(Originally published by The Hill on June 24, 2025.)

President Trump’s demand of “unconditional surrender” by the Iranian regime is both absurd and terrifying.

It is absurd because history’s examples of unconditional surrender mostly have followed brutal destruction — Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki — quite unlike the narrowly targeted strikes that the U.S. and Israel have launched on Iran. And it is terrifying because the president’s grand delusions just might march us down that road to Armageddon.

Beyond courting that calamity, the U.S. attacks on Iran violate a hallowed principle of international law.

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