President Donald Trump on Friday said the U.S. would accept no negotiated settlement with Iran short of “unconditional surrender” and repeated his demand for input into the choice of a new supreme leader nearly a week into the joint U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign against the Islamic Republic.
Writing on Truth Social, Trump said there would be “no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” and called for the selection of a “GREAT [and] ACCEPTABLE” leader or leaders to replace Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed by an Israeli bomb strike at the outset of the nearly week-old war.
The president added that once those conditions were met, the U.S. and “many of our wonderful and very brave allies and partners” would “work tirelessly” to reconstruct Iran and its’ economy by bringing it “back from the brink of destruction” and “making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before.”
“IRAN WILL HAVE A GREAT FUTURE. “MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).” Thank you for your attention to this matter!” he said, employing a version of his “Make America Great Again” slogan that has also been adopted by some of his supporters, including longtime Iran hawk and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.
Trump’s ultimatum to Tehran appeared to deliberately echo the demand made to Imperial Japan by the United States, the United Kingdom and China at the July 1945 Potsdam Conference in a declaration calling on Tokyo to “proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action.”
It warned that Japan would face “prompt and utter destruction” if it did not comply with the allies’ demands.
Because the U.S. campaign against Iran has been limited to airstrikes while Trump has thus far declined to involve — or rule out — American ground troops, it’s unclear to whom Iranian representatives might offer any “unconditional surrender.”
Asked to clarify what Trump meant by “unconditional,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested that it wasn’t necessary for Iran to actually surrender to anyone because Trump would decide for himself when Tehran had “surrendered” based on the extent to which the air campaign degrades the Islamic Republic’s military capabilities.
She told Fox News that Iran will have “surrender”
The president’s social media post comes less than a day after he told reporters the U.S. and Israeli militaries have continued to “totally demolish the enemy far ahead of schedule and at levels that people have never seen before” after six days of an air campaign that administration officials have said could last weeks or months if not longer.
He also said on Thursday that he must have a role in choosing Iran’s next leader to succeed Khamenei, whose successor has yet to be chosen by a group of Islamic clerics known as the Assembly of Experts. The current frontrunner for the post is Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the late supreme leader.
The younger Khamanei, 48, is considered a hardline cleric in the mold of his father and has deep ties to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.
But in an interview with Axios, Trump dismissed him as a “lightweight” and called him “unacceptable,” telling the outlet he and his administration want “someone that will bring harmony and peace to Iran” to be appointed along the lines of how Venezuela’s government quickly moved to install Vice President Delcy Rodriguez with his input after American forces captured former president Nicolas Maduro in a brazen exfiltration operation this past January.
“They are wasting their time. Khamenei’s son is a lightweight. I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodriguez] in Venezuela,” Trump said.
Separately, he told Reuters: “We want to be involved in the process of choosing the person who is going to lead Iran into the future. We don’t have to go back every five years and do this again and again.”
But Trump also complained to reporters that the U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign had eliminated many of the potential leaders who were seen as more amenable to his demands.
“Most of the people we had in mind are dead,” Trump said. “So, you know, we had some in mind from that group that is, is dead. And now we have another group. They may be dead also, based on reports. So, I guess you have a third wave coming in. Pretty soon, we’re not going to know anybody,” he said.
According to Iranian state media, more than 1,000 have been killed in what the Trump administration has dubbed “Operation Epic Fury” since the air campaign started in the early hours of Saturday morning, six days ago.
Since then, Iran has retaliated by striking targets in 14 countries, plunging the Middle East into chaos and fueling a spike in oil prices that could have global repercussions by causing economies the world over to slow and inflation to skyrocket.
Trump has laid out four main objectives for the war, including destroying Iran’s missile capabilities, annihilating its navy, ensuring it can’t obtain a nuclear weapon, and stopping it from arming outside terrorist groups.
But his administration’s explanations for why it chose to launch the attacks have shifted numerous times over the six days since bombing began.
Initially, the strikes were framed as necessary to prevent Iranian efforts to rebuild a nuclear weapons program Trump has claimed to have “obliterated” with bunker-busting munitions last June.
Secretary of State and White House National Security Adviser Marco Rubio told reporters Monday that the decision to attack was made to preemptively degrade Tehran’s ability to retaliate against American bases after an attack by Israel.
But Trump himself contradicted that claim during a media availability with reporters Tuesday after he was asked if Israel had “forced his hand” with their own attack plans.
“Based on the way that the negotiations was going, I think that they were going to attack first. And I didn't want that to happen,” Trump said. “So if anything, I might have forced Israel's hand. But Israel was ready and we were ready.”
He also told reporters it was his “opinion that they were going to attack first.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later echoed those comments during a press briefing on Wednesday when she said Trump’s decision to launch the campaign was grounded in what she called a “feeling based on fact” that Iran would imminently attack the United States and its allies.
“The president was not going to be just another president on a very long list who sat back and stood by and passed the buck of this direct threat to the next administration,” she said after The Independent pressed her on the shifting explanations for the war offered by top administration officials since the weekend.
“The president had a feeling, again, based on fact, that Iran was going to strike the United States was going to strike our assets in the region, and he made a determination to launch Operation Epic Fury based on all of those reasons,” Leavitt added.
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