Iran International
As Washington and Islamabad push for a preliminary agreement with Iran, experts say the unresolved fight over Lebanon could determine what the region looks like after the war and how much influence Iran retains.
The US and Pakistani officials say a Memorandum of Understanding with Iran will be signed on Sunday, describing it as a step toward ending the wider conflict, but Tehran has cast doubt on the timing.
That uncertainty has kept attention on the issues still capable of derailing or reshaping any deal.
One of them is Lebanon.
Iranian officials and media reports have suggested that any broader understanding with the United States would have to include an end to fighting involving Hezbollah. Israel has rejected any arrangement that would limit its freedom of action, with Defense Minister Israel Katz saying Friday that Israel would continue operating in Lebanon regardless of any agreement with Tehran.
The dispute reflects a larger reality taking shape across the Middle East: even if a preliminary Iran-US agreement moves forward, the struggle over Lebanon may decide what kind of post-war order follows it.
For veteran Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller, Tehran’s focus on Lebanon is no accident.
“I think they are using Lebanon now to try to push Trump to push Netanyahu and to establish a new equation,” Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Eye for Iran.
For decades, Hezbollah served as Iran’s primary deterrent against direct attacks on Iranian territory. Now, Miller argues, Tehran is attempting to reverse that logic by making Hezbollah itself the red line.
Lebanon, he said, has become even more important to Iran after setbacks elsewhere in its regional network. The result is a new dynamic in which military action in Lebanon risks triggering a wider confrontation involving Iran directly.
“The concern about Lebanon and the Persian Gulf is that they provide ample opportunities for miscalculation or kinetic interaction,” Miller said.
The repercussions are already being felt beyond Lebanon.
Mohamed Fahmy, an Egyptian-Canadian journalist and Middle East political analyst who recently returned from reporting in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, said the war has altered how Iran is viewed across parts of the Arab world.
“There is a scar that has changed the psyche of people there towards how Iran is viewed,” Fahmy said.
Fahmy said governments across the region are now grappling with questions about deterrence, security and their future relationship with Tehran as missile and drone attacks continue despite diplomatic efforts.
The shifting landscape is also reshaping traditional assumptions about power in the Middle East.
“If you ask me who are the three most powerful players in the region, they’re the three non-Arabs: Israel, Turkey and Iran,” Miller said.
“The three states that dominated Middle Eastern politics for decades, Egypt, Iraq and Syria, are all offline.”
That makes Lebanon more than a side issue in the diplomacy around Iran. It is one of the places where the limits of any agreement may be tested first: whether Iran can preserve the deterrent value of Hezbollah, whether Israel can keep striking without triggering a wider war, and whether Washington can turn a preliminary understanding with Tehran into a more durable regional arrangement.
'The only real end is Iran regime change'
For former US special representative for Iran Elliott Abrams, the debate over Lebanon points to a larger question about the future of the Islamic Republic itself.
“The only real end of this is the end of the regime, which is to say, let the Iranian people govern themselves,” Abrams told Eye for Iran.
Looking beyond the immediate fighting, Abrams argued that the significance of the war may not ultimately be measured by what happens in Lebanon, but by what happens inside Iran.
“If the regime falls in a few years, we’ll all look back on early 2026 and say that’s when it started.”
For now, Lebanon remains one of the clearest tests of the emerging Iran-US track. A preliminary agreement may slow the war, but experts say the unresolved fight over Hezbollah and Israel’s freedom of action could still shape what comes after it.
The report, by Jay Solomon, said US officials and documents reviewed by The Free Press show Parsi has become a target of the State Department investigation as Secretary of State Marco Rubio seeks to counter Iranian influence inside the United States.
Parsi, 51, was born in Iran, raised in Sweden and has lived in the United States for more than 25 years. He is a green-card holder and co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank that argues for diplomacy, military restraint and a smaller US military role overseas.
The State Department declined to discuss Parsi’s immigration status, The Free Press said. Parsi and Quincy did not respond to the outlet’s requests for comment.
The investigation places one of the most prominent critics of the US-Israel war against Iran at the center of a broader fight over who shapes Washington’s Iran debate.
Since the war began, Parsi has appeared across left-wing, mainstream and even pro-MAGA platforms arguing that Trump faces a quagmire and that Washington should seek a deal with Tehran.
His critics say that position fits a much longer pattern: opposing sanctions and military pressure, amplifying Tehran’s warnings, and presenting policies favorable to the Islamic Republic as anti-war realism. Parsi has denied wrongdoing and has said such criticism is an effort to silence opponents of Trump’s Iran policy.
The Free Press cited a Trump administration official saying the State Department is reviewing people whose work is seen as helping US adversaries. “Anyone who seeks to undermine the US, we’re taking a hard look at,” the official said.
Parsi has long been a divisive figure among Iranian Americans. In 2002, he founded the National Iranian American Council, or NIAC, which described itself as a voice for Iranian Americans and later became one of the most visible organizations advocating engagement with Tehran.
In 2020, Republican senators Tom Cotton, Mike Braun and Ted Cruz asked the Justice Department to examine whether NIAC should register as a foreign agent, accusing it of amplifying Iranian government propaganda. No investigation or enforcement action was publicly announced.
The Free Press also revisited Parsi’s defamation lawsuit against Iranian American journalist Hassan Daioleslam, who had accused Parsi and NIAC of advancing Tehran’s interests. The lawsuit was dismissed. Emails disclosed in the case showed Parsi had corresponded with Iran’s then-UN ambassador, who later became foreign minister, about meetings with US lawmakers and policy conferences.
The latest report also points to Parsi’s family and professional ecosystem. His brother, Rouzbeh Parsi, helped create the Iran Experts Initiative, a network of Iranian scholars and analysts formed in 2014 as nuclear talks with world powers intensified.
