems to have backfired, both because there was such a big organic public backlash from people like yourselves and many others to start objecting to this. But also because there were folks inside the administration that pushed back against it. And it was very unusual for the State Department to come out and even comment on something like this. Because, I mean, look, you know how many pieces are written all the time about things that they claim State Department is doing or not doing? If they were to go out there and deny or confirm everything, that's all they would do all day. So they just have a policy of not commenting. The fact that they commented, it tells you a lot of what was going on inside.

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Well, now, listen, I mean, I think it's pretty obvious why the likes of Laura Lumer would want to get rid of you, but for, you know, the people who've never heard of you before, if that's the first thing they hear about you, then there comes, you know, with talk like that, a presumption of guilt. Like, who is this guy? And what is it that he does? he's really representing Iranian government interests in this country, why he better register or knock it off or get the hell out,

especially we're at war against them right now and that kind of. So without information, if people don't know you, they might just fill in the gap and think there must be something really dangerous here going on. So what is your relationship with the government of Iran anyway, Trita? Well, my family fled Iran in 1978 before the revolution. My dad had been in prison during the time of the Shah, and he ended up being in prison afterwards as well in Khomeini's jail. My father has not been able to go back to Iran since then.

I was back twice, but I've not been able to go back since 2005, I think, because my book came out about, you know, Treacher's Alliance. I spend a lot of time in Israel. If you spend a lot of time in Israel and you are a Iranian citizen, I was born with an Iranian citizenship, I can't get rid of it, even if I wanted to, I'm not saying that I want to, but nevertheless, they consider me an Iranian citizen.

You go to Israel, that's an automatic five-year prison sentence. So I've not been able to go back to Iran since 2005 or so. I've interviewed a significant number of Iranian officials. That's part of my job. I was an academic. I wrote books about this topic. And as someone who is in the think tank world, that is exactly what you're supposed to do.

That's one of the differences between being an academic and the think tank. You're supposed to be able to talk. to the government officials who are making the decisions that you are analyzing and writing about. But in Washington, it's very uncommon for someone to actually have a relationship or an ability to talk to Yvani officials

because essentially it's just safer to write all of your books and articles and know nothing about that country and never have access to it. And that's just a safer career path in Washington because as I write in my second book, We have an institutionalized enmity between the US and Iran. That institutionalized enmity means that you advance your career

by coming up with new ideas of how to intensify that enmity and come up with new sanctions and all kinds of other ways of punishing the other side. And the Iranians do exactly the same. I was never part of that. I've more than 25 years in Washington only work for making sure that we can resolve these issues peacefully through dialogue, through diplomacy. I can't advocate for diplomacy if I don't conduct it myself. I can't advocate for dialogue if I don't engage in dialogue myself.

So the very same contacts I have with folks on the Iranian side, I have with the Israeli side. I mean, as you seem, reading my book, I extensively interviewed plenty of them, I've continued to have a lot of people on the Israeli side, less so in the last couple of years after the genocide, admittedly, but nevertheless, that I talked to because that's the only way you can actually get an understanding

of what's happening on all sides. how they're viewing their situation, how they're calculating the next moves, instead of just sitting from the far distance and then pretending to be an expert on these things. And which that sums up, your entire approach this whole time, I mean, I've known you for 20 years or right about something like that. And that's what you always say is stuff like that.

I never heard you representing the Iranians' point of view or their agenda in any way other than to say, well, best I can tell, the way they see it is this in the interest of just, as you're saying, preventing violent conflict because that's what's best for everyone, not because you're carrying wall for the Iranians. Give me a break. And everybody who knows you, of course,

there was such wide objection and outrage about this because everybody who knows you is like, no, wait a minute, you can't do that to this guy. There can be some caricature in your head maybe of some Iranian agent or whatever. That doesn't fit with him. So no. So, yeah, hopefully I don't think that'll go

anywhere. I mean, we should be frank, though. I mean, these guys are going to continue to try and, you know, my institution and I have to be careful about it because, you know, these folks, they've lost everything. They got their war. They got their war. They got their sanctions and the result is an absolute disaster. And instead of owning up for the disaster that they have inflicted on the United States

and on everyone else, they're just escalating their threats to silence others, to cancel others and in my case going as far as deportation. That's just how they played, unfortunately. Yeah, at law fair, it's, you know, everything. This is outside of law fear. Yeah. This is illegal fair. Yeah, yeah.

