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The writer is author of ‘Black Wave’ and an FT contributing editor
President Donald Trump is frustrated. He wants to know why Iran hasn’t caved in the face of the biggest US military build-up since the 2003 Iraq invasion. This snippet of presidential thinking comes to us courtesy of his special envoy Steve Witkoff, who said in an interview with Fox News last weekend that Trump was curious as to “why they haven’t capitulated? . . . Why haven’t they come to us and said, ‘We profess that we don’t want a weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do’?”
Witkoff’s statement reveals both a misunderstanding of history and a misreading of how the Islamic republic makes decisions. In response to his musings, and just ahead of the resumption of the indirect US-Iran talks in Geneva, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian and its senior security official Ali Shamkhani promised that “Tehran won’t develop nuclear weapons” in line with supreme leader Ali Khamenei’s stated ban on weapons of mass destruction. The introduction to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — which Trump himself later tore up — also states: “Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.”
Iran may profess this now, but its assurances have not been enough to convince the US — or the International Atomic Energy Agency — of the peaceful nature of its nuclear programme. Yet the White House has failed to define, with any consistency, what Iran must do — the demands have ranged from zero to low enrichment to shipping out stockpiles of enriched uranium and destroying centrifuges.
Witkoff focused on the nuclear programme. Secretary of state Marco Rubio has made clear that Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal is also on the table. Its regional proxies have also been thrown into the mix at various times.
This blurs the nature of US demands on Iran, leaving them somewhere between verification and surrender. But Witkoff’s statement also raises the question of what Iranian capitulation looks like to Trump, to US officials such as Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and, crucially, to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
All three have mused about the removal or killing of Khamenei and the wholesale collapse of the Islamic republic. When discussing the war in Gaza, Graham and various Israeli officials, including Netanyahu himself, have made repeated references to the capitulation of Germany and Japan in the second world war. “Just flatten it,” Graham said, referring to Gaza. “We flattened Berlin. We flattened Tokyo.”
This vision of capitulation appears to be seeping into the debate about Iran. Setting aside the fact that guardrails were set in place to avoid another such total war, including the UN charter and Geneva Conventions, such capitulations are rare in modern history, precisely because they require total war, devastating destruction, state collapse and decimation of the leadership.
In 1999, Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milošević gave up after 78 days of sustained Nato bombing — and some argue it was a forced settlement rather than a capitulation. As for Hamas in Gaza and Hizbollah in Lebanon, they never waved the white flag of surrender but agreed to a ceasefire. For the two militant groups and their patrons in Tehran, ideology and survival are central to their calculus. As long as the regime remains cohesive — and there are no signs of cracks for now — it calculates the cost of resistance is lower than capitulation.
In Kyiv, nationalism is also the key factor preventing major concessions and frustrating Trump’s desire for a peace deal. Ukraine, a sovereign democracy, is making the same calculation but with broad public support. It believes that capitulating to Russia is more costly for the nation in the long run than continuing to fight. These drivers — ideology, national pride, regime survival — appear to escape real estate negotiators like Trump and Witkoff.
Tehran has its own reading of history and capitulation, which could be driving its current negotiating strategy. From its perspective, it is the US that has a record of retreating under fire, whether in Vietnam or, more immediately relevant, in Beirut, where Ronald Reagan withdrew the US Marines after their barracks and the American embassy were bombed in 1983 by the vanguards of Hizbollah.
The unknown element in all this remains Trump’s own mind. Unless he can be assured of a swift success that will not risk American lives or drive gas prices up, he could still settle for much less than the 2015 nuclear deal. With some creative wording, he could declare triumphantly that Tehran did capitulate under pressure from the armada he sent to the Middle East.