A deep dive with Dr. Trita Parsi on whether Israel will strike Iran again, why June’s war left “unfinished business,” how much Israel depends on the United States, what Iran’s rapid-response playbook looks like after June, and how a wider fight could spill into the South Caucasus and affect Armenia. Recorded Oct 30, 2025.
Warning: This is a rush transcript generated automatically and may contain errors.
Asbed: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this Conversations on Groong episode. We are continuing to discuss different aspects of Israel’s unprovoked war on Iran, which torpedoed the U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations and are leading the region and the world closer to a catastrophic war. In a moment, Dr. Trita Parsi will join us.
He is the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, a leading voice for diplomatic U.S. foreign policy and an expert on Iran and Middle East affairs.
Hovik: But before that happens, I’d like to take a quick moment and ask our visitors, our friends, to make sure that you are subscribed. And we anticipate a lot of new folks will be joining. joining us to hear Dr.
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Thank you. And on to the show. Dr. Trita Parsi, welcome to The Groong Podcast.
Trita: Thank you so much for having me.
Hovik: It is a genuine pleasure to have you, Dr. Parsi. And since this is the first time on our show, please introduce yourself to our audience and what you do, what keeps you awake at night for those who may not know.
Trita: Sure. Thank you so much. It’s a great pleasure to be with both of you and to be on this podcast. Name is Rita Parsi.
I’m the executive vice president and one of the co-founders of the Quincy Institute, which is a think tank in Washington that is explicitly in favor of a restrained oriented U.S. foreign policy, which means that we would have a much higher bar for the United States getting involved in military conflicts. We do not believe that it lies in the interest of the United States. to dominate the world militarily, and to be involved in so many different conflicts. We believe that there’s a direct line between the domination of the US, the hegemonic approach, and the fact that the US has ended up in so many forever wars.
Prior to this, I was the president of the National Iranian American Council, which I also co-founded, which worked very much on trying to avoid war between the United States and Iran.
Hovik: Nice. So let’s just jump into it, shall we? You have previously stated, Professor Parsi, that Israel would likely strike Iran by December, tying the window to American politics.
However, despite Trump’s pompous steelmaking, Gaza remains at risk of ethnic cleansing, Israel continues to occupy Lebanon, Gulf capitals are weighing their exposure to war, and U.S. military… presence and threat of force remains central essentially to avoid all-out war and uh i believe that world markets are like very jittery about the you know issues related to state of hormuz so all these issues are up in the air now has your timetable for the second war on Iran shifted at all given the current realities and developments on the ground
Trita: Thank you. That’s a great question. Let me first explain what my timetable has been. In August, I published a piece in Foreign Policy that I said, I believe that the Israelis were likely to strike and start the war again before December of this year.
And this was driven by several different factors. The fact that they failed ultimately in the most important of their objectives, which was to turn Iran into the next Syria or Lebanon, a country Israel can bomb with impunity at will without American involvement. And the reason why December was the kind of outer edge of the prediction window that I had was because if the Israelis give the Iranians too much time, they will rebuild their air defense systems, perhaps by better ones. They are building missiles faster than the U.S. and Israel can build missile interceptors.
The missiles of Iran turn out to be very, very crucial. are probably a key reason why the Israelis wanted a ceasefire at the end. but also because of the political window, which is that once the US enters the midterm election season, it becomes more complicated for Israel to do this. It’s not an insurmountable obstacle, but Trump clearly is receptive to the demands of his base and his base doesn’t wanna see another war. And they know very well that of course, in this next war, the US very likely will get sucked in. So the objection from the American side, I think, would become much stronger after December.
Now, a couple of things have happened since then. The most important ones are these. Over the summer, as a result of Israel’s war with Iran, we have seen that the support of Israel within the MAGA crowd, the America First crowd, has really plummeted. It plummeted further after the killing of Charlie Kirk.
A lot of people in that crowd blame Israel. I’ve not seen any evidence for it, but a very commonly held view is that the Israelis did this because Charlie apparently had told a friend that he was afraid the Israelis would kill him. He had told other friends, and we have evidence for this, that he was now leaving the pro-Israel train essentially because of the pressure that he was under from some pro-Israel donors to break with Tucker Carlson and people like that. And this, I think, is a key reason as to why Trump, after the Israelis committed a huge mistake by attacking Doha, Qatar, decided to shift and really put pressure on Israel.
It’s because he realized that Israel was starting to become a political problem for him. He had told one of his pro-Israel donors that my people is starting to hate you. This is very crucial because it was a real awareness that his core base was starting to become increasingly negative on Israel. So when Qatar was attacked by Israel, and it really went too far, and the region reacted very strongly against that, Trump saw an opportunity and a necessity of shifting, and he did.
And he came up with this out of the blue, this new idea of a Gaza peace plan. You know, there’s plenty of flaws with it. But one crucial thing happened. For the first time, he really started exerting real pressure on Israel.
