The burden of peace is a rule John Kiriakou applies to asymmetric conflicts, stated in July 2025 in answer to the objection that any demand on Israel should be matched by a demand on Hamas.
The rule
“In any kind of lopsided military conflict, most of the burden of making peace falls on the superior military force,” Kiriakou says. The stronger party “is going to have the advantage”, and therefore “they’re going to have to make most of the concessions” if a ceasefire is the object.[1][2]
He applied it to a negotiation he considered already dead. There were, he said, no peace talks — the United States had walked out and they “weren’t accomplishing anything anyway” — and there was “no chance” of a settlement “because the Israelis aren’t serious.”[3][1]
Against unconditional surrender
Kiriakou anticipates the counter-example: the end of the Second World War. He rejects it. “I never — I wasn’t there, but I would have never agreed with the policy of unconditional surrender. I think it dragged World War II on much longer than it needed to.”[2]
In any case, he argues, the model no longer describes how wars stop. “Those days are gone. That’s just not how conflicts end anymore.” What happens instead is the pattern Saddam Hussein set: “you go hide in your spider hole. You leave weapons behind and then an insurgency pops up.” And whatever the outcome, “nobody ever admits that they were defeated.”[4]
What negotiating actually takes
Against the shuttle diplomacy of the Henry Kissinger era, and Philip Habib’s in the 1980s, Kiriakou grants the practitioners their diligence whatever else may be said of them — Kissinger “certainly was a hardworking dude” who “went back and forth all the time” — and describes ending a complicated war between states as an arduous, prolonged process that had not begun in Gaza at all.[5]
He also notes a point of agreement between the belligerents that rarely survives translation to the United States: the Israelis themselves accept the Hamas health ministry’s casualty figures, and it is “only the Zionists in the United States who pretend like they’re not true.” His own view is that the figures are an undercount.[6]