And they don't, yeah, they don't have honor or manners or anything. Now, so I guess I would be remiss though if I asked you, have you attempted to pursue American citizenship? Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's in the process. Just unfortunately taking way too. long. And it's, I have to admit it is very frustrating that it's done so. But yeah, no, it's been in the process. And how long have you lived in the United States? Because I know you lived in Sweden

first, right? After leaving in the United States. I've lived in the U.S. since 2001. I was first the student. So I had to apply for the green card. And once the green card comes in, you have to wait a couple of years before you can apply for the citizenship. So there is a pathway. But I got to tell you, the pathway is a lengthy one oftentimes. Yeah. Mike is probably more than others for a variety of reasons or no reason. It's just a bureaucracy the way it works. Yeah, right. You get pulled aside by TSA. It's like, well, it could be random or

maybe not. Me, after all, you know, I don't know. IRS, too. Shouldn't even say the words. I'm afraid I'm going to conjure the ghost. All right, you guys, let's take just a quick sec to talk about expat money.

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He is a libertarian, one of us. us and he's here in case you run a small to medium-sized business or you make a lot of money at your high-powered salary job and you're looking to protect your wealth from the IRS who wishes to take it no gimmicks here you have to obey the law but he knows the law and he will make sure that you do not pay one penny more than you have to talk to your new lawyer matt surcelly at agoristtaxadvice.com all right so let's talk about this deal what We got seven minutes. Tell me about this deal.

It's an MOU. It's not an all the way deal. They've essentially agreed on reopening the straight and the Gulf, but punted on the nuclear issue from Trump's interview with David Singer in the New York Times. It's pretty amazing how far he's willing to climb down here, apparently for now. Then J.D. Vance started bringing up things about funding groups in the region and all that, and I didn't hear that was in the original deal. And Netanyahu and, you know, Israeli politics is all in upheaval today.

I mean, there's full on panic and political civil war right now in which everyone is trying to turn this into huge loss for Netanyahu, which I think is accurate. And they're essentially trying to just eliminate him politically now. As you know, elections are going to come up and they're going to use this as aggressively as aggressively as they can against him. And, you know, I'll be frank. The biggest loser on this so far is going to be the Israelis.

They pushed the United States into another disastrous war in the region, and they ended up getting a deal between the United States and Iran, which is exactly what they've been doing everything they can to avoid and to undermine. So from the Israeli side, of course, they're going to point to the fact that Ivan's capabilities have been set back. All of that is true. But if it ends up in a scenario in which the trajectory of Iran's growth now changes dramatically because of a deal, because of sanctions, relief, et cetera.

And it doesn't matter if they were set back 10 years. They're going to recuperate that in just a couple of years. And if it also then leads to what, and this is, I think, very interesting that the administration is actually leading with the argument of saying that this is about to transform the U.S.-Iran relationship, which is very fascinating. The Obama administration stayed very carefully away from that type of language. Right. This is just a strict nuclear issue,

and they wanted to talk about scientific things, et cetera, and the nuclear details, et cetera, but wanted to stay away from the larger picture, and they treated the potential of an improved relationship between the U.S. and Iran as a potential bonus 10, 15 years down the road, but absolutely nothing that was a driving force or even an ambition of the United States. Trump administration has done it completely the opposite,

perhaps, because they don't want to talk about the details, and instead they want to talk about the larger picture. But I personally have to say, I think that is the right approach because it is quite useless to have one of these deals. If all it does is just deals with the straight-of-war moves and some nuclear elements, but everything else in the relationship remains the same,