You just had J.D. Vance say that. I think it was yesterday at the Turning Point USA event in which he was asked, by a student, why is the US giving so much money to Israel? And he said that it’s precisely because Trump is not controlled by pro-Israel elements, that he has been able to use leverage.
And this is why we actually got a ceasefire, because we use that leverage, implicitly saying that other presidents were controlled by the pro-Israel crowd. So this is very crucial. This changes the picture. It doesn’t mean that it changes the fundamentals of Israel’s interest.
Its interest is to establish what essentially is military hegemony in the region, get rid of or weaken all countries in the region that can pose a challenge to Israel’s maneuverability. Turkey is one of those countries. if it manages to first establish it over Iran. So that interest is still there because the Israelis don’t believe that you can just balance these different countries. They believe that they’re all out there to get Israel.
And as a result, you need to be able to completely dominate them militarily. So that interest remains. But the opportunity and the window may have changed dramatically because of this turn against Israel within the American pro-MAGA, America First crowd. the manner in which the rest of the region, under the leadership of Qatar and other countries, have really united against Israel and put pressure on Trump to put pressure on Israel. So this changes things.
Now, I’ve spoken to Israelis who believe that precisely because of this reason, Israel is more likely to strike before the end of December. That precisely by striking Iran and dragging the US into that war, it can once again change the dynamics in the region away from the way that it has shifted as a result of their mistake by striking Qatar. And that Netanyahu’s own personal interest is even stronger now. If he doesn’t have a war with Gaza, he needs another war to stay out of jail and just keep on bombing Lebanon is not sufficient.
He needs something bigger. So you have people, former Israeli officials, who are of the view that the risk may have actually increased. If you’re sitting in Washington as I am, you definitely have a sense that the risk has decreased because there’s a lot of satisfaction of seeing that Trump’s pressure on Israel work, which of course it would. Of course, if the U.S. finally decided to put pressure on Israel, of course it would work.
The only reason why we don’t have much data points proving this is because it almost never happens that the U.S. puts pressure on Israel.
Asbed: Dr. Parsi, is the need for war on the part of Israel a domestic need? Is it, for example, Netanyahu’s domestic problems or what is driving that need for constant engagement?
Trita: Yeah, so there’s many different things. So under normal circumstances, you would not have a situation in which a president or a prime minister of Israel would need a war to simply stay out of jail. But that is the specific circumstances that exist now. And that obviously reinforces the broader need in a very significant way.
But the fundamental need that is there is not a need for a war. It is essentially the Israeli military doctrine. Most states define a threat as being a combination of capability times intention. So if a country has the military capability and is hostile, then you see them as a threat.
The Israelis assume that the intent of hostility, the intent to destroy Israel is constant. It’s always there in every country in the region, more or less. So you cannot count on them not having bad intent. You have to always assume that they have bad intent, which then leaves you only focused on whether they have the capability.
So it’s setting aside intent, focus entirely as to whether they have capability or if the combination of certain states have that. This is incidentally part of the reason why it is legislated in the United States. that we have to help ensure Israel’s, what is called, strategic qualitative edge. The US never sells weapons to other countries in the region that are at the same technological and advanced level as it sells it to the Israelis. The Israelis always get the absolute best.
Everyone else gets one or two or three steps below. This is part of US law. It is as a measure to help Israel sustain that qualitative strategic edge. And as a result, if you’re sitting in Israel 30 years ago, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, when Iran, the region was in some ways larger because Iran didn’t have the technology to hit Israel.
So Israel could not even see Iran as a threat. And back then, of course, they were close allies partnering against Arab states. And it didn’t matter to the Israelis what technology the Iranians had. In fact, the Israelis were providing technology to the Iranians that the U.S. refused to sell Iran. during the time of the shock.
But that was fine because the distance were greater. Now you have a scenario in which the region has become much smaller because of the advancement of technology. The Iranians have missiles that can reach Israel in 12 minutes, which then means that Israel needs to dominate Iran for its own survival strategy, a survival strategy that I find to be completely self-defeating. No country can sustain this type of a policy indefinitely.
This is the policy of empire, essentially. Right. But this is the key reason. So this is why also when Assad falls in Syria, what is the first thing the Israelis did?
They went in and they bombed everything they could, every military installment, everything they could find, because it didn’t matter to them who replaces Assad. What matters to them is, does the next Syrian government have the capability of challenging Israel’s domination? Does the next Syrian government have the capability to have a deterrence against Israel? This is the fundamental issue.
So even when Netanyahu is out of office and the next prime minister may be clean as snow, no illegal activities, you would still have this problem. And even once Trump is out of office, you will still have this problem. Even if the regime in Iran changes, you will still have this problem. It may be manifested differently.
