Actor

1974-07-21 · Iran, Islamic Republic of · Male

1 series in the catalog

Trita Parsi (Persian: تریتا پارسی) 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 comments on foreign policy in print and on television, and is the author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (2007), A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran (2012) and Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy (2017). With Frida Stranne he also wrote Illusionen om den amerikanska freden (2023), in Swedish. Treacherous Alliance won the Grawemeyer Award for "Ideas Improving World Order" in 2010, and in 2008 it took the silver medal in the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross Book Award.

Early life and education

Trita Parsi was born in Ahvaz, Iran, to a Zoroastrian family. His father, Touraj Parsi, was a politically active university professor who was jailed under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and again, after the Iranian Revolution, under Ruhollah Khomeini. Parsi's family left Iran in October 1978, when he was four, and settled in Uppsala in Sweden; his parents were political refugees. Parsi has said that the family did not intend to stay, and that the revolution and the repression which followed it made returning impossible. His elder brother, Rouzbeh Parsi, is a Middle East scholar in Sweden.

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 in 2006, under Francis Fukuyama. He was awarded the 2016 Alumni of the Year prize from Uppsala University.

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.

In 2003, Parsi served as an aide to Representative Bob Ney. 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. Georgetown University's Center for Security Studies lists him as an adjunct associate professor.

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. Parsi has long opposed a war against Iran.

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.

Through NIAC, Parsi supports engagement between the US and Iran, saying it "would enhance our [U.S.] national security by helping to stabilize the Middle East and bolster the moderates in Iran."

In a 2011 talk sponsored by the Institute for Global Law and Policy at the Harvard Law School, Parsi argued that the conflict between Israel and Iran was not ideological but strategic and geopolitical. 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 February 2026, an unsigned editorial in The Wall Street Journal pointed to a video in which the Tehran University professor Foad Izadi suggests Parsi may have been an Iranian lobbyist, and said that former president Hassan Rouhani had wanted an Iranian lobby in the United States. Parsi responded that NIAC is an Iranian-American organization and has no connections to the Iranian government. NIAC said in reply that Rouhani had made the remark in 2013, eleven years after the organisation was founded, and that Izadi says in the same clip that it would be impossible for Iran to have a lobby in the United States. Jamal Abdi, president of NIAC, said Izadi was an Iranian hardliner who was falsely suggesting a connection between NIAC and Iranian reformists in order to undermine the latter as "American toadies".

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."

Separately from the merits, the court sanctioned Parsi and NIAC over their conduct during discovery, in which they had failed to produce a range of documents and had not complied with several orders. Bates set the figure at $183,480.09, and in February 2015 the D.C. Circuit upheld most of it, describing the award as "the wages of Appellants' dilatory, dishonest, and intransigent conduct" and reversing two narrower components. The appeal concerned only the sanctions; the dismissal of the case itself was not appealed, and the district court had declined to find that Parsi altered a document in bad faith.

Parsi's work has continued to draw criticism from commentators opposed to engagement with Iran. An opinion piece in Iran International in February 2025 described him as "known for advancing Tehran's talking points".

Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

Parsi stepped down from NIAC in 2018, and the following year helped found the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a foreign policy think tank in Washington, D.C., together with Stephen Wertheim, Eli Clifton, Suzanne DiMaggio and Andrew Bacevich. The institute is named after John Quincy Adams, who as secretary of state said in 1821 that the United States "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy", and it argues for restraint in American foreign policy in preference to sanctions and military force. It began publishing in December 2019.

The Open Society Foundations, funded by George Soros, and the Charles Koch Foundation each gave $500,000 towards the launch, and individual donors contributed a further $800,000. Later donors have included the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Rockefeller Brothers…