The Price of Iran’s Unconditional Surrender

Share this link on Facebook

Share this page on X (Twitter)

Share this link on LinkedIn

Share this page on Reddit

Email a link to this page

Historically, unconditional surrender to the United States has been followed by prolonged US military occupation.

On March 13, The Wall Street Journal reported that President Donald Trump ordered an amphibious group of 5,000 Marines and sailors and several warships to the Middle East, strengthening his declared end state for the war with Iran: unconditional surrender.

The American historical record of unconditional surrenders is generally positive: Ulysses Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia; Douglas MacArthur on the USS Missouri; and Walter Bedell Smith in Reims, France. Yet those surrenders came with high costs of occupation, governance, and finance, and these are missing from discussions of the current war.

Failing to accept the costs of unconditional surrender in the current war risks repeating the mistakes made after the Treaty of Versailles ended World War I, which is generally accepted as the proximate cause of the rise of Hitler’s Germany.

The three American wars required extensive, prolonged occupations. The military occupation of the Reconstruction South under martial law lasted 10 years. In post-World War II Japan, the Allied occupation lasted seven years; in Germany, 10 years.

By contrast, the occupation of post-World War I Germany lasted for 11 years, but was limited to the Rhineland, a mere 6.5 percent of German territory. The Allies ran the Rhineland with a very light hand to keep the occupation’s costs minimal, and they made........

© The National Interest