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Trita Parsi

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Trita Parsi is the founder and current president of the National Iranian American Council, and author of Treacherous Alliance and A Single Roll of the Dice.

Born in Iran to a Zoroastrian family, Parsi moved with his family to Sweden at the age of 4 to escape the political repression in Iran. His father was an outspoken academic who was jailed under the reign of the Shah and later under Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Republic. Parsi earned a Master's Degree in International Relations at Uppsala University and a second Master's Degree in Economics at Stockholm School of Economics. As an adult, Parsi moved to the United States and studied foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies where he received his Ph.D. in International Relations.

Early in his career Parsi worked for the Swedish Permanent Mission to the UN 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.

He 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.

Fluent in Persian, English, and Swedish, Parsi carries Iranian and Swedish passports, but he is not a citizen of the United States, where he lives as a permanent resident.

In 2002, Parsi closed down the IIC and founded the National Iranian American Council , whose stated purpose was "to enable Iranian Americans to condemn the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks" and, later, to provide a "grass-roots group aimed at strengthening their voice." Through the organization, he supports engagement between the US and Iran in belief that it "would enhance our [U.S.] national security by helping to stabilize the Middle East and bolster the moderates in Iran." On the group's formation, he commented, "We realized that our primary thing that separates the Iranian-American community from the Jewish-American community, the Arab-American community, the Armenian-American community is that the Iranian-American community has shunned political participation."

In 2007, Yale University Press published Treacherous Alliance The Secret Dealings of Israel Iran and the United States. Parsi's work 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 between Israel, Iran, and the United States that continue to shape the future of the Middle East." The book basically argues that the struggle between Israel and Iran is not ideological but strategic.

In the 2012 book A Single Roll of the Dice Obama's Diplomacy with Iran, 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."

Treacherous Alliance received the 2010 Grawemeyer Award from the University of Louisville, given for "Ideas Improving World Order." Treacherous Alliance also won the 2008 Arthur Ross Silver Medallion from the Council on Foreign Relations, which described it as a "unique and important book" that "takes a closer look at the complicated triangular relations between Israel, Iran, and the United States that continue to shape the future of the Middle East."

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

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Trita Parsi

Trita Parsi

Books from Trita Parsi

Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States

A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran

Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy

Retargeting Iran

وسيلة وليست غاية... لماذا تناصر إيران القضية الفلسطينية؟!

Truce: Iran, the U.S. and the Middle East After the Nuclear Deal (World Politics Review Features)

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Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States 1st Edition by Parsi, Trita published by Yale University Press