But this is not as simple as to think, oh, as long as the mullahs of Iran are gone, Iran and Israel are going to become friends again. That’s a complete misread of the geopolitical situation in the region, a belief that, you know, whatever geopolitical situation in the region was back in the 1970s when the Iranians and the Israelis were close, that that is some sort of the natural permanent state of the region. It is not.
Hovik: Professor Parsi, you frame Israel’s, or at least you had framed Israel’s push for a second round as quote-unquote unfinished business from June. And we know that from those times Netanyahu tested ways to pull Washington in more fully. Israel tried to degrade Iran’s command nodes and create freedom, as you say, to strike Iran at will. And you argued that those efforts fell short and we saw Tehran replace key commanders within days or in a day and showed that it could punch through any air defenses that Israel had.
But so according to your thesis what remains unaccomplished specifically that Israel would need to accomplish, let’s say in the first 48 hours of a potential
Trita: second war that could happen well the key thing for the Israelis is that despite the fact that Ian’s network of organizations from Hezbollah to hashed in Iraq and others Despite that being more or less not destroyed, but significantly weakened, despite the fact that the nuclear program, at least the civilian aspects of it were bombed, whether they have a non-civilian aspect or not, we don’t know. It seems to me that they certainly didn’t have it before. Whether they have it now is a different story because we don’t have any inspections to know.
But nevertheless, it did show that the missiles were a very, very effective deterrent against Israel. The Israelis, I mean, we have to keep one thing in mind. We do not yet know the full extent of the damage that the missiles did because Israel’s military censorship does not allow for that to be reported. And this is what part of the problem with the Western media covering this story.
The Israelis allow them to show if a missile had hit something that appeared and may have been a civilian target. but they never allowed the media to film any military targets. And then the media ends up saying all of the Iranian missiles hit civilian targets. Yeah, that’s because that’s the only thing you’re allowed to see. And you know that you’re being censored.
If you’re operating in Israel as a Western media, you know completely that the military censorship is very, very clear and very vast and completely explicit. Yet you don’t tell that to the audience. Instead, you only report what you’re allowed to see and say that this is the full picture. This is beyond journalistic malpractice.
But my point is that we don’t know the degree to the damage that it did because the censorship doesn’t allow it. We do know, however, they were running out of the interceptors. We do know, however, that the interception rates became higher and higher as the war went forward, both because of the fact that the Iranians had successfully taken out big parts of the air defense systems, but also because they apparently became more and more efficient on how to penetrate the air defense systems without destroying them so that they found the gaps in them.
This then has shown that Iran’s ability to actually deter Israel and its ability to challenge Israel’s domination is actually more effective using the missiles than using a latent nuclear program or even some other different groups such as Hezbollah, etc. So if you’re sitting in Israel right now, you cannot possibly be happy. You can, yes, go out and say that this was a success. The nuclear program took huge hits.
A lot of the Iranian officials were killed. But you scratch the surface. I do not believe for a second that the Israelis are particularly content. At best, they will say, well, look, this is just the first phase.
You cannot expect to have complete success after just one phase. Even smaller states that Israel has managed to subjugate took time. And I think that’s a fair position for them to take. But to go out and say that it was a complete success, and as a result, there’s no need for them any longer to view Iran as a challenge, I find that completely unconvincing.
Asbed: Professor, since June, Iran appears to be adjusting its playbook a little bit. It seems like they are getting ready for a possible second phase, but the picture is not really clear. There are reports of drills that stress quick, massive fire responses, tighter links with Hezbollah, Iraqi groups, Houthis. These steps suggest that they have learned certain lessons, but we’re not sure.
Are these steps real readiness steps or how much of it is signaling?
Trita: No, I do think that they strongly believe that the Israelis are going to attack again. They have said so publicly. The Israelis have said so publicly that they will attack. And it would be complete malpractice for the Iranians not to prepare themselves.
Now, is their preparation adequate or not? That’s a different story. There’s a lot of question marks. The Israelis had a tremendous benefit because it turned out that they had a massive Mossad presence inside the country.
A lot of the attacks were actually taking place from inside Iranian territory. Israeli jets, many reports indicate, actually never really penetrated Iran’s airspace, but was shooting the missiles from outside of Iranian airspace. What was in Iran’s airspace was drones and other things, and those were shot from inside the territory. Now, we do not know.
Did the Israelis consume the majority, perhaps all of their Mossad assets inside the country for this attack? Did they save some? Can they restore it? These are obviously questions that we cannot know.
This is all classified and it’s not even clear to me whether other countries have a good assessment. Israeli media has said that a lot of these different cells were not inside the country as sleeper cells, but rather these were Iranians that for good reason had a lot of problems with the Iranian regime, but then had made a decision to join the Israelis. The Israelis have managed to flip them, essentially. They had trained them outside of Iran, and three days before the war, they slipped back into Iran.
