The joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign in Iran rages on, but its larger purpose remains unclear. Since beginning the hostilities on Feb. 28, U.S. President Donald Trump has presented shifting and often contradictory justifications, from curbing Iran’s nuclear program to remaking its political order. In recent days, there have been reports of exploratory negotiations between Washington and Tehran, but the American demands thus far appear as maximalist as the war effort itself. In fact, Trump has more than once demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender.”
The rhetoric is evocative, but it rests on a historical assumption that has rarely withstood close scrutiny. Far from bringing wars to a decisive and orderly close, the pursuit of unconditional surrender has more often prolonged conflict, hardened resistance, and produced outcomes far more ambiguous than the popularly accepted narrative suggests.
For much of the 20th and 21st centuries, calls for an enemy’s total capitulation have carried enormous symbolic power in U.S. political culture. “Unconditional surrender” seems to promise a total and morally unambiguous victory.
Crucially, the power of the narrative does not end with surrender. In its most compelling form, it extends into a transformative vision of defeated societies not only accepting their losses but being liberated and remade in the American image, emerging as stable, prosperous democracies.
In practice, however, even the most decisive military victories seldom translate into anything resembling the absolute defeat of a country’s body politic, its bureaucratic institutions, or its underlying ideological foundations, all of which tend instead to endure, adapt, and reconstitute themselves in ways that complicate the finality promised by the language of unconditional surrender.
Much of the mythology surrounding “unconditional surrender” in U.S. strategic thinking stems from the country’s decisive victory in World War II.
As retold through countless books, popular films, television series, museum exhibits, and video games, the widely accepted narrative depicts the United States and its allies crushing Germany and Japan through overwhelming military force, compelling their total capitulation in May and August 1945, respectively.
The policy itself was formalized at the 1943 Casablanca Conference, where the Allies declared that nothing short of complete submission would be accepted from the Axis powers. The declaration insisted that the Allied governments sought no harm to the ordinary populations of Germany or Japan but instead punishment for “their guilty, barbaric leaders.” Then-U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt later elaborated that he aimed for the “total and merciless destruction of the machinery” through which the Axis powers had imposed their rule, evoking the memory of President Ulysses S. Grant, whose moniker, “Unconditional Surrender,” had come to symbolize uncompromising wartime resolve.
Notwithstanding the clean-cut picture of total defeat, the official declaration served only to further entrench the German position. It is well documented that in the short- to mid-term aftermath of the proclamation, Nazi propaganda benefited from this all-or-nothing strategy. Adolf Hitler and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels used the announcement to argue that Allied powers intended to destroy not only the regime but also the entire nation, its state institutions, and anyone affiliated with the Third Reich. As they argued, anything short of a total war effort was futile, since Germans could face mass execution at the hands of the victorious Allies—the only path left was to fight until the bitter end.
When the war with Germany did finally end, the settlement that followed was far from the absolute rupture implied by the language of unconditional surrender. While thousands of officials and officers were tried, executed, or imprisoned for their roles in Nazi crimes, in many domains, administrative continuity persisted, and elements of the former military establishment were drawn into cooperation with the Allied authorities.
It was, in other words, a surrender, followed immediately by negotiation and compromise rather than the unqualified destruction of a defeated nation’s sociopolitical and administrative infrastructures.
The war’s Pacific front tells a similar story. There is little doubt that Japan was practically defeated by the summer of 1945. Its navy was virtually destroyed, it was under a blockade, and the U.S. firebombing campaign had destroyed close to 60 percent of urban areas. More than 187,000 Japanese civilians were killed, and 9 million were homeless. Yet defeat, in the military sense, did not translate into immediate capitulation. Within the Japanese leadership, a powerful faction remained committed to fight on, determined to defend the home islands, preserve the imperial institution, guarantee the safety of the emperor, and sustain a sense of national honor.
As in Germany, the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender, coupled with the refusal to clarify the fate of the emperor, appears to have reinforced this resolve. What might have served as an opening for negotiation instead narrowed the space for compromise, strengthening the voice of those who argued that surrender offered little more than humiliation and insecurity.
When surrender did occur, it was followed almost immediately by political compromise. The necessity of preserving the imperial institution to facilitate transition outweighed the desire to punish Emperor Hirohito for Pearl Harbor and the wider devastation of the Pacific theater.
