The folly of ‘unconditional surrender’: Fukuyama, author of ‘The End of History’, on why Iran won’t surrender to Washington | World News –

Grand phrases have a way of seeming decisive in wartime. “Unconditional surrender” is one of them. It has echoes of 1945, with the surrender of emperors and wars ending cleanly on the deck of a warship.

This phrase has reappeared in Washington’s demands towards Tehran, but political scientist Francis Fukuyama met it with skepticism. He points out that, among other problems, it assumes a coherent political system capable of capitulation, something that simply does not exist in Iran, and may never have happened.

The problem is demanding surrender

Donald Trump recently demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender”, promising to later rebuild the country into something “bigger, better and economically stronger than ever” under new and “acceptable” leadership. In a high-profile message on social media, he mocked his own political brand with the slogan “Make Iran great again” A play called “Make America Great Again” demonstrated confidence in military power and the idea of ​​remaking another country in Washington’s image. The announcement raised an obvious question: What exactly is this war intended to achieve?

It is easier to understand the misplaced confidence behind “unconditional surrender” in light of the administration’s recent success in Venezuela, where a swift operation captured President Nicolas Maduro. It was the decisive, clean result that could encourage belief in the power of simple force. When Donald Trump later joined Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in launching strikes on Iran, he seemed to hope for something similar: a short campaign ending in a quick surrender.

Instead, the war has spread across the Middle East, with Iran launching missiles and drones at US allies and bases around the Persian Gulf. It quickly became clear that what remained of the Iranian leadership was not about to give up, and that the conflict could continue for weeks.This leaves a state of uncertainty deeper at the heart of the war itself. Is the goal to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, overthrow its leadership, reassure America’s allies, or reshape Iranian society in some way? Or is it something more ambitious, a civilizational project framed in the language of democracy? Trump has avoided using the phrase “regime change,” a political response learned from two decades of failed American adventures in the Middle East.

But his words make it abundantly clear: talk of a new, “acceptable” leadership, promises to rebuild Iran after victory, and the suggestion that the country’s future begins once its current rulers are gone. Which leaves war explained through a shifting mix of purposes: nuclear containment one day, liberation the next.This uncertainty lies at the heart of why the idea of ​​unconditional surrender is unrealistic.

Misplaced trust behind “unconditional surrender”

Political scientist Francis Fukuyama, best known for his books The End of History and The Last Man, in which he argued that liberal democracy has largely won the battle of ideologies, approaches the situation through a distinctly practical lens. In his view, such wars require clearly limited goals rather than sweeping statements. Normally, a cautious leader in such circumstances would lower expectations and set an achievable target, significantly impairing Iran’s ability to strike targets with ballistic missiles and drones, for example, creating a reasonable moment to declare victory and disengage.

Instead, Trump moved in the opposite direction. According to him, the new goal of “unconditional surrender” suddenly raises the goalkeepers to an almost unattainable height.Fukuyama’s critique begins with something more concrete: how power actually works within the Iranian state.The demand for unconditional surrender presupposes the existence of a government capable of ordering its armed forces to lay down their arms at a single decisive moment, as the Emperor of Japan did at the end of World War II.

Iran doesn’t work that way. Its security apparatus is divided between multiple institutions, such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Basij militia, and the regular armed forces, each of which has its own networks and loyalties.

After US and Israeli strikes targeted senior leaders, the command structure became less cohesive.

In such circumstances, expecting a clean surrender is just wishful thinking.

“Iranian forces — the IRGC, the Basij, and the regular army — are highly decentralized,” Fukuyama noted, noting that with leadership disabled, it is not even clear that a single hierarchy is still able to force surrender. More importantly, surrender would threaten the regime’s survival. Iran’s theocratic government maintains power largely through force. Large segments of the population feel very dissatisfied with it, especially after the violent suppression of protest movements.

Armed groups supporting the regime realize that laying down their arms would likely mean the end of the political protection they enjoy. “The Iranian Revolutionary Guard and the Basij will not surrender their weapons.” Fukuyama wrote, “Because they themselves will not survive.”

In other words, the conflict is unlikely to end through the kind of formal surrender that Washington expects. For the Iranian regime, surrender does not simply mean military defeat; This would almost certainly mean political extinction.

The institutions that support the state, especially the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij, understand this clearly. They have every incentive to keep fighting, even in deteriorating form.

The limits of bombing the state into submission

Fukuyama believes that the last problem is historical.The belief that air power alone can force political surrender has repeatedly proven wrong. During World War II, the United States and Britain razed German cities in the hope that the destruction would break the will of the Nazi government.

It didn’t happen. The regime collapsed only after Soviet and Allied forces effectively occupied the country. The most recent example is in Gaza. After years of large-scale Israeli bombing and ground operations, a large portion of the Strip’s infrastructure was destroyed, and Hamas was severely weakened.

However, the group continues to remain in tunnels and shelters, and is still able to obstruct any effort to rebuild Gaza and form a stable post-conflict government. There are only two cases that Fukuyama can identify where the bombing itself led to a decisive political outcome. One was Japan in 1945, when the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki convinced the emperor that further resistance was futile. The other was Serbia during NATO’s Kosovo campaign in 1999, and even there the bombing campaign sparked internal unrest that helped lead to the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic, and the ensuing long-term NATO presence on the ground. Iran is represented by T In fact, it is much more complex. It is a geographically vast country, politically flexible, and capable of absorbing losses while continuing to retaliate. Even if airstrikes destroy much of its visible military infrastructure, missile launch pads, drone bases, and ammunition depots, thousands of fighters will still be able to continue fighting. In the words of Fukuyama, “Tens of thousands of individual fighters are still there, and they will retain some residual fighting capacity.”