still deeply hostile, still trying to sabotage each other everywhere. Because if that's the case, all it means that we're going to be at war or some sort of a conflict down the road again. And what's the good of that? So I think the desire or have, having the ambition of transforming this is the right thing. Now, whether they can succeed, whether they will put in all the resources into it,

that is necessary to materialize. That, of course, is a different matter on top of not knowing how far the Iranians are willing to go. But I do think that it's very fascinating that they're actually leading with that argument. Yeah, I saw a tweet from Trump where he says, Only I have the leadership skills to make peace with Iran. No other president has had the courage to make peace with Iran. them the way that I have. And like, yeah, that's right, right?

None of them would dare risk normalize relations. He's maybe because of that part. Okay. And so, you know, even saying the terms make peace, it was very clear that the Obama administration has completely stayed away from any such terminology. They didn't talk about this, their deal, the nuclear deal as a peace deal either.

And technically that was quite correct as well. But, and I don't think the Iranians at the time were at a place in which they would have reciprocated. And I don't know if they are right now. But I do find it really interesting because I think it also reveals. Ultimately, Trump is looking for legacy. He's looking for doing huge things.

And it could be war with Iran and getting rid of theocratic government once and for all after 47 years. Or it could be making friends with theocratic government. He doesn't seem to really care. He tried the first one, didn't work. Now he's trying the other one. Hey, sounds good to me.

It is like in the leverage book going to Tehran where they said, if you just solve the nuclear issue, that won't resolve it because all those other issues are going to end up ruining this one. And you'll end up, you know, they're totally right about that. So I appreciate that. You know, Nixon goes to China approach.

First of all, let's make friends. Then I'll have my people call your people and we'll work out all the finer details later. Oh, nuclear dust, they can have some dust. Just don't make it a higher percent. Whatever, you know? Work all that out later. But then the big question is,

can and will the President of the United States reign in Prime Minister of Israel and his regime and tell them, no, you have no veto here. You are leaving Lebanon and you are even going to stop bombing Gaza. You're not hitting the Houthis and you're not hitting Iran. You're staying home because I said so. And would anything less than that do the trick? I don't know about the Houthis in Gaza.

It doesn't appear that the Iranis have made that as a similar type of a red line as they have made Beirut, and I think they're extending it to Lebanon. But I think the U.S. side is fully recognizing that when the Iranians were insisting on Lebanon being included, it may have been annoying for the U.S. because they didn't want to make sure that it expanded to that. They didn't want to give the Israelis this veto.

But the reality is that if it wasn't included, the Israelis would be using Lebanon in order to sabotage this deal. So I think what started off as an Iranian demand has frankly now become a joint Iranian-U.S. demand because they see that the Israelis are looking for ways to sabotage the steel. I mean, bombing southern Beirut just hours before the signing, deliberately trying to sabotage it very much in your face. All masks are off at this point.

It's very clear what the Israelis are doing. The Trump administration must see it. And the conclusion they have to draw in my view is that it's not enough to have an angry phone call every once in a while after the Israelis do something. You have to prevent it. you have to make sure very clearly that this is not going to fly. And one way of doing so is to make sure that you already now make clear

the U.S. will not enter any war Israel starts against U.S. wishes. Because part of the reason why they wanted to go at Lebanon is to restart a war with Iran and drag the U.S. into it. If they know from the outset, the U.S. is not going to go into that war. They may not go down the path in the first place because it's the end objective, which is what they're looking for, drag the U.S. into the war. So if we can detach ourselves from the Israelis on this issue

and make sure that they understand they'm starting a war against our wishes guarantees that the U.S. will not enter the war. That, I think, may be the only way of really preventing them from sabotaging this. But either way, there has to be consistent pressure from the Trump administration to make sure that the Israelis do not succeed in this sabotage effort.

Yeah. And we still got you. Years to go of this Trump presidency, too. A lot of variables at play. So thanks for helping guided through it, man. Really appreciate your time, as always, Trita. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Talk to you soon.

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