Grand phrases have a way of sounding decisive in wartime. “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 met it with skepticism. Among other problems, he notes, it assumes a coherent political order capable of surrender, something that simply does not exist in Iran, and perhaps never did.
