The Vietnam Problem

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, May 12, 2026

 

Since Vietnam, there’s been a persistent impulse in our political debate to declare almost any military conflict another Vietnam.

 

So, let’s be clear — the Iran war is not another Vietnam. Not even close.

 

The Iran war isn’t a yearslong war of counterinsurgency involving hundreds of thousands of American troops on the ground engaged in bootless search-and-destroy missions.

 

That long-ago defeat, nonetheless, sheds light on our difficulty getting Iran to capitulate or to sign on to an acceptable deal, despite the massive punishment it is sustaining.

 

Vietnam demonstrated that military superiority doesn’t equal success, and neither does sheer ordnance or technical proficiency, especially in a limited war against a foe with a fanatical political will alien to American sensibilities.

 

Now, it’s always possible that the Iranians, ground down by the air campaign and ongoing blockade, cry “uncle” at some point. Certainly, the blockade allows us to impose more comprehensive economic pain on Iran, with limited military cost, than we did on the enemy in Vietnam with the exception, perhaps, of the 1972 mining of Haiphong Harbor. (The converse is that the North Vietnamese had no power to disrupt the global economy.)

 

There’s no doubt that we’ve demonstrated a military preeminence over Iran, just as we did over North Vietnam. We have long been good at blowing stuff up and are better at it now than ever.

 

The problem comes when we run into an enemy that has a high threshold for pain and is determined to outlast us, while we make what we hope will be a time-limited commitment, seek to avoid escalations that carry unpredictable risks, and operate from a tenuous base of domestic political support in the United States.

 

This is why we can utterly dominate our adversaries and still succumb to asymmetric campaigns of attrition; it explains, in short, why in the post–World War II era, we haven’t lost battles, only wars.

 

It’s likely that President Trump launched the Iran war believing he could force a quick understanding with the Iranians based on the belief that they are, ultimately, rational interlocutors — the Persian equivalent of a construction contractor with whom he’d dealt hundreds of times in the course of building a tower or golf course.

 

Of course, though, the Islamic Republic is not fundamentally transactional; it is a profoundly serious ideological project grounded in Shia Islam.

 

What is called “mirroring” in international relations — the belief that an adversary shares our essential characteristics — has been a persistent failing of U.S. foreign policy over the last 60 years.

 

If Trumps tends to think any foreign actor is recognizable from the world of New York real estate, LBJ wanted to believe that the Vietnamese might act like FDR Democrats. “My God, I’ve offered Ho Chi Minh $100 million to build a Mekong Valley,” he said at one point, adding, “If that’d been George Meany, he’d have snapped at it.”

 

Foreign policy adviser Robert Komer said that the president “felt no particular need to delve into what made the Vietnamese Vietnamese — as opposed to Americans or Greeks or Chinese.”

 

And why worry about any of that if we had the ultimate solution to the conflict?

 

As Max Boot notes in his book on America’s small wars, The Savage Wars of Peace, when queried by a reporter about how the Americans would defeat the Viet Cong insurgency, General William Westmoreland responded simply: “Firepower.”

 

We possessed it in abundance. Boot writes: “The U.S. side had sensors, ground radar, infrared equipment, defoliants, herbicides, cluster bombs, missiles of various varieties, tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery of various calibers, naval vessels ranging from small patrol boats to giant nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, and of course all the aircraft – everything from B-52 bombers to UH-1 Huey helicopters to specially fitted C-47 airplanes known as Puff the Magic Dragon equipped with automatic machine guns capable of spitting out 6,000 rounds a minute.”

 

In 1965, LBJ launched an air campaign called Rolling Thunder, which was supposed to last for weeks, but instead went on for years. He stopped repeatedly to demonstrate our goodwill and give the North Vietnamese a chance to come to their senses and negotiate a deal. LBJ paused Rolling Thunder for five days in May 1965 for this purpose, and got nothing. He stopped for 37 days near the end of the year, and got nothing again.

 

All told, Rolling Thunder unloaded a prodigious amount of ordnance, roughly 800 tons a day for three and a half years, according to Boot. Throughout the entire war, the U.S. dropped 8 million tons of bombs, far eclipsing what we used in World War II.

 

Much of this was the equivalent of Joseph Conrad’s gunboat futilely firing into the jungle in The Heart of Darkness (itself, of course, the template for the great Vietnam War movie Apocalypse Now).

 

The target list in Iran has been much more discriminating, and achieved concrete goals of degrading the regime’s military and industrial capacity. But the idea that simply listing the number of targets hit, or saying we were “ahead of schedule,” somehow proved that we were close to achieving strategic goals — toppling the regime, getting it to give up its highly enriched uranium, reopening the Strait of Hormuz — smacked of the empty bean-counting that characterized the U.S. government’s defense of the conduct of the Vietnam War.

 

This method of evaluating the progress of a campaign is known as “the McNamara Fallacy.”

 

Again, it’s possible that the blockade at some point collapses the Iranian economy. Yet it’s quite possible that the IRGC is as fervently determined as the North Vietnamese, who lost 1.1 million, or 5.5 percent of their population of 20 million. The equivalent in the U.S. today would be nearly 19 million combat losses.

 

Trump has been careful to try to avoid U.S. casualties. On the one hand, this limits an Iranian asymmetrical advantage (a willingness to take casualties that we lack), but on the other, it forecloses the possibility of taking swift, decisive military actions that risk U.S. casualties — and thus extends the war.

 

This raises the question of staying power. We all know the supposed Taliban adage, “You have the watches, but we have the time.” George C. Marshall once said the U.S. couldn’t fight a Seven Years’ War; the media impatience over the Iran conflict has sometimes made it seem that, today, we are hard-pressed to wage even a seven-week one.

 

Our blockade is, without doubt, a clever use of U.S. asymmetric power. It is relatively low risk to us, while imposing disproportionate pain on Iran. If we could maintain it for the duration, we probably would grind the Iranian regime to dust. The problem is that Iran has an asymmetric power of its own — the ability, despite its vast military inferiority, to create enough risk in transiting the Strait of Hormuz that civilian shipping doesn’t want to attempt it.

 

Time is on our side in that the Iranians are experiencing more direct and more grievous costs; time is on their side in that the political tolerance in the U.S. for an extended conflict is low, especially given that very little public case was made for the war in advance and it started out unpopular (the Vietnam and the Iraq wars were on much firmer ground at their inceptions).

 

If we end up in an unsatisfactory place, it will be because our many tactical victories didn’t add up to the hoped-for strategic effect and we didn’t have the requisite will — either the willingness to escalate, or to persist — to make the Iranians buckle.

 

It is a story as old as time, and familiar to Americans from the course of a number of our limited wars over the last 70 years.