If that is the case, perhaps there’s another reservoir of people that they are training and they can slip them back in. So it’s not just about what the presence is inside the country, but the presence that they can inject into the country. Now, much indicates that this operation was something they had trained for for many, many different years, prepared for for many different years. And that may suggest that it’s not so easy to just restore all of those different Mossad capabilities within just six months or so.
Again, we do not know. It’s one of the big unknowns of what will the big presence be inside Iran from Mossad’s end prior to this. Do the Israelis have another trick up their sleeve? Very few people expected the pager attack against the Hezbollah officials and their families.
Is there something of that kind or something completely unexpected that they also have in their reservoir? We do not know these things. What we do know is they are restoring launchers. They’re building more missiles.
They’re getting stuff from the Chinese. They are in conversations with the Russians about… fighter jets, those may not be very efficient in shooting down drones, but they may be very useful in challenging Israeli jets outside of Iranian airspace if the war happens again. Can they train up pilots on these new Su-35s in such a short time span? We have no idea.
But bottom line is, even if there isn’t an attack… before December. It does not mean that the window has closed and that the Israelis will just move on and start focusing on other things. This is going to be a long term competition struggle rivalry between the Iranians and Israelis. And even if it doesn’t lead to another phase of the war before December, it is very likely to lead to another confrontation down the road later on.
Hovik: Professor Parsi, let me just jump in here. We know that Iranian media has reported that Azerbaijan, for instance, was used during the territory of Azerbaijan, was used during the June War.
And, you know, there’s obviously Iran is very diplomatic about it with Azerbaijan. but how likely do you see if that is true how likely do you see a repeat of that tactic or uh process if the if a new war starts especially with all the changes that are going on there is this new trip corridor that we won’t have time to cover today but um you know it seems like the geopolitical uh sort of uh processes are continuing and and and the us is more the more involved in the region than before so um yeah what are your thoughts about this conflict if if it does begin to become hot what do you think about it spilling over to the south caucasus as well
Trita: So I think that if this leads to a fuller confrontation, meaning that the Israelis attack the U.S. is more than it was last time. I mean, last time the U.S. was obviously very involved in shooting down Iranian missiles and drones, and it was involved completely when it comes to a single attack on the nuclear program. But Trump did not agree to be offensively involved in the war beyond that.
But if it leads to a war with a significant confrontation between Iran and Israel, and the Iranians are successful in hitting the Israelis very hard, perhaps high casualties on the Israeli side, then the pressure on Trump to step in will be very significant. If that then happens, then the restraint the Iranians have shown, which is clear, they don’t want a confrontation with the US, it is reasonable to believe that that restraint will be out the window at some point in that type of a phase. And that means that the Iranians who have a much larger reservoir of shorter range missiles will likely start using them.
And given at least deep suspicion, perhaps some evidence of Azerbaijan’s role in all of this, there is a likelihood that the confrontation could extend there. Now, the Iranians are very disinclined to have a direct confrontation with Azerbaijan for a variety of reasons, including ethnic reasons. But there is undoubtedly a tremendous amount of anger and suspicion, not just because of this, but because they have seen, of course, that Israel and Azerbaijan’s alliance has been forming over the course of the last two decades. This suspicion is not based on nothing.
It’s very clear that the Israelis are extremely active with the Azeri military, extremely active in Azerbaijan intelligence-wise. And it’s certainly not without an eye on Israel. Iran. If anything, from the Israeli standpoint, it’s far more interested in that relationship with Azerbaijan because of its rivalry with Iran rather than because of Israel’s viewpoints or relationship or absence of that with Armenia.
Asbed: We are very interested in exploring this issue, especially since the August 8th agreement between Armenia, Azerbaijan and the White House on August 8th, to understand if this trip actually extends the risk of war all the way to Armenia in case this Middle East conflict flares up in the future. But we’ll leave that for the future conversation. Thank you so much.
Trita: Thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
Asbed: Bye-bye. Well, folks, that’s our show today. This episode was recorded on October 30th, 2025. We’ve been talking with Dr.
Trita Parsi, who is executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, which is a leading voice for diplomatic U.S. foreign policy. He’s an expert on Iran and Middle East affairs, and his insights appear regularly in The Washington Post, New York Times, and he frequently appears on CNN, BBC, NPR, Al Jazeera, and of course, Groong. Dr. Parsi has been named one of Washingtonian Magazine’s 25 most influential foreign policy figures annually since 2021.
For more information on him, his bio, my bio, and Hovig’s bio, you can go to podcasts.groong.org/episode-number and click on the links.
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Asbed: Well, I’m Asbed Bedrossian in Los Angeles.
Hovik: And I’m Hovik Manucharyan. I’m normally based out of Yerevan, but currently also in Los Angeles.
Asbed: We’ll talk to you soon.
Hovik: Have a nice day.