The initiative was first exposed in 2023 by Iran International and Semafor, based on thousands of Iranian Foreign Ministry emails. The documents showed Iranian officials sought to cultivate overseas analysts and academics who could promote Tehran’s positions on the nuclear talks in Western media and policy circles.
The Free Press said Trita Parsi’s name did not appear in the Foreign Ministry emails as a member of the initiative. But it quoted critics who argued that the work of the two brothers should be viewed as part of a broader effort to weaken pressure on Tehran and normalize engagement with the Islamic Republic.
Rouzbeh Parsi has denied cooperating with Tehran. A later investigation by the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, his former employer, found no evidence that he was paid by Iran or controlled by it. But it concluded that he had been a principal creator of the initiative and had failed to disclose its work to the institute, Sweden’s foreign ministry or Lund University. The institute ended his employment in May 2025.
The Iran Experts Initiative revelations also drew attention in Washington because one of its founding members, Ariane Tabatabai, later held a senior Defense Department role under the Biden administration.
Republican lawmakers pressed the Pentagon and FBI to ensure members of the initiative were not in positions to influence US policy or access sensitive intelligence. Tabatabai’s current employer has defended her record and said she had passed security reviews under multiple administrations.
The controversy around Parsi has not been limited to Washington. In February, the German Institute for Global and Area Studies canceled a Berlin event featuring him after public backlash from Iranian activists and opponents of the Islamic Republic.
The institute cited security concerns, while critics said Western institutions should not offer unchallenged platforms to figures they accuse of echoing Tehran’s policy line.
The Free Press report said Quincy had prepared for a possible legal fight. In an April memo reviewed by the outlet, Quincy CEO Lora Lumpe said the think tank’s chairman had agreed to cover legal costs to prepare for, and if necessary fight, what she called a “deportation attack on Trita.”
The memo said Quincy was retaining an immigration lawyer and preparing a habeas corpus petition in case Parsi was suddenly detained by immigration authorities.
The report also said Parsi’s recent criticism of the Iran war has been noticed in Tehran. Photos circulated last month by Iranian activists showed banners bearing his face on a Tehran overpass and lamppost, alongside a quote attributed to him saying Trump’s “failed war” had destroyed Washington’s ability to make military threats.
For critics, those images captured the central question around Parsi’s career: why a Washington analyst’s arguments are repeatedly useful to Tehran at moments when US pressure on the Islamic Republic is at stake.
For his defenders, the case raises a different concern: whether the Trump administration is using immigration powers to punish lawful political speech and dissent over war policy.
That tension makes the Parsi investigation more than a dispute over one analyst’s status. It is now part of a wider battle over Iranian influence, free speech, immigration power and the long-running struggle to define US policy toward Tehran.
Soleimani Ardestani, a religious scholar, former Mofid University professor and member of a reformist association of Qom seminary teachers and researchers, is being held in Qom’s prison.
According to Mojtaba Lotfi, an official from the office of the late dissident cleric Hossein Ali Montazeri, the court convicted him on all eight charges brought against him.
Lotfi said Soleimani Ardestani does not plan to appeal unless the court agrees to hold a public hearing.
In a letter from prison, Soleimani Ardestani said the charges against him included disturbing public opinion, insulting sacred values, insulting the leadership in relation to Ali Khamenei and his son Mojtaba, taking part in a gathering over the house arrest of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and assembly and collusion against domestic security.
Mousavi, a former prime minister, has been under house arrest since 2011 after rejecting the official result of Iran’s disputed 2009 presidential election and becoming one of the symbols of the Green Movement protests.
Soleimani Ardestani also listed accusations such as propaganda against the system, spreading falsehoods online, insulting senior religious authorities, damaging the dignity of the clergy and “mind control and psychological suggestion” – a striking charge even by the standards of Iran’s broad political indictments.
He has called the indictment weak and baseless, criticized his arrest and solitary confinement, and said he wrote his defense not to seek acquittal but to leave a record for history.
The case began with remarks in a debate with pro-government cleric Hamed Kashani. Soleimani Ardestani questioned long-promoted Shiite accounts about the death of Fatemeh Zahra, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammed and wife of Ali, the first Shiite Imam.
In Iran, the story of Fatemeh’s martyrdom is not only a religious narrative but part of a vast state-backed culture of mourning, ritual and political identity.
Soleimani Ardestani argued that if Ali had merely watched his wife being attacked and had not intervened, then the traditional account would raise questions about his justice. He later said he had not insulted Fatemeh and was challenging what he called the “stories told by religious singers or eulogists (maddahs).”
He also questioned mourning ceremonies for Muhammad Taqi, the ninth Shiite Imam, saying his death was linked to jealousy by his wife after he remarried and that mourning the event 1,300 years later was meaningless.
The backlash was immediate. Pro-government eulogists, who play an influential role in mobilizing religious crowds, attacked him with vulgar and sexist language. Reports also emerged of a group attack on his home.
Hardline figures called for prosecution and defrocking, while some religious voices went further, suggesting that denial of Fatemeh’s martyrdom could amount to leaving Shiite doctrine.
The controversy also split parts of the political middle ground. Reformist figures criticized Soleimani Ardestani’s tone and timing, while others warned that violent threats, home attacks and denunciations violated freedom of belief.
The sentence is significant because it shows how quickly the Islamic Republic can convert a dispute over religious history into a security case.
Soleimani Ardestani was not an outside critic of clerical rule. He was a cleric from inside the seminary world, which makes his challenge more sensitive.
By sentencing him to prison and stripping him of clerical status, the system is not only punishing one man. It is policing the boundaries of who is allowed to interpret religion, how far internal debate can go, and what happens when religious scholarship collides with the political theology of the state.
