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

Great phrases often sound decisive in times of war. “Unconditional surrender” is one of them. It carries the echo of 1945, of emperors capitulating and wars ending cleanly on the deck of a battleship. The phrase has resurfaced in Washington’s demands toward Tehran, but political scientist Francis Fukuyama has approached it with skepticism. Among other problems, he points out, it assumes a coherent political order capable of surrender, something that simply does not exist in Iran, and perhaps never existed.

The problem of demanding surrender

Donald Trump recently demanded Iran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER,” promising that the country would later be rebuilt into something “economically bigger, better and stronger than ever” under new, “acceptable” leadership. In a high-profile message on social media, he even referred to his own political brand with the slogan “Make Iran great again” a play about Make America Great Again that projected confidence in military strength and the idea of ​​remaking another state in Washington’s image. The statement raised an obvious question: what exactly is this war intended to achieve?The misguided confidence behind “unconditional surrender” is easier to understand in light of the administration’s recent success in Venezuela, where a swift operation captured President Nicolás Maduro. It was the kind of clean, decisive result that can foster faith in the simple power of force. When Donald Trump later joined Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in launching attacks on Iran, he seemed to expect something similar: a short campaign that would end in rapid capitulation. Instead, the war spread across the Middle East, with Iran firing missiles and drones at US allies and bases around the Persian Gulf. It quickly became clear that what remained of the Iranian leadership was unwilling to surrender and that the conflict could drag on for weeks.Which leaves a deeper uncertainty at the heart of the war itself. Is the goal to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, overthrow its leadership, reassure American allies, or somehow reshape Iranian society? Or is it something more ambitious, a civilizational project framed in the language of democracy? Trump has avoided the phrase “regime change,” a political reflex learned from two decades of American misadventures in the Middle East. Yet his own words largely explain it: talk of an “acceptable” new leadership, promises to rebuild Iran after victory, the suggestion that the country’s future begins once its current rulers are gone. Which leaves war explained through a shifting combination of purposes: nuclear containment one day, liberation the next.And that uncertainty is why the idea of ​​unconditional surrender is so unrealistic.

The Misplaced Confidence Behind “Unconditional Surrender”

Political scientist Francis Fukuyama, best known for The End of History and The Last Man, where he argued that liberal democracy had largely won the battle of ideologies, approaches the situation with a characteristically pragmatic lens. In his view, wars like this require clearly limited objectives rather than radical declarations. Normally, a careful leader in such circumstances would lower expectations and define an achievable goal, degrading much of Iran’s ability to strike targets with ballistic missiles and drones, for example, creating a plausible moment to declare victory and withdraw. Instead, Trump moved in the opposite direction. According to him, the new goal of “unconditional surrender” suddenly raises the goal to an almost unattainable height.Fukuyama’s critique begins with something more prosaic: how power actually works within the Iranian state.The demand for unconditional surrender assumes a government that can order 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 like that. Its security apparatus is divided between multiple institutions, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Basij militia and the regular armed forces, each with their own networks and loyalties. After US and Israeli attacks targeted senior commanders, the command structure has become even less coherent.

Under these circumstances, expecting a clean capitulation is an illusion. “Iran’s forces (the IRGC, the Basij and the regular army) are highly decentralized,” Fukuyama observed, noting that with leadership disrupted it is not even clear that a single hierarchy is still capable of imposing surrender. More importantly, surrender would threaten the survival of the regime. Iran’s clerical government maintains power largely through force. It is deeply resented by large sections of the population, particularly after the violent repression of protest movements. The armed groups that support the regime understand that laying down their arms would probably mean the end of their own political protection. “The IRGC and Basij will not hand over their weapons” Fukuyama wrote: “Because they themselves wouldn’t survive.”

In other words, the conflict is unlikely to end through the kind of formal capitulation that Washington seems to hope for. For the Iranian regime, surrender would not simply mean military defeat; it would almost certainly mean political extinction. The institutions that support the State, in particular the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij, understand this clearly. They have every incentive to continue fighting, even in a degraded form.

The limits of bombing a country into submission

The last problem, Fukuyama maintains, is historical.The belief that air power alone can force a political surrender has repeatedly been proven wrong. During World War II, the United States and Britain devastated German cities in the hope that the devastation would break the will of the Nazi government. It wasn’t like that. The regime collapsed only after Soviet and allied forces physically occupied the country. A more recent example is found in Gaza. After years of large-scale Israeli bombing and ground operations, much of the territory’s infrastructure has been destroyed and Hamas severely weakened. However, the group persists in tunnels and shelters, still capable of obstructing any efforts to rebuild Gaza and establish a stable post-conflict government. There are only two cases that Fukuyama can identify in which the bombing alone produced a decisive political result. One of them was Japan in 1945, when the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki convinced the emperor that further resistance was useless. The other was Serbia during NATO’s Kosovo campaign in 1999, and even there the bombing campaign triggered internal unrest that helped topple Slobodan Milošević, followed by a long-term NATO presence on the ground. Iran presents a much more complicated challenge. It is geographically vast, politically resilient, and capable of absorbing losses while continuing to retaliate. Even if airstrikes destroy much of its visible military infrastructure, missile launchers, drone bases and ammunition depots, thousands of fighters are still able to continue the fight. As Fukuyama says, “The tens of thousands of individual fighters are still there and will retain some residual capability to counterattack.”

