- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
President Trump insisted there are “no limits” to his power when asked in a new interview about his takeaways from the Iran war.
The president was pressed by Axios’s Marc Caputo during an interview about whether he learned there are bounds to his power during the Middle East conflict.
“I haven’t learned that lesson yet,” he replied. “I know there are, but there are no limits. We defeated them totally militarily.”
“Unconditional surrender” is when there is an end to hostilities, and one side is so completely defeated that they agree to stop fighting without receiving anything in exchange. Then the winning side gets to make all sorts of demands on the loser and they must agree.
The Treaty of Versailles that ended World War One is an example of this. Germany got punished hard in that document, which is widely believed to have set the stage for World War Two some twenty years later.
In this case, though, the US agreed to also end hostilities in Lebanon (including and especially by Israel) and arrange for a whole lot of reparations to be paid. Those are concessions. The winning side in an unconditional surrender doesn’t make concessions.