Of the many questionable decisions Donald Trump has made with regard to Iran, one of the strangest was his declaration last Friday that the United States would demand “unconditional surrender” from Tehran. When Trump launched the attack with Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, he was obviously hoping for a quick victory, something like the outcome he achieved when he snatched Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in January. But the war expanded across the Middle East, with Iran shooting missiles and drones at American allies and bases all over the Persian Gulf. It was clear that what remained of the Iranian leadership was not about to capitulate, and that the conflict could drag on—as Trump himself admitted—for weeks.
Normally, a smart leader in such a situation would try to lower expectations and declare an achievable objective in the war, such as degrading the better part of Iran’s ability to strike targets with ballistic missiles and drones. This would offer an opportunity for Trump to declare victory and disengage. Instead, Trump did the opposite.
The new objective of unconditional surrender suddenly raised the goalposts to an unachievable height. There are any number of reasons for Iran not to capitulate. In the first place, unconditional surrender assumes that there is a coherent government that can instruct the nation’s military to stand down, as the Japanese Emperor did in 1945. But Iran’s forces—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Basij, and regular military—are highly decentralized. Indeed, with the U.S.-Israeli targeting of military leadership, it is not evident that there is a single coherent command-and-control hierarchy remaining.
A second reason for thinking that surrender won’t happen is that it would expose the regime to internal disintegration. Iran is today being ruled by force; a large part of the population hates the regime of the clerics that killed tens of thousands of protesters in January. The IRGC and Basij will not give up their weapons, because they themselves would not survive.
A final reason for not expecting unconditional surrender is that a good part of the regime can survive and continue fighting for some time to come. The air campaign has been extremely effective in going after Iran’s visible military assets—air defenses, ballistic missiles, drones, launch facilities, ammunition storage, military bases, and the like. But the tens of thousands of individual fighters are still there, and will retain some residual capacity to fight back.
We have recently seen an example of what this looks like. The nearly two and a half year-long war between Israel and Hamas has destroyed a huge amount of infrastructure in Gaza, and deprived Hamas of the ability to launch major attacks. But they are still there, commanding some degree of popular support in their remaining tunnels and shelters. They have not surrendered, and will be a big obstacle to any attempt to rebuild Gaza and restore a post-conflict government. Gaza is a much smaller territory, and Israel has been willing to enter it with ground forces.
Iran by contrast is a very big country, and has a lot of places for the surviving regime to hide. It will not be possible to eliminate every missile and drone under their control, so we can expect continuing attacks on U.S.-aligned Gulf states and American facilities into the foreseeable future. The threat of a random drone striking the big airline hubs in the Gulf will be economically very damaging.
The basic problem that the United States and Israel face has to do with the limitations of airpower. We have a lot of experience with attempts to use airpower to achieve political objectives, and it is not encouraging. The U.S. Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces and the British Bomber Command flattened many German cities during World War II, hoping to break the will of the Nazi regime. But as the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey noted after the war, this terrible campaign did not bring the regime down; it collapsed only after the Russians and Western allies physically occupied Germany.
I can think of only two cases where strategic bombing by itself achieved a clear political objective. The first was Japan’s “unconditional surrender” on the deck of the USS Missouri, after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As in Germany, the United States was willing to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians by firebombing Japanese cities, and demonstrated in August 1945 a terrible new capability that convinced the Emperor and leadership that it made no sense to fight on.
The second case was Kosovo, where Serbia was attacked by NATO airpower in 1999 and eventually agreed to relax its grip on Kosovo. This result succeeded because the attack triggered a popular revolt against the government of Slobodan Milošević. Even so, NATO had to assemble a peacekeeping force, the Kosovo Force (KFOR), which is still on the ground in the region today.
If, as I expect, the Iranian regime does not capitulate, Trump will face three choices. He can in effect back down, declare victory, and end U.S. operations, leaving a weakened but still dangerous Islamic regime in power. Second, he could decide to send ground forces into the country, a move fraught with obvious dangers both in Iran and politically in the United States. (It is interesting that he has not entirely ruled this option out.) The final choice would be to expand the air campaign to a broader and broader range of targets, hitting civilian infrastructure facilities like desalination plants, the electrical grid, and transportation infrastructure. This would create a huge amount of misery for the Iranian people that Trump claims to want to support. Having neutralized most military targets, further bombing will inevitably hurt ordinary civilians, just as the Israelis have done in Gaza. The United States will, in effect, be bombing the rubble.
Given these unappealing choices, demanding unconditional surrender was a very foolish thing for the president to do. I’m tempted to believe that Trump just liked the sound of the words, without thinking through the ways in which they could come back to haunt him. But this was only one poor decision among many. The most serious was the decision to go to war in the first place without a clear rationale for doing so.
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.
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The strategic incoherence is thoroughgoing and comprehensive--from definition of problem to description of desired end state and everything in between. Whatever performative pleasure it might produce, the chest-thumping itself is deeply counterproductive, bringing more costs and risks than gains. In this context of complete incoherence, the notion of unconditional surrender doesn't even begin to make sense. I think you're on to something about the president liking the sound of the words. Kind of like the images of explosions on TV screens. Wow! Hell of a way to run a war, not to mention a country.
The only thing Trump cares about is how he looks on TV. This was his impersonation of Douglas MacArthur. What happens outside the TV studio does not interest him at all.