Today, 81 years ago, on September 2, 1945, Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu boarded the American battleship Missouri, which was anchored in Tokyo Bay.
Alongside him stood representatives of the Japanese military. Across from them stood General Douglas MacArthur and representatives of the Allies.
The ceremony was brief. In less than half an hour, Japan’s instrument of surrender was signed, and World War II officially came to an end. But in fact, that morning did not just end a war. Peace began.
And this is a distinction that is important to understand today, of all days. Because looking back across eight decades, it is easy to look at Japan and see a democratic, prosperous, moderate country, and one of the United States’ most important allies in Asia. It is harder to remember what kind of Japan stood facing America just a few short years earlier.
This was a militaristic empire imbued with ideology, which for years waged cruel campaigns of conquest across Asia. It conquered vast territories, committed war crimes, attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, and was willing to send soldiers to die by the thousands in the name of the Emperor and the Empire.
In the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the intensity of that fanaticism was revealed to the Americans. Japanese soldiers continued to fight even when defeat was all but certain. Kamikaze pilots turned suicide itself into a weapon of war.
The United States did not respond to this fanaticism with hope alone. It responded with force. The Potsdam Declaration demanded unconditional surrender.
After Japan did not immediately accept the terms, the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria. Faced with a reality where the continuation of the war threatened to bring further devastation to Japan, Emperor Hirohito intervened and ordered the acceptance of the Allied terms.
On September 2, the surrender was signed. From this comes the first lesson of 1945: sometimes there is no way to reach peace before the side that initiated the war fully understands that it has lost it.
Not because war is better than peace. Quite the opposite.
Because sometimes, as long as a fanatic regime believes that violence pays off, an agreement does not end a war. It only postpones the next round.
The resolution that changed Japan
The truly important story begins after the signatures on the deck of the Missouri. America did not settle for a ceasefire. Nor did it settle for a vague Japanese promise to behave better in the future. The Allies dismantled the military apparatus that enabled Japanese aggression. The army was disbanded. Officials from the militaristic establishment were removed from positions of influence. War criminals were brought to trial. Under MacArthur’s leadership, sweeping political, economic, and social reforms were introduced.
The goal was defined in two words: demilitarization and deradicalization. The direction was sharp and clear: Japan would no longer be able to return to being the empire that ignited wars across Asia.
And then something amazing happened. The enemy that bombed Pearl Harbor became, within a generation, the United States’ most important strategic partner in Asia.
In 1960, the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan was signed. For more than six decades, this alliance has been one of the pillars of the American strategic order in Asia and the Indo-Pacific region.
This is perhaps one of the most surprising ironies of the 20th century. America did not achieve friendship with Japan by allowing Japanese militarism to survive. It achieved friendship with Japan after Japanese militarism was defeated.
It did not force the Japanese people to be an enemy forever. It liberated their future from the system that made them an enemy. And this is the crucial difference.
America was not in an eternal war with the Japanese people. It was in a war with a political and ideological order that turned Japan into a war machine. Once that order was defeated, the possibility for something else opened up.
Not every enemy must remain an enemy
In the West, a tendency has developed in recent decades to assume that the path to peace almost always begins with compromise. History teaches otherwise. Sometimes peace begins precisely when doubt about who won comes to an end.
The Germany and Japan of 1945 are the most prominent examples. In both cases, no agreement was signed that allowed the old regimes to remain in place in the hope that they would gradually change their ways. The systems that gave birth to the war were broken. And only then did reconstruction begin. This lesson is especially important today in the Middle East.
It is important in Gaza. And it is important in Iran.
This does not mean that Gaza is Japan, or that Iran is Japan. Historical analogies are not mathematical formulas. Japan was a sovereign state that was defeated in total war and occupied. Hamas is a terrorist organization ruling part of Palestinian society; Iran is a nation of tens of millions of people, with an ancient history, culture, and national identity. Yet the differences do not negate the principle.
When Hamas ideology turns war into a calling, and when an Iranian leadership builds its legitimacy on relentless struggle against an external enemy, a ceasefire is not peace, it is oxygen.
The lesson of Gaza
This is why Israel cannot afford to end the campaign in Gaza while Hamas is still able to present October 7 as a successful model. Israel can agree to arrangements, mediation, and ceasefires. It can and should strive to minimize civilian suffering and build a different political horizon for the residents of Gaza. But one thing must not remain ambiguous: Hamas cannot remain the military and sovereign force that dictates the future of the Strip.
