Why humiliating Iran is unlikely to bring surrender

As Iran reeled from waves of Israeli military attacks last week, President Donald Trump posted a message demanding Tehran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” in nuclear talks.

After five rounds of indirect negotiations, the White House had demanded strict limits on Iran’s nuclear program that, to Iranian officials, did in fact amount to surrender. And that summoned bitter echoes of past humiliation that still resonate in the Iranian psyche today – and affect decisions to be flexible, or to dig in.

Iran balked. But Washington reinforced its demand for capitulation early Sunday, when American B-2 bombers and submarines joined the Israeli campaign. Mr. Trump said they had “obliterated” Iran’s three most important nuclear sites.

He then raised the stakes further: “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media channel Truth Social.

If strategists in Washington and Tel Aviv had calculated that airstrikes would put irresistible pressure on the authorities, some Iranian analysts say that nationalist sentiment has risen notably in recent days. That appears due in no small part to Mr. Trump’s hectoring manner and condescending tone, they add, which makes their proud nation even less likely to concede.

“It has a rally-around-the-flag effect,” says Hassan Ahmadian, an assistant professor of Middle East and North Africa studies at Tehran University. “The Iranian psyche is very much disturbed when there is an invasion of the country, or an imposition of the sort that Trump is talking about.”

Dr. Ahmadian says he has been surprised by the reactions to U.S. and Israeli attacks – and to Iran’s retaliatory barrages of ballistic missiles against Israel – among Iranian Millennials who usually have little time for politics, or for the Islamic Republic.

One example is a video message to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei from a young woman. She is “proud” to be born in Iran, and says: “I beg you, please do not back down. Do not give up at all.”

“You hear [millennials] speaking politics in a very nationalistic way,” says Dr. Ahmadian. “They may not like the [ruling] system, they may not like lots of things here. But it seems that Trump touched a very sensitive nerve in the Iranian society’s psyche.”

A bitter history

One reason is the conventional wisdom in Iran: that this was an “unprovoked attack on their country,” says Vali Nasr, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Study.

Indeed, Iran has made compromises under political and sanctions pressure in the past, such as during the Obama-era nuclear talks that resulted in Iran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. That deal was carefully negotiated for years with a sense of mutual respect, and preserved what Iran called its “right” to enrich uranium under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Mr. Trump withdrew the U.S. from that deal in 2018, which ultimately set in motion a chain of events that has led to the current American and Israeli bombing campaign.

“Iranians are fiercely nationalistic,” says Prof. Nasr. “Even though they dislike this regime … the belief that this attack was unfair, and will soon make Iran smaller and deny it its rightful place in the sun, is going to gnaw at Iranian nationalism for years to come.”

“My gut feeling is that no government can survive accepting unconditional surrender,” says Prof. Nasr, author of Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History. “Iranian people might be happy for a little bit, to get back to normalcy. But I think there will be a seething anger there.”

Iranian history is replete with examples, taught in schools, of how the remnants of the Persian Empire were carved up in disastrous treaties reached by Persian kings with imperial powers such as Russia and Great Britain.

Iranians’ modern experience with “surrender,” which is burned into the national consciousness, especially among regime supporters, dates to the first decade of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

When Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, he triggered a brutal conflict of World War I-style trench warfare, ballistic missile exchanges, and eventual chemical weapons use by Iraq, which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

Iran eventually pushed Iraqi forces back, in what it called the “imposed war.” But the newly minted Islamic Republic then went on the offensive, vowing to turn Iraq into another Islamic Republic.

In those days, the water that gushed from the fountain at the sprawling cemetery south of Tehran was dyed red to honor the blood of Iran’s martyrs. But when the father of Iran’s revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was forced to accept a ceasefire in 1988, the human toll had been horrific, Saddam Hussein was still in power – and the Iran-Iraq border had barely moved.

“Happy are those who have departed through martyrdom,” Ayatollah Khomeini said, when he announced the ceasefire in a radio address that was read out for him. “Unhappy am I that I still survive, and have drunk the poisoned chalice.”

No choice but surrender?

From then on, the charismatic leader was unable to to walk, and he never again spoke in public. His son Ahmad reported that the Ayatollah “kept hitting himself with his fists” and groaning.

Today’s situation is not identical to Iran’s dilemma in 1988, says Dr. Ahmadian, though the desire to preserve national pride and avoid surrender is a common thread.

“Back in 1988, society had a real war fatigue, after eight years with no achievement,” he says. The current conflict “just started now.” The government is under pressure, “but we are attacked. Iran is reacting to an aggression. That is very much reverberating in society.”

As for the “poisoned chalice,” Dr. Ahmadian says, “there is no one willing to drink that at this point. And that goes for any country, not just Iran. You are attacked, then you are asked to negotiate, to give up, surrender. That is not going to happen.”

Yet some suggest that the Iranian government may have no option, given the damage that Israeli and U.S. bombing raids have done, the assassination of key military leaders and nuclear scientists, and targeting of Iran nuclear sites.

“The regime is now in a position where it has no choice but to surrender,” says a reformist university professor from Tehran, who gave his name as Arash and asked to remain anonymous. “Surrendering is the only way to ensure its survival.”

But that is by no means a universal opinion in Iran. For some, the level of bomb damage is irrelevant.

“The important point is that Iran has acquired nuclear knowledge, and in any future scenario, Iran will reestablish its nuclear technology,” says a Tehran accountant who asked not to give his name. “As a result, this attack will not lead to Iran’s surrender.”

An Iranian researcher contributed to this report.