Trita Parsi is one of the people Washington consults when it wants to know what Tehran is actually thinking. He co-founded the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in 2019, and serves there as executive vice president. Before that, he founded the National Iranian American Council. He is the author of four books on US foreign policy in the Middle East, and the 2010 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. The Washingtonian has named him one of the 25 most influential foreign-policy voices in Washington every year since 2021. He visited Iran in May of last year, before the June war. He has spoken with Iranian officials since the ceasefire. What he tells Glenn Diesen, on a podcast recorded eight days before this writing, is that the war Trump fought in June was not a war the United States paused — it was a war the United States lost in the strategic sense and has not yet decided how to acknowledge.
↑ N° 02 · Continues themes from N° 02. Escobar’s framing of a war that ended without ending returns here from a different angle — Parsi reads the same ceasefire as the moment the US lost the war, not the moment it stopped fighting one.The cascade of failures
The Beijing summit was supposed to deliver something on Iran. It did not. What it revealed instead is a chain of escalations in which each step became evidence that the previous one had failed.
The summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in Beijing on May 14 and 15 produced, on the Iran file, almost nothing. The White House emphasised, in its post-meeting messaging, that the Chinese had stated they would like to see the strait of Hormuz open. Parsi’s reading is that this is a vanilla statement of almost no operational meaning. Every country in the world would like to see the strait open. The question is what each is willing to do about it — and what “open” means.
The Chinese definition of open is not that the Iranians do not control the strait. It is that Chinese tankers get through. China and Iran have a bilateral arrangement under which Chinese ships pass. From Beijing’s standpoint, the strait is functionally open. From Washington’s standpoint, “open” means something else: a strait in which Iran does not set the rules, does not collect fees, does not condition passage on anything. Those are two different demands, and the Chinese statement satisfies only the first.
If the Beijing meeting yielded nothing more than a vanilla Chinese statement, that is itself an indication of how little the US side managed to extract. What followed, in the 48 hours after Beijing, was a sharp uptake of hostile rhetoric from Washington — the kind that, in Parsi’s reading, signals that yet another escalation is being contemplated. He lays out the chain in plain terms.
If we assume that war is in the cards, the very fact that we have escalatory rhetoric again is an indication that the blockade of the blockade was a failure. And the blockade of the blockade was an indication that the war was a failure. And the war was an indication that the threats of war back in were a failure. So what you have is a series of escalatory moves that have all proven to be failures and that are only leading the Trump administration toward the next escalatory move.
This is a precise framing. Each escalation in the chain was triggered not by the success of the prior one but by its failure. The threats failed to extract Iranian concessions, so they produced the war. The war failed to produce the strategic outcome Washington wanted, so it produced the blockade of the blockade. The blockade of the blockade failed to produce a return to negotiations on US terms, so it is now producing the rhetoric of round two. A cascade, not a strategy.
China’s calculation, in Parsi’s reading, is shaped by this. Trump went to Beijing hoping to arrive having taken control of two oil files — Venezuela’s, via the Chevron license question, and Iran’s, via the blockade. Neither held. He arrived in Beijing with a regional mess and no plan for how to leave it. There is no incentive for the Chinese to step in as the instrument of a strategy they regard as failing. If Washington had brought a serious compromise that Beijing believed Iran should accept, China could have nudged. Washington brought maximalist demands. China declined to bail them out.
What a second round would look like
Parsi has spoken with Iranian officials since the ceasefire. The Iranians, he says, are more or less counting on a second attack — and the second round would not look like the first.
The first round of the war was characterised, on the Iranian side, by a deliberate limit. Iran retaliated against US bases that had largely been emptied in advance. It did not strike civilian or critical infrastructure in the Gulf states. It did not test the limits of what the GCC’s economies would tolerate. It established escalation dominance through horizontal moves — closing Hormuz, targeting bases across multiple countries — without forcing the global economy into a production crisis. Parsi describes the second round as a different proposition.
The Iranian planning, as he relates it, centres on the United Arab Emirates. The UAE is the target because of two specific things. First, its role during the June war: Abu Dhabi pushed Trump toward restarting the war after the early ceasefire. Second, the steadily deepening UAE-Israel strategic partnership, which Tehran no longer treats as commercial drift but as alignment. Within the UAE, the Iranian targeting set is, in Parsi’s account, deliberately constructed: AI infrastructure and data centres, including the ones connected to Palantir and similar firms, and assets associated with the Trump family business empire.