Israel’s stated goal remains the dismantling of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities and the removal of the threat from Gaza. Even amid current disagreements over a future arrangement, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists that the disarmament of Hamas must precede a full Israeli withdrawal.
Some view this demand as an obstacle to peace. The history of 1945 allows us to view it the opposite way. Precisely the continued arming of Hamas is the obstacle to peace.
As long as a child in Gaza grows up within a system where the men of October 7 are portrayed as role models, where weapons grant political status, where terror against Jews is described as a national achievement, and where the organization that brought immense destruction to the Strip is able to claim it survived and therefore won, the conditions for the next war are already being sown in the ground.
Demilitarization, therefore, is not revenge. De-radicalization is not humiliation.
Creating an education system that does not train another generation for holy war is not solely an Israeli interest. It is a Palestinian interest. The person liberated from a rule that teaches him his supreme goal is to die in the struggle against his neighbor is not defeated. Another possibility to live is opened before him. Japan is the most extreme proof that a nation is not forever bound to the ideology that ruled it at a certain moment in history.
And what is true for Gaza is true, on a different scale, for Iran as well. Here the lesson becomes much more strategic for the United States. The problem America and Israel have with Iran is not the Iranian people. In fact, far deeper ties exist between Iranian culture and the West than the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic allows us to see.
The problem is the regime that took over Iran in 1979 and built its identity around revolution, anti-Americanism, the elimination of Israel, and the export of ideology by force. From the regime’s perspective, “Death to America” is not a rhetorical deviation. “The Zionist entity” is not a border dispute. The confrontation with the West is one of the sources of the revolution’s legitimacy.
Therefore, the biggest mistake Washington can make is to confuse Iran with the Islamic Republic. They are not the same thing. Just as Japan existed for thousands of years prior to the militarism of the 1930s and continued to exist long after it, ancient Iran is far older than the Ayatollahs.
The Iranian people can have a future after the revolutionary regime. And perhaps entirely different relations with America and Israel as well.
United States President Donald Trump is currently waging sharp military and economic pressure against Iran. His administration announced on August 24 the “Economic Outcast” operation, designed to cut the regime off from its financial sources, and in recent days military exchanges between the United States and Iran have also resumed.
One can debate various components of this strategy. One can and must examine its costs, the limits of power, and the danger of being dragged into a war. But Tehran must not be allowed to conclude that persistence pays, and that if it simply holds out long enough, the West will grow weary, retreat, and ultimately learn to live with the Iranian threat. If, at the end of every confrontation, the regime retains the infrastructure that enables it to rebuild its power, threaten again, and wait for the next opportunity to attack, then neither peace nor decisive victory has been achieved. What has been achieved is merely a pause until the next round. And the Middle East has already paid far too high a price for such pauses.
Victory is not the opposite of peace. Sometimes it is the condition for it
On September 2, 1945, American bombers flew over the Missouri as the ceremony ended. MacArthur declared that the guns had fallen silent and that a great tragedy had reached its end. Eighty-one years later, Japan and the United States are not preparing for the next war against each other. They are preparing together to face the challenges of the 21st century. This is a tremendous political achievement.
But it was not born from America learning to live with the kamikaze. It was born because the era that produced the kamikaze came to an end. And this is perhaps the greatest lesson that Israel and the United States must remember today. The future of the Palestinians does not have to be Hamas. The future of the Iranians does not have to be the Revolutionary Guards. Peoples can change. States can change. Enemies can become partners. But for the future to change, terror must first be defeated unequivocally.
President Trump is right in his central principle regarding Tehran: a regime that repeatedly threatens its neighbors and America must understand that aggression is not a path to survival and concessions. And Netanyahu is right to insist that Hamas cannot emerge from the war as an armed force that continues to rule Gaza.
The challenge for both of them is to ensure a victory that enables a day after. Not an arrangement based on the West learning to live with the threat, but an arrangement based on the threat ceasing to be an organizing principle of the state and society.
On the deck of the Missouri today, 81 years ago, one of the most terrible wars in human history came to an end. But at that very hour, the seed of one of the most impressive alliances created after it was also sown.
The author is Shimon Refael, Deputy Head of the National Security Policy Institute of the Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF), and former policy advisor to Israel’s Minister for Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer.