Trita Parsi

Trita Parsi is an Iranian-Swedish international relations writer and political analyst who is co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is also co-founder and former president of the National Iranian American Council.

He writes articles and appears on TV to comment on foreign policy and is the author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (2008); A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran (2012); and Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy (2015). In 2010 Treacherous Alliance won the Grawemeyer Award for "Ideas Improving World Order” and the book also won the 2008 Arthur Ross Book Award from the Council on Foreign Relations.

Early life and education Trita Parsi was born in Ahvaz, Iran, to a Zoroastrian family. His father, Dr. Touraj Parsi, Parsi's family moved to Sweden when he was four to escape political repression in Iran.

Parsi earned a master's degree in international relations at Uppsala University and a second master's degree in economics at the Stockholm School of Economics. He studied foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins University's Nitze School for Advanced International Studies in Washington DC, where he received his Ph.D. in international relations under Francis Fukuyama.

Career Early in his career, Parsi worked for the Swedish Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York, where he served in the Security Council, handling the affairs of Afghanistan, Iraq, Tajikistan, and Western Sahara, and on the General Assembly's Third Committee, addressing human rights in Iran, Afghanistan, Myanmar and Iraq. Parsi has served as an adjunct professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins University SAIS, an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute and as a Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC.

Parsi is co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft is an American foreign policy think tank. Co-founded in 2019 by Trita Parsi, Stephen Wertheim, Eli Clifton, Suzanne DiMaggio, and Andrew Bacevich, a former U.S. Army officer who fought in the Vietnam War and later became a professor of history at Boston University. Lora Lumpe is the CEO of Quincy.

The think tank is named after U.S. President John Quincy Adams who, as secretary of state, said in a speech on July 4, 1821, that the United States "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy." It has been described as "realist" and "promot[ing] an approach to the world based on diplomacy and restraint rather than threats, sanctions, and bombing."

The organization is located in Washington, D.C.

National Iranian American Council In 2002, Parsi founded the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), whose stated purpose is "dedicated to strengthening the voice of Iranian-Americans and promoting greater understanding between the American and Iranian people. We accomplish our mission through expert research and analysis, civic and policy education, and community building." At NIAC's founding, Parsi argued "Our community is educated, affluent, dynamic, and professionally successful. However, we have yet to harness our immense human potential into constructive engagement in American civil society."

Both Trita Parsi and the National Iranian American Council have been accused of having connections to the Iranian government and lobbying on its behalf. Other sources have said such allegations are inaccurate, and that Parsi is a victim of a smear campaign.

Some critics also see Parsi's advocacy for the protection of Iran's cultural artifacts in the USA as being aligned with the Iranian government, while Parsi counters that such advocacy is done in the interest of Iranian-Americans. In a 2012 article for Salon, Parsi accused Israel of using the threat of war to push the U.S. and EU into economic sanctions on Iran.

In 2026, The Wall Street Journal pointed to a video in which professor Foad Izadi suggests Trita Parsi may have been an Iranian lobbyist and said former president Hassan Rouhani had wanted an Iranian lobby in the US. Parsi responded that NIAC is an Iranian-American organization and has no connections to the Iranian government.

Lobbying controversy and lawsuit In 2007, Arizona-based Iranian-American blogger Hassan Daioleslam began publicly asserting that NIAC was lobbying on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Daioleslam wrote in an internal email, "I strongly believe that Trita Parsi is the weakest part of the Iranian web because he is related to Siamak Namazi and Bob Ney... I believe that destroying him will be the start of attacking the whole web. This is an integral part of any attack on Clinton or Obama."

In response, Parsi sued Daioleslam for defamation. In September 2012, a U.S. federal judge John D. Bates threw out the libel suit against Daioleslam on the grounds that "NIAC and Parsi had failed to show evidence of actual malice, either that Daioeslam acted with knowledge the allegations he made were false or with reckless disregard about their accuracy." Bates also wrote, "Nothing in this opinion should be construed as a finding that defendant's articles were true. Defendant did not move for summary judgment on that ground, and it has not been addressed here." Iran International criticized Parsi as being "known for advancing Tehran's talking points".

