Copper miner and oil producer Freeport-McMoRan Inc. (NYSE: FCX) announced Wednesday morning that the company had appointed two new board members recommended by activist investor Carl Icahn. That brings the company’s number of directors to 11, following Tuesday’s announcement that the board had been reduced in number from 16 to nine.

It’s pretty tough to characterize Freeport’s capitulation to Icahn’s demands as anything other than a total surrender. When Freeport announced that it was reducing the number of directors on its board and reviewing what to do with its oil and gas business, the alternatives it described and the other steps the company may take could have been written by Icahn two months ago.

Icahn, who holds 8.8% of Freeport’s stock, said in a statement Wednesday morning:

We have had a number of contacts with representatives of Freeport over the past few weeks and commend the board for adopting a number of our recommendations, such as reducing the number of directors to 11 and providing us with 2 representatives on the board, as well as representation on the board of Freeport’s oil and gas subsidiary. … To preempt criticism that we were willing to accept only a small minority position on the board, I should point out that in many of the situations just over the last few years, where we accepted only small minority positions, shareholder value has been greatly enhanced.

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Icahn knows that he doesn’t need a majority of the board to get what he wants from Freeport. When he announced in August his stake in the company, he said he believed the shares were undervalued and the he intended to have discussions with the board and management of Freeport relating to the company’s capital expenditures, executive compensation packages and capital structure. He also said he wanted the company to rein in its high-cost production operations.

Read over the announcement from Freeport and you can check off each one of those items.

Why did Freeport give in to Icahn so easily? Because management got itself into this fix and doesn’t know how to get out? Because the steps Icahn proposed were so obvious that a child could have ticked them off and management would have looked petulant if they had fought against them?

Now whether or not Icahn can drive Freeport’s management and board to repair the damage they’ve done to shareholder value over the past two years remains to be seen. At the time Freeport acquired its former oil and gas business and Plains Exploration & Production, crude oil sold for more than $90 a barrel. By the time the deal closed in the fall of 2013, Freeport only saw one year’s benefit from the oil revenues before the price of oil collapsed.

Freeport’s managers can’t be blamed for the collapse, nor can they be blamed for the concomitant collapse in copper prices. They can, however, be held to account for failing to move more quickly to stop the share price bleeding.

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About all that Icahn can do to enhance shareholder value at this point is to drive Freeport management to sell off assets. Whether the company survives the surgery is of little consequence to him, nor should it be to shareholders if Icahn is able to deliver value as promised. By this time next year, we should have an answer.

Freeport stock traded up about 10% in the noon hour Wednesday, at $12.99 in a 52-week range of $7.76 to $32.35.

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