By John J. Mearsheimer
John's Substack
June 23, 2026
On 21 June 2026, I was on Tom Switzer's podcast - "Switzerland" - with Trita Parsi. We focused almost exclusively on the negotiations between Iran and the US, which had begun earlier that day in a resort near Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. It is fair to say those negotiations got off to an inauspicious start, raising doubts about whether the two sides would ever reach a deal.
Many people, of course, think that Israel and its powerful lobby in the US will ultimately derail the negotiations and hopefully the war will start up again, providing an opportunity for the US and Israel to finish the job they started.
Trita and I poured cold water on this perspective. We argued that the war is lost, there is no way of winning it, and going back to war would only make a bad situation worse. More specifically, the US absolutely needs to reach an agreement with Iran - no matter what Israel and the diehard Zionists in the West think - because the international economy is heading toward the precipice. As President Trump said, there is a real danger of an "economic catastrophe," and he does not want to be known as Herbert Hoover the Second.
In essence, the US has a profound incentive to make a deal with Iran that reflects the terms laid out in the Memorandum of Understanding.
This article was originally published on John's Substack.