2026 Iran war Parsi vocally opposed the 2026 Iran war. In June 2026, The Free Press reported that the United States Department of State was considering deporting Parsi. According to Democracy Now, the State Department later denied that it was trying to deport Parsi.

Books Treacherous Alliance In 2007, Yale University Press published Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States. The book is an expansion of his 2006 Ph.D. dissertation written at Johns Hopkins University under the supervision of his Ph.D. adviser Francis Fukuyama. The book "takes a closer look at the complicated triangular relations [among] Israel, Iran, and the United States that continue to shape the future of the Middle East." The book argues that the struggle between Israel and Iran is not ideological but strategic.

In Foreign Affairs, L. Carl Brown called the book a "well-constructed history", and former U.S. ambassador Peter Galbraith praised the book as "a wonderfully informative account." The book was also praised by political scientist John Mearsheimer and former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was on his dissertation committee.

Treacherous Alliance received the 2010 Grawemeyer Award from the University of Louisville, given for "Ideas Improving World Order."

In a 2011 interview with the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard University, Parsi asserted that his thesis had "been vindicated" by recent events. "I believe it is increasingly clear that efforts to divide the region between moderates vs radicals, democracies vs non-democracies etc is of little utility and has no real explanatory value. Israel, for instance, who had sought to frame its rivalry with Iran as a struggle between the region's sole Western democracy against a fanatical Islamic tyranny, favored the status quo in Egypt and opposed the efforts to oust Mubarak." He added that "With the decline of the US, Israel's strategic paralysis and increased isolation in the region, the rise of Turkey, the 'revolutions' in Tunisia and Egypt, and Iran's continued difficulties in translating its strength to regional acceptance, the region is experiencing momentous changes both in its political structure and in its balance of power. An ideology-based approach towards understanding these shifts won't get you far."

A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran In the 2012 book, Parsi's thesis is that US-Iran relations are in a stalemate caused by institutionalized enmity: "The thirty-year-old US-Iran enmity is no longer a phenomenon; it is an institution." He argues that the way forth is through sustained diplomacy that he considers "the only policy that remains largely unexplored and that has a likelihood of achieving results amounting to more than kicking the can down the road."

Julian Borger wrote in The Guardian that A Single Roll of the Dice is "A carefully balanced and thoroughly researched account of the tortured US-Iranian relationship in recent years." L. Carl Brown from Foreign Affairs said the book is "the most incisive account available... eminently readable, sometimes gripping."

Reviewing the book in The Wall Street Journal, Sohrab Ahmari faults Parsi for failing to "re-examine U.S. policy and its underlying assumptions." Instead, he writes, "Quick to ascribe irrationality and bad faith to opponents of engagement, Mr. Parsi is charitable when it comes to examining the motivations of the Iranian side." In opposition to Parsi's position, Ahmari concludes, "Mr. Obama's engagement policy failed not because of Israeli connivance or because the administration did not try hard enough. The policy failed because the Iranian regime, when confronted by its own people or by outsiders, has only one way of responding: with a truncheon."

A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran was selected by Foreign Affairs as the Best Book of 2012 on the Middle East.

Media appearances Parsi has been a guest on The Colbert Report and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Parsi has frequently appeared on C-SPAN to discuss the Iran nuclear deal and Middle Eastern politics. Parsi also gave a widely viewed Ted Talk on the possibility of peace between Iran and Israel. In the talk, Parsi "shows how an unlikely strategic alliance in the past [between Iran and Israel] could mean peace in the future for these two feuding countries."

Parsi is a guest on news programs including CNN, PBS Newshour, NPR, BBC, and Al Jazeera.

Personal life Parsi is an Iranian-Swedish dual national and a permanent resident of the United States. He is fluent in Persian, English, and Swedish.

Parsi and Semlali have three children together.