That means the conflict is unlikely to end with a dramatic capitulation. What is much more likely is a prolonged cycle of retaliation, with drones and missiles targeting US allies and military facilities across the Gulf.

To understand the strange logic of the current war, it is useful to review an argument that haunted 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 had been defeated and Soviet communism had collapsed. Liberal democracy, linked to capitalism, open markets and representative institutions, seemed to stand alone. Fukuyama suggested that the world could be getting closer “the end point of the ideological evolution of humanity and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

The phrase was widely misinterpreted. Fukuyama did not predict the end of the conflict or political struggle. His claim was more limited: no competing ideology seemed capable of organizing modern societies with the same durability. Even if authoritarian systems returned, he believed the long-term trajectory still pointed to democratic governance becoming more prevalent over time.For policymakers in Washington and Europe, the argument had practical implications. If democracies rarely fight each other, D’s central proposaldemocratic theory of peacethen encouraging the expansion of democratic institutions could be framed as a strategy and principle. The logic was appealingly clear: political liberalization would encourage economic openness, economic openness would generate prosperity, and prosperous democracies would behave as stable partners rather than adversaries. If the liberal order is expanded, the world should gradually become less violent. You can hear the echo of that thought in the way Donald Trump talks about Iran today. His promise that the country will be “economically bigger, better and stronger than ever” once it accepts “acceptable” leadership is based on the same underlying assumption: remove the existing regime, connect the country to global markets and eventually stability will follow. But that story was never universally accepted. The most influential critic was Samuel P. Huntington, who argued that the world was not converging on liberal democracy at all. He believed that the ideological battles of the 20th century were giving way to something older and more tenacious: civilization. In Huntington’s view, future conflicts would follow cultural and religious lines—Western, Islamic, Sinic, Orthodox, Hindu—as societies defended historical identities rather than adopting a single political model. Another criticism came from Benjamin Barber, who described the tension between two forces that are reshaping the world. “McWorld” was his shorthand for the expanding machinery of globalization: integrated markets, multinational corporations, financial networks, and the technological web that unites them. “Jihad,” in Barber’s formulation, did not refer strictly to Islamic militancy but to the reaction provoked by such forces, communities uniting around a tribe, religion, nation, or culture to defend themselves against what they perceived as a homogenizing global order. McWorld flattens out; Jihad resists. None of these forces, Barber argued, necessarily strengthened democracy. Three decades later, those arguments seem less theoretical. China has risen through a hybrid system that combines single-party political control with the dynamism of market capitalism rather than adopting Western democracy. Russia increasingly defines itself through an Orthodox identity and an autocratic state that presents itself as a defender of the continuity of civilization. India’s rise is often narrated through a rediscovery of civilizational identity rather than through an imitation of Western political models. And in parts of the Islamic world, political rhetoric frequently invokes cultural authenticity, historical continuity, and, in some cases, explicitly theocratic visions of governance, rather than an ideological convergence with the liberal order.

In other words, the world did not converge in the way that many authorities expected. It diversified, hardened and, in many places, retreated. Iran represents one of the clearest examples of that resistance. The Islamic Republic was born in a revolution that presented the United States not simply as a geopolitical rival but as the center of a global system that sought to remake other societies in its own image while tying them to an economic order designed in Washington, London and New York. Tehran’s leaders have spent decades describing themselves as a “axis of resistance” precisely to that agreement, rejecting not only US foreign policy but the political and economic model that accompanies it. From Tehran’s perspective, this is not stubbornness. It is the founding logic of the regime. The state was designed to resist absorption into the Western order, not to negotiate the terms of joining it. That is why demands for unconditional surrender misunderstand the terrain almost as completely as they misunderstand the military balance.

And there’s another complication that Washington rarely admits: its own record. The United States often wraps its interventions in the language of freedom and democracy, noble ideals that sound convincing on paper. In practice, the motives are much less noble: to secure resources, assert control, and expand American influence. That control is not just about soldiers and bombs. It manifests itself in sanctions, pressure on trade and energy networks, influence over central banks and financial systems, and the installation of governments willing to play by Washington’s rules. Time and time again, the history of democracy promotion has been inseparable from the history of the preservation of power. The result is a paradox that lies at the heart of the current conflict. Washington believes it is offering Iran a better system, democracy, markets and integration into the global economy. Tehran believes it is being asked to surrender its sovereignty, its ideology and, ultimately, its identity. And governments built around identity rarely capitulate simply because they are told the alternative will be better.

A slogan without strategy

If, as Fukuyama hopes, the Iranian regime does not capitulate, the United States faces three unattractive options. It could take a step back after downgrading Iran’s military capabilities, leaving in place a weakened but still dangerous Islamic Republic. It could be escalated by sending ground forces, a move fraught with both military and political risks. Or it could expand the bombing campaign to civilian infrastructure, power grids, desalination plants, and transportation networks, inflicting suffering on the very population the United States claims it is trying to protect or liberate.None of these paths match the dramatic clarity suggested by the phrase “unconditional surrender.” As Fukuyama points out, the words may have simply appealed to the president without much thought about how they might backfire.“I’m tempted to believe,” he wrote, “that Trump simply liked the sound of the words, without thinking about the ways they might come back to haunt him.”More fundamentally, the war was started without a clear objective: The United States can degrade Iran’s capabilities, he concludes, but it cannot easily wipe out the Islamic Republic or control what comes next.The story, it seemed, was never going to end so well.