Therefore, it was necessary to insist upon the formality of an unconditional surrender. Behind that formality, however, lay the implied promise of a magnanimous peace. It might even be said that the lesson of FDR’s parable was that if the Germans and Japanese would first agree to surrender unconditionally, they could anticipate that all reasonable requests would subsequently be granted. But what requests were reasonable? And how could the defeated nations know in advance, without appearing to bargain? Therein lay the intractable problem with the “unconditional surrender” formulation. It was,
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