The seven-year occupation (1945-1952) that followed thus took on a hybrid character. While Japan’s military apparatus was dismantled with rigor, governance proceeded largely through existing administrative and bureaucratic structures. Far from representing a complete break from the past, it underscored the extent to which even decisive victories depend on continuity—upon the preservation, however selective, of political and social institutions capable of sustaining order in the aftermath of defeat.
When Roosevelt invoked Grant’s name, he was referring to one of the earliest records of a celebrated call for unconditional surrender, dating back to the U.S. Civil War. As the legend goes, in the first major victory for the North, Grant refused to negotiate terms for the surrender of Fort Donelson in 1862, declaring that “no terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.” The statement earned him the nickname “Unconditional Surrender” and a promotion to major general of volunteers.
The true story, of course, is not so simple. Grant did indeed demand “unconditional surrender,” but that does not mean that he received it. The actual surrender involved two days of negotiations, after which the Confederate soldiers were permitted to keep their personal belongings, food rations were provided to the defeated troops, and senior officers retained their men.
Unconditional surrender did not become a routine strategy for Grant, either. It is well documented that he negotiated often and even offered generous terms to his adversaries. This often included paroling Confederate soldiers, allowing officers to keep their sidearms, and permitting defeated combatants to keep their horses. One may be able to point to a single battle or the fate of a foe and argue that the encounter amounted to total capitulation, but in practice, most Civil War surrenders involved negotiated terms. Most importantly, Grant never demanded unconditional capitulation from the entire Confederacy to end the war.
Despite limited to no historical context for an unconditional surrender as a successful military strategy, calls for a total spectacle of victory—with an enemy completely shattered, fully at the mercy of the victor—still persist. U.S. presidents and hawkish political leaders have long sought to dehumanize the enemy and vow to rid the world of “evildoers,” while the United States continues to rhetorically be cast as the bastion of goodness and liberty. This good-versus-evil binary requires an ending that carries unmistakable moral clarity, one that can seemingly be achieved only through the complete destruction of the wicked.
Total victory also reassures the American public that the sacrifices made were justified and that all present and future enemies will now be deterred from daring to challenge the forces of good. However, as demonstrated, wars may begin with grand declarations and promises of decisive triumph, but they almost always conclude through quieter and far less dramatic processes in which exhausted victors and adversaries confront the limits of their power.
In this sense, the promise of unconditional surrender has long functioned less as a realistic description of how wars end than as political language to construct public consent, sustain morale, and justify the immense human and material costs.
In the case of Iran, echoing familiar patterns and long-standing wartime rhetoric, the Trump administration continues to promise complete regime collapse, the destruction of all repressive institutions and coercive tools of the state, and the emergence of a democratic future marked by total freedom and liberation for the Iranian people.
History is not a predictive field of study, but if any lessons can be drawn from the previous cases of the United States’ military adventures, the current war will not end simply by pummeling the enemy harder and longer. What will ultimately end it is the gradual recognition—by all sides—of the limits of military force and the unavoidable need for political settlement. The continued insistence on unconditional surrender will only prolong an already devastating conflict.
Thus far, the evidence from Iran appears to follow the historical trends and patterns discussed. The regime has hardened its stance, and the political system has proved far more durable than many anticipated. The supreme leader has been assassinated, yet his son has assumed the office. The members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps killed by U.S. and Israeli strikes have been replaced by new and more hard-line commanders.
According to U.S. intelligence estimates, the Iranian regime may be weakened, but it is continuing to consolidate power. Trump claims that the country’s navy and air force have been annihilated, but drones and missiles continue to terrorize Israel and the rest of the region. Iran’s nuclear program has reportedly suffered major losses, yet much of it now appears to operate in the shadows.
The United States may still imagine that it can drive its adversary to its knees and compel total submission. There are always new weapons to deploy, new targets to strike, and ever more refined methods of dismantling an enemy’s infrastructure and security apparatus. Such force can shatter and disrupt, remove individuals, recalibrate strategic calculations, and even provide battleground victories. But it cannot, on its own, produce political order, manufacture legitimacy, or secure a durable peace for the day after.
Time and again, history has underscored a sobering truth: Wars have hard limits, and the pursuit of total victory seldom—if ever—yields outcomes that are clear-cut, swift, and conclusive.
