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For more than two decades, Trita Parsi has been one of the most persistent advocates for a different kind of American foreign policy — one built on diplomacy and restraint rather than military intervention. He founded the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) to give Iranian Americans a political voice, spent years researching the tangled dynamics of U.S.-Iran-Israel relations, and eventually co-founded the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, one of Washington’s most distinctive and independent think tanks.

This week on the Muslim Philanthropy Podcast, AMCF Co-Founder and Chief Development Officer Muhi Khwaja sat down with Trita to talk about the journey, the ideas, and the institution he helped build

From Iran to Sweden to Washington

Trita was born in Iran in 1974. When he was four and a half years old, his family fled the country just before the revolution — settling in Sweden, where he would spend the next two decades. He studied political science at Uppsala and Stockholm Universities, added a master’s in economics, and eventually made his way to the United States in 2000 to pursue a PhD at Johns Hopkins SAIS, where his dissertation examined Israeli-Iranian relations — a subject so overlooked at the time that the last book written on it had been published in 1988.

That research shaped everything that followed. Trita saw how the U.S.-Iran relationship was being distorted by forces most analysts weren’t fully accounting for, and he wanted to build institutions capable of changing the conversation.

Building NIAC, then something bigger

After graduate school, Trita founded the National Iranian American Council to give the Iranian American community a seat at the table in U.S. foreign policy debates. It was the kind of organizational work that required years of patient institution-building — and it gave him a firsthand education in how Washington actually worked, and where its blind spots were.

The signing of the JCPOA — the Iran nuclear deal — felt like a validation of the diplomatic approach he had long championed. But as the Trump administration moved toward withdrawal from the agreement, Trita found himself thinking about a deeper problem: the failure wasn’t just about one deal or one administration. It was about a foreign policy establishment that kept defaulting to militarism even when the evidence argued for something else.

Why the Quincy Institute

In 2018 and 2019, Trita co-founded the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft alongside a group that included historian and retired Army colonel Andrew Bacevich, researcher Eli Clifton, diplomat Suzanne DiMaggio, and historian Stephen Wertheim. The name was chosen deliberately — a reference to John Quincy Adams’ 1821 speech warning that America should not go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” The point wasn’t nostalgia. It was a reminder that a different foreign policy tradition had existed before World War II, and that it could exist again.

Bacevich, who lost his son in the Iraq War and spent years as one of Washington’s sharpest critics of American military adventurism, became one of the organization’s defining voices. The founding team brought together expertise across regions, policy areas, and ideological backgrounds — with Eli and Stephen both finishing books at the time that would shape the restraint policy conversation in the years ahead.

An institution built differently

From the beginning, Trita and his colleagues made deliberate choices about how to fund the Quincy Institute. They would not accept money from defense industries. They would not accept money from foreign governments. And they would build bipartisan support — securing funding from both George Soros’s Open Society Institute on the left and Charles Koch’s Institute on the right — not as a gimmick, but as proof that opposition to reflexive militarism wasn’t a partisan position.

Today the Quincy Institute operates on a budget of $8–9 million with a staff of 45 to 50 people organized around global regions. It has also built a funding tracker database to promote transparency in think tank funding across Washington — holding the broader industry to a standard of disclosure that Quincy applies to itself.

What it’s really about

When Muhi asked Trita to describe the core of what the Quincy Institute is trying to do, his answer was straightforward: shift the paradigm. Not win a single debate or influence a single policy decision, but change what Washington thinks is possible — and remind Americans that the country has other traditions to draw on besides the one that produced the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We’re not just trying to tweak the existing foreign policy,” he said. “We’re trying to change the framework itself.”

You can learn more about the Quincy Institute at quincy-institute.org. Listen to the full conversation on the Muslim Philanthropy Podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts.

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