Hello American prestige listeners.

It's Derek, joined, as always, by my friend and comrade Danny Bessner,

and we are very pleased to welcome back to the program somewhat auspiciously.

Treata Parsi.

Trita is co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He also has a substack. Trita Parsi. TRETA is a co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for

Responsible Statecraft. He also has a substack, Treadaparcy.substack.com, to which we will have a link in the show

description for people to check out what he's been doing lately. TRETA, thank you so much for

coming back on the show. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. As I was saying to you,

off Mike earlier, we scheduled this just thinking it's been a while since we've done an update on Iran.

Peace talks are back and forth. They're shooting at each other.

It would be a good time to touch base and see what's happening.

I did not think that we were going to be recording this in the middle of a flurry of Donald Trump tweeting out who knows what.

So with the proviso that anything we say here could become completely out of date in the couple of hours

is going to take us to produce this episode and get it out.

Donald Trump now says that he's spoken to Benjamin Netanyahu and through intermediaries,

he's spoken to Hezbollah, and they've agreed to either stop fighting altogether or at least stand down.

This is after the Iranians earlier in the day on Monday said that they were going to suspend negotiations

or negotiations about negotiations with the U.S. over, in part, the expanding Israeli campaign in southern Lebanon.

Where does this situation stand? Basically, what are you hearing? What is your impression of what's happened just over

the last few hours? So there's a couple of things. There's several different dimensions to all of

this. This is one of them. It's very important. The Iranians insisted in the first ceasefire that

it should be region-wide. The U.S. at first said that they agreed to it, later on kind of backed away from it. Undoubtedly, the Israelis are very unhappy about it. They don't want to be bound by any ceasefire that they're not part of negotiating themselves. But then again, they're hardly part of any ceasefires ever. But more importantly, at the end of the day, the Israelis cannot conduct any of these wars without US's support and help.

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