No, Unconditional Surrender Is Not a Green Light for Rape

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Sunday, March 08, 2026

 

Man, it’s gotten stupid out there.

 

I think the Trump administration’s “unconditional surrender” rhetoric is foolish and counterproductive. Although he had an exquisite case for a declaration of war against Iran, which has waged war against the United States and has been explicitly committed to our destruction for nearly half a century, the president failed to make it. (See my weekend column.) Moreover, the president is famously “transactional,” so the thought that he would not accept something that looked like solid victory because he was holding out for unconditional surrender is laughable.

 

I’m sure the amateur psychiatrist in Trump thinks there is strategic advantage in telling the mullahs he wants unconditional surrender, but that hardly means he wouldn’t settle for less — maybe (I fear) much less, such as the survival of the regime if it promises to behave as if it’s easing up on ballistic missiles and not pursuing nukes . . . at least until the next Democratic administration comes to power.

 

But even if the unconditional-surrender bombast is real, there is nothing in the laws of war that forbids it. Much less is it, as Tucker Carlson contends, a green light to ignore the international and domestic legal prohibitions on rape, to say nothing of other atrocities against civilians and the mistreatment of enemy combatants.

 

Truly demanding unconditional surrender would merely mean that our forces would continue lawful combat operations until the enemy regime agrees to surrender without conditions. It does not mean that our forces have immunity to commit war crimes until the enemy surrenders without conditions.

 

I try to ignore Carlson’s whole “Hey, here, check out the next outrageous thing I’m saying” claptrap. I’m a conservative, my priorities are constitutional liberty, limited government, and American national security. I don’t really care about the nationalist project to rebrand as “conservatism” the adoption of statist policies and the appeasement of our enemies. I’ve stopped caring about Republican politics since Trump “populism” has taken the party in that direction. Since I’m against the project, I don’t obsess over how Carlson, JD Vance, et al. opportunistically position themselves in the fool’s errand of navigating Trump’s careens from Wilson to Reagan to Mamdani. To invest intellectual energy in this would be to suggest that there’s something about it that’s not capricious. Count me out.

 

But Carlson’s claim that “unconditional surrender means foreign troops get to rape your wife and daughter if they want” merits a response, since many uninformed and misinformed people follow him. So here: It’s psychotic.

 

The Fourth Geneva Convention, of which the United States is not only a party but the driving force, explicitly states in Article 27:

 

Women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault.

 

Geneva IV is principally about protecting civilian populations, so there are other provisions along those lines. Importantly (because treaties are not self-executing), federal law — including the penal code and the Uniform Code of Military Justice — was amended to enforce these prohibitions.

 

The UCMJ makes rape subject to any punishment a court-martial could impose, potentially including life imprisonment, in Article 120 (codified in Section 920 of Title 10, U.S. Code).

 

The federal penal code (in Section 2441 of Title 18) includes among the war crimes punishable by life imprisonment:

 

Rape.—

 

The act of a person who forcibly or with coercion or threat of force wrongfully invades, or conspires or attempts to invade, the body of a person by penetrating, however slightly, the anal or genital opening of the victim with any part of the body of the accused, or with any foreign object.

 

It also adds:

 

Sexual assault or abuse.—

 

The act of a person who forcibly or with coercion or threat of force engages, or conspires or attempts to engage, in sexual contact with one or more persons, or causes, or conspires or attempts to cause, one or more persons to engage in sexual contact.

 

I have my issues with the Trump administration and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. But the suggestion that they would encourage the rape of Iranian women under any circumstances is a disgraceful smear. The implication that they would do it while we are encouraging the Iranian people to overthrow their jihadist regime and embrace liberty is lunatic.