The logic is psychological as much as operational. Iran’s read of Trump, after the June war, is that he is more wounded by harm to his commercial interests than by harm to abstract American interests. A strike that damages US troop facilities is part of a war; a strike that destroys an AI data centre with Trump branding is something else. The Iranian planners are looking for targets where the cost reaches a person who can decide.
Beyond the UAE, the Iranian planning extends. Parsi names the closure of the Bab al-Mandab and the Gulf of Aden — the chokepoint at the south end of the Red Sea — as part of the toolkit, alongside the closure of Hormuz at the north end of the Persian Gulf.
He also describes Iranian exploration of attacks on the undersea fibre-optic cables in the GCC, the cables that carry roughly ninety-nine percent of internet traffic in the Gulf states and route billions of dollars in daily financial transactions. If those go, a second Hormuz emerges — this time made of severed bandwidth rather than mined water. Iran’s own internet has been cut off from the global system since before the June war; it runs on a domestic-only network built years ago. The asymmetry is real.
Iraq enters the second-round picture too, though Parsi is careful with this one. Iraq’s government is fragile. The revelation that two Israeli air bases were operated on Iraqi soil — with Iraqi officials, according to the New York Times reporting, unaware of the operators’ nationality — has shifted the political environment.
Iran’s horizontal-escalation playbook in the first round caught US intelligence off-guard, even though the analytic warnings had been in the system. In Parsi’s reading, the Trump administration stopped listening to its own intelligence agencies and started listening to the Israelis. The Israelis told Trump the war would be easy and short. It was neither.
Why the US has no good military options
The hawks in Washington and Tel Aviv have a list of things the United States could escalate to. Parsi’s diagnosis is that every option on the list is worse than the one before it.
The first option is the one most often floated: a strike against Iran’s electrical grid and oil installations. Lindsey Graham has been pushing for this from the Senate; Israeli sources have been advocating it for months.
Parsi’s analysis of the second-order consequences is direct. If the United States destroys Iran’s energy infrastructure, Iran retaliates against GCC energy infrastructure. That move transforms what is currently a bottleneck problem — oil sitting on tankers that cannot move — into a production problem. Oil that cannot be pumped is qualitatively different from oil that cannot be shipped. Prices do not move from where they are now to one hundred dollars. They move to one hundred and eighty, two hundred, or above, and they stay there.
This means that the global economy will be thrown into a recession, perhaps even a depression. It would be simply devastating.
— Trita Parsi
The second option, taking an island, is the one that sounds easiest. Abu Musa, the Greater and Lesser Tunbs — these are within reach of US naval and air power. The problem is not taking them. The problem is holding them.
An island is a static target. Once US troops are on an island in range of the Iranian coast, they become subject to a sustained Iranian missile and drone campaign that the US has, to date, mostly evaded by keeping Navy assets three thousand kilometres offshore. American casualties on an occupied island would compound rather than abate. Eventually the US would have to give up the island, and the achievement would be nothing.
The third option, opening Hormuz by force, is the one the Trump administration has threatened most. Parsi’s point is that no one in Washington has done the staffing math on what this actually requires.
The reason Iran controls the strait is not that it has mined it. It is that Iran has positioned military assets along its entire fifteen-hundred-kilometre southern coastline — anti-ship missiles, drone bases, fast-attack boats, mine-laying capability, integrated radar. Opening the strait permanently means neutralising that coastline. Neutralising the coastline means occupying southern Iran. The force required is on the order of five hundred thousand troops, and the amassing alone is more than a year of preparation. The US is not going to do this.
This last point connects to the broader strategic argument. The organising principle of American military doctrine, since the early 1990s, has been the capacity to fight two wars on two continents simultaneously. That doctrine sized the force, set the procurement budget, structured the alliance system. The current situation has the US unable to win one war on one continent. The doctrinal premise is failing in real time.
The strategic defeat already delivered
It is tempting to read the June war as a stalemate. Parsi reads it as a defeat — and the comparison he reaches for is Iraq, where the United States at least won the war in the short run.
The Iraq war is the inflection point most often cited as the moment US power began to bleed credibility. The conventional reading is that the war accelerated the move toward multipolarity by destabilising the region, creating ISIS, draining US resources for a decade. That reading is correct as far as it goes.