This means that the conflict is unlikely to end in a dramatic surrender. What is more likely is a long cycle of retaliation, with drones and missiles targeting US allies and military installations throughout the Gulf.

To understand the strange logic of the current war, it is useful to revisit the argument surrounding Western foreign policy after the Cold War.When Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man in 1992, he was trying to capture the moment after the Cold War. Fascism was defeated and Soviet communism collapsed. Liberal democracy, associated with capitalism, open markets and representative institutions, seemed to stand alone. Fukuyama suggested that the world may be getting closer “The endpoint of humanity’s ideological evolution and the mainstreaming of Western liberal democracy as the ultimate form of human government.”

This phrase has been widely misunderstood. Fukuyama was not predicting the end of conflict or political conflict. His claim was narrower than that: no competing ideology was able to organize modern societies with the same viability. Even if autocracies return, he believes the long-term trajectory still suggests that democratic rule is becoming more widespread over time.For policymakers in Washington and Europe, this argument had practical implications. If democracies rarely fight with each other, the proposition that lies at the heart of DrDemocratic peace theoryEncouraging the spread of democratic institutions can therefore be framed as a strategy and a principle.

The logic was attractively arranged: political liberalization would encourage economic openness, economic openness would generate prosperity, and thriving democracies would behave as stable partners rather than adversaries. If we expand the liberal order, the world will gradually become less violent. You can hear an echo of this thinking in the way Donald Trump talks about Iran today. His promise that the country will become “bigger, better and economically stronger than ever” once it accepts “acceptable” leadership is based on the same basic assumption: remove the existing order, connect the country to global markets, and stability will eventually follow. But this story was not universally accepted at all. The most influential critic was Samuel Huntington, who argued that the world was never so close together on liberal democracy. He believed that the ideological battles of the twentieth century were giving way to something older and more stubborn: civilization. In Huntington’s view, future conflicts will extend along cultural and religious lines – Western, Islamic, Chinese, Orthodox and Hindu – with societies defending historical identities rather than adopting a single political model. Another critique arrived from Benjamin Barber, who described the tension between two forces reshaping the world. “Macworld” was his shorthand for the expanding machinery of globalization: integrated markets, multinational corporations, financial networks, and the technological web that links them together. “Jihad,” in Barber’s formulation, does not refer narrowly to Islamic militancy, but rather to the violent reaction such forces provoke, the gathering of communities around tribe, religion, nation or culture to defend themselves against what they see as a monolithic world order.

Macworld is flattening. Jihad resists. Neither force necessarily worked to promote democracy, Barber said. Three decades later, these arguments seem less theoretical. China has risen through a hybrid system that blends single-party political control with the dynamism of market capitalism rather than embracing Western democracy. Russia increasingly defines itself through an Orthodox identity and an authoritarian state that presents itself as the defender of civilizational continuity.

India’s rise is often told through the rediscovery of civilizational identity rather than through imitation of Western political templates.

In parts of the Islamic world, political discourse often invokes cultural authenticity, historical continuity, and in some cases explicitly theocratic visions of governance, rather than ideological affinity with the liberal order.

In other words, the world has not converged quite as many policymakers once expected.

It has diversified, hardened, and in many places declined. Iran represents one of the clearest examples of that resistance. The Islamic Republic was born in a revolution that portrayed the United States not only as a geopolitical rival, but as the center of a global order that sought to remake other societies in its own image while linking them to an economic system designed in Washington, London, and New York. Tehran’s leaders have spent decades describing themselves as “rebels.” “Axis of resistance” Precisely for this arrangement, rejecting not only American foreign policy but also the political and economic model that accompanies it. From Tehran’s perspective, this is not stubbornness. This is the founding logic of the system. The state was designed to resist integration into the Western system, not to negotiate terms for joining it. For this reason, demands for unconditional surrender completely misunderstand the terrain and the military balance.

There is another complication that Washington rarely acknowledges: its own record.

The United States often wraps its interventions in the language of freedom and democracy, lofty ideals that sound convincing on paper. In practice, the motives are much less lofty: securing resources, asserting control, and expanding American influence. This control is not limited only to soldiers and bombs. This manifests itself in sanctions, pressure on trade and energy networks, influence on central banks and financial systems, and the installation of governments willing to play by Washington’s rules.

Time and again, the story of consolidating democracy has been inseparable from the story of maintaining power. The result is a paradox that lies at the heart of the current conflict. Washington believes it is offering Iran a better regime, democracy, markets, and integration into the global economy. Tehran believes that what is required of it is to give up its sovereignty, ideology, and identity in the end. Identity-based governments rarely give in simply because they are told that the alternative will be better.

Slogan without strategy

If the regime does not surrender As Fukuyama predicts, the United States faces three unattractive options. It could retreat after Iran’s military capabilities are weakened, leaving a weak but still dangerous Islamic Republic. It could escalate by sending ground forces, a move fraught with military and political risks. Or it could expand the bombing campaign to include civilian infrastructure, electricity grids, desalination plants, and transportation networks, causing suffering to the very populations the United States claims it is trying to protect or liberate.None of these paths match the dramatic clarity implied by the phrase “unconditional surrender.” As Fukuyama points out, the words may have simply won over the president without giving much thought to how they might backfire.“I tend to think that Trump loved the sound of words, without thinking about the ways they might come back to haunt him,” he wrote.More importantly, by entering a war without a clear goal, the United States can reduce Iran’s capabilities, he concludes, but it cannot easily end the Islamic Republic, or control what comes next.It seems that history will never end with such precision