But Parsi makes a separate point worth holding. In Iraq, the United States was militarily successful in the short run. The country was taken in three weeks. Saddam Hussein was overthrown — the political objective stated up front. The disasters came afterwards, in the occupation, in the failure to stabilise, in the years that followed. The short-run war was won.
In Iran, that is not the case. The war was not won militarily. The political objective — whatever it was; coercing nuclear concessions, regime change in some maximal framings, the elimination of Iranian strategic capability — was not achieved. Iran established escalation dominance. The United States asked for the ceasefire.
Then, with the ceasefire in hand and oil prices easing, the administration imposed the blockade of the blockade, which erased the advantage the ceasefire had given it. Oil prices during the ceasefire are now higher than oil prices during the war. The ten-year Treasury yield sits near four-point-six percent. Bond markets are pricing in something the administration’s rhetoric is not yet acknowledging.
The global consequences are also asymmetric. The Iraq war had heavy regional consequences and slower-moving global ones. The Iran war’s consequences are global from the start. Fuel shortages in Australia. Energy crises in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines. South Korea and Japan, both of which draw the bulk of their crude from the Persian Gulf, are in critical condition. The global economic damage is not the long tail of an occupation; it is the immediate consequence of the war’s incompleteness.
This is where the argument turns from tactics to strategy. If the United States cannot establish escalation dominance in the Persian Gulf — and cannot, by Parsi’s analysis, even within a year and at the cost of half a million troops — then the premise of American primacy is no longer technically supported.
In January of last year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, in a podcast interview with Megyn Kelly, that unipolarity was an aberration. He did not say the United States should retreat from primacy; he said unipolarity was an anomaly, a historical accident, a product of the end of the Cold War. The Iranians read him. The Chinese read him. The Russians read him. Then the December 2025 National Security Strategy came out, with the strongest language any American government document has used against the idea of global hegemony, and explicitly deprioritising the Middle East as a theatre.
Three months after that document, the United States went to war with Iran. Whatever the NSS said, it did not constrain the decision. The gap between the rhetoric of an administration that recognises multipolarity and the conduct of an administration that escalates into a Persian Gulf war is exactly the gap Parsi is pointing to. If the recognition is real, the conduct cannot be sustained. If the conduct is the real signal, the recognition was rhetoric.
The deal Trump is uniquely placed to deliver
The military options are bad. The diplomatic options, in Parsi’s reading, are real — and the technical reason they are real is a quirk of how US sanctions on Iran are structured.
The American sanctions regime on Iran has two layers. Primary sanctions block US persons and US companies from doing business with Iran. Secondary sanctions extend the reach to non-US firms — European, Russian, Chinese, Indian companies — by threatening them with loss of access to the US market if they trade with Iran. The two layers were built at different times by different instruments, and the asymmetry between them is the analytic key to the entire conversation.
Primary sanctions on Iran are, in their bulk, the product of executive orders. The president of the United States can lift them with a signature. Secondary sanctions are largely the product of congressional legislation — they require an act of Congress to undo. This is the inverse of the Cuban sanctions architecture, where the primary embargo is the one Congress codified and the secondary layer is more flexible. Iran’s regime is structured so that the easier sanctions to lift are the ones that bring American capital, American firms, and American economic interest into the Iranian market.
This matters because of what it implies for any deal. The 2015 JCPOA waived secondary sanctions only. No primary sanctions were lifted. The American business interest in the survival of the deal was, with one exception, zero. The exception was Boeing — the JCPOA wrote a Boeing aircraft order into the text. When Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, the Emiratis bought Boeing out by placing a replacement order, and the last remaining domestic US constituency for the deal disappeared. There was nothing to defend, and so the deal collapsed.
If primary sanctions are on the table this time, that calculus changes entirely. American oil services firms can compete for Iranian contracts. American banks can finance trade. American consumer firms can enter the market. A US business constituency forms inside Iran, with skin in the survival of any settlement. The next Trump, or the next president, cannot walk out as cheaply as the last one did. Parsi’s point is that Trump can put primary sanctions on the table by executive order, without going to Congress, and that this is a structurally larger gesture than anything the JCPOA contained.
In exchange, Iran has now offered something it has not offered since 2005: a twelve-year moratorium on enrichment. The framing matters. Iran refuses the American word moratorium; the Iranian word is suspension, with a different legal weight. But the substance is that for twelve years, enrichment would stop. Parsi describes this as a remarkable shift. Iran has not agreed to even a week of stopping enrichment since the experience of 2003 to 2005 — and that experience is the reason it has refused for twenty years.
The Iranians have now agreed to the twelve-year suspension anyway, in the most recent round of indirect talks. That is the size of the concession.
What is blocking the deal is not enrichment policy in the future; it is the disposition of Iran’s existing stockpile of uranium enriched to sixty percent. Both sides are maximalist on that. As long as that remains the case, the talks are deadlocked. But the deadlock is over one variable in a negotiation in which both sides have moved significantly on others. That is a different situation from the absence of a negotiation, and it is the situation a competent administration could close.
The rhetoric problem
The deal is technically available. Whether the administration capable of structuring it is also capable of holding still long enough to land it is a separate question.
Trump can deliver a deal that no other American president of the last forty years could have delivered. The same Trump can also detonate that deal with a four-in-the-morning tweet. Parsi describes the pattern from the inside of the negotiations. Backchannel progress is made; a tweet appears; the progress dissolves. The Iranian side has begun to articulate this as its own problem. Their question, as Parsi reports it, is whether a president who cannot control his own social media account can be trusted to live up to a treaty.
The same temperament, however, produces the gift. The president who tweets at four in the morning is also the president who can say, in public, that he wants Iran to be a completely and amazingly successful country. He wants Iran to flourish.
No other president of the post-Cold War period would have said this. The political cost of saying it has been treated as prohibitive even when the president privately wanted a deal. Trump does not register the political cost. He says it. The Iranians, who have read every American president’s body language for fifty years, hear something they have not heard before.
He covers the entire 360. He can be absolutely terrible on social media and counterproductive, but he is also a president who can say, “I want Iran to be a completely and amazingly successful country.”
— Trita Parsi
Parsi’s diagnosis of Trump’s negotiating posture is sharper than the conventional reading. When Trump is winning, he can be generous. He can put unusual things on the table; he can use the rhetoric of mutual success; he can break taboos that have constrained the diplomacy for two decades.
When Trump is losing, the disposition reverses entirely. He becomes zero-sum. He becomes dictatorial. He demands the other side concede everything because he frames the entire encounter as a contest he must visibly win. This is exactly the mode he has been in for the last six weeks, since the blockade of the blockade began producing the wrong economic numbers.
The other piece of Parsi’s analysis worth holding is what he calls the Iranian mistake. For five years, Tehran refused to talk to Trump directly. The decision was framed inside Iran as a display of dignity, of refusal to be drawn into theatrics, of strategic patience.
In Trump’s psychology, Parsi argues, that framing is invisible. Trump talks to anyone — to Kim Jong-un, to the former leader of al-Qaeda in Syria, to Vladimir Putin — and frames his willingness to talk as evidence of strength. I am strong, so I talk to anyone. By the inverse logic, refusal to talk to him reads as weakness.
The Iranian refusal, intended as strength, reinforced Trump’s belief that Iran was weak, afraid of direct confrontation, incapable of escalation. That belief is part of what made Trump confident the war would last four days. He was wrong, but the war happened on the basis of the belief, and the belief had been confirmed in part by Iran’s own choice not to engage.
The piece is not a hopeful piece, and it is not a despairing one. Two things are uncertain. Whether either side moves off the disposition of the sixty-percent stockpile in the next six weeks. Whether Trump’s discipline holds long enough for a settlement to land before the next escalation cycle begins.
Two things are no longer uncertain. Every US escalation against Iran since January has failed to produce what the escalation was supposed to produce, and the chain of failures has shortened the time available to choose the next step. The consequences of a second war would be of a different order from the consequences of the first — not by some marginal percentage, but by a category. The first round produced a bottleneck in oil. The second would produce a production crisis. The first round damaged American credibility. The second would damage the architecture of American primacy itself.
What the reader is left with, on the Parsi reading, is a particular kind of available choice. The military option is closed; the diplomatic option is open; the difference between them is one administration’s ability to hold still.
The war that has already been lost in the strategic sense can still be converted into the settlement that loss makes available — primary sanctions for Iran, a long enrichment suspension for the United States, the strait of Hormuz functionally open under a regional payment mechanism that does not look exactly like American hegemony but does not look like the loss of it either.
Whether that conversion happens is, in Parsi’s account, a question of whether the administration that produced the cascade of failures can recognise the moment at which a cascade of failures becomes the precondition for an unusually large settlement, and stop escalating long enough to take it.