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.

Iran Could Speedrun the Vietnamese Path

By Graeme Wood

Saturday, April 11, 2026

 

The prediction that Iran will be America’s next Vietnam—a moral catastrophe, an abyss into which money and lives have been pitched, with the sole effect of weakening the United States and heartening its enemies—is already in general circulation among Americans. A few days ago, the Iranian embassy in Hanoi joined the doomsaying. Its X account featured an AI-generated image of a mouth-breathing American GI being lectured to by a smiling Vietnamese soldier in Saigon on April 30, 1975. “We thought that after the Vietnam War, you would never invade any country again,” the soldier says. “It seems that after 50 years you have forgotten that devastating defeat.”

 

Fifty years before 1975 was 1925. Why not show present-day Vietnam? Probably because it would be a nightmarish scene, not for an American but for a Vietnamese Communist or, for that matter, for a present-day Iranian hard-liner. Modern Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) is the site of a total victory for market economics, global trade, and consumer culture. American products compete without stigma: You can get a Vietnamese-style coffee at Starbucks. In 2023, Vietnam entered into a comprehensive strategic partnership with the United States, an official diplomatic designation for the highest level of cooperation. Vietnam is not a democracy, and its government would happily forget Western notions of human rights and civil liberties. But it does not hate America—which is why, to invoke the Vietnam parallel, Iran has to pretend that the past 50 years went rather differently.

 

At this point, Iran as America’s next Vietnam sounds less like a curse than like a relatively optimistic scenario for all involved. Here is the course of events:

 

1.      The United States attacks and escalates when an adversary refuses to surrender.

 

2.      The United States grows stymied and confused that this adversary persists, despite devastation.

 

3.      The United States leaves in a huff, and in denial about having lost the war.

 

4.      The attacked country celebrates its heroic resistance—but soon realizes that it has been reduced to rubble.

 

The Iranian case tracks the Vietnamese one, in mercifully abbreviated form—five weeks rather than two decades—at least up through the second step. Steps 3 and 4 might be coming. If they do, once the afterglow of defeating America fades, Iran’s best hope will be to speed-run the Vietnamese path from victory to prosperity, and even to pro-Americanism.

 

I asked Vietnam experts how a country spoiled for reasons to hate America eventually came to have such fondness for it—and whether Iran, now in a self-congratulatory phase, might have anything in common with Vietnam after their respective wars. K. W. Taylor, a historian at Cornell, told me that at least one aspect of the postwar situations already matches. “In Vietnam,” Taylor said, “you had a very autocratic authoritarian regime, and that aspect of it just strengthened as a result of the war.” Iran, according to most analysis, is more tightly controlled by authoritarian hard-liners than it was before the war. When supposed reformers such as ex–Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif have spoken up meekly to suggest compromise, the regime has threatened to arrest them.

 

After the fall of Saigon, normalization with the United States took another 20 years. That is long enough for a generation to pass. But Taylor stressed that the very hard-liners who had espoused anti-American ideology were seeking reconciliation with the United States as early as the late 1970s. “Vietnam moved straight to fighting another war, this time with China and Cambodia,” Taylor said. “Vietnam was open to normalization much earlier, but the United States bet on China.” The intervening two decades were marked by isolation, poverty, and eventual abandonment by Vietnam’s main remaining patron, the Soviet Union.

 

“Vietnam had the support of China and the Soviet Union during the war,” Carlyle Thayer, a Vietnam specialist at the University of New South Wales, told me. “But that fell away, and by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, there wasn’t much left.” The economic modernization of Vietnam paralleled Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms of the late 1980s, and reflected a consensus that the alternative to growth through reform was poverty through stagnation. Thayer ventured that Iran might already face isolation of the sort that forced change on Vietnam. Vietnam had the support of global communism. Iran, by contrast, “does not have a world Shiite community supporting it,” Thayer said. Iran is not a minor planet in the galaxy of Shiism. It is the sun, and when it goes dark, no other will exist to reignite it.

 

The multiple whammies that afflicted Iran even before this war—economic catastrophe, ecological collapse, diplomatic isolation, social unrest—had already brought it to a nadir. Every one of these problems is worse than it was then, and some are much worse. Iran’s steel plants have been destroyed. (There goes any hope of industrial revitalization.) Its second-largest trading partner, the United Arab Emirates, is now an enemy. And its proposed economic salvation—the extraction of fees for ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz—is an affront to international law that will probably lead to another war. Under this analysis, the Iran pessimists are the Iran optimists, because Iran has already bottomed out, in a pit of despair that Vietnam took two decades to plumb.

 

All of this presumes that Iran’s leaders have a hitherto latent pragmatic streak. None of the despair so far has led Iran’s leaders to compromise at all, either with the United States or with its own people. And attempts to help the Islamic Republic evolve into a normal country, through negotiation, have made fools of the proponents of that dialogue. Americans got Vietnam wrong, Thayer told me, in part because they failed to understand that national independence was Vietnam’s goal and communism a means to that end. (At international Communist conferences overseas, Ho Chi Minh sometimes frustrated his comrades by changing the subject from “worldwide workers’ revolution” to freedom for his own little patch of soil in Southeast Asia.)

 

What might prevent Iran from making a Vietnamese-style exit from its pit is if the exact opposite is the case there, and if revolutionary Shiite Islamism is the end and everything else the means. The United States, if not also the Iranian people, seems to have acquiesced to the continued leadership of Iran by butchers and tyrants. Last week, I wrote about Iran’s fetishization of resistance, even at the expense of its survival. It has already resisted, and all that Iran needs now is to accept that it has won the war. Being unwilling to take the W, like North Vietnam, and move on is a course of self-destruction that Iran is unfortunately still capable of following.

Remembering Vietnam

By George Will

Saturday, September 16, 2017

Many Americans’ moral vanity is expressed nowadays in their rage to disparage. They are incapable of measured judgments about past politics — about flawed historical figures who were forced by cascading circumstances to make difficult decisions on the basis of imperfect information. So, the nation now needs an example of how to calmly assess episodes fraught with passion and sorrow. An example arrives Sunday night.

For ten nights on PBS, Ken Burns’s and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War, ten years in the making and 18 hours in length, tells the story of a war “begun in good faith by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings,” and “prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through than admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions” during five presidencies. The combat films are extraordinary; the recollections and reflections of combatants and others on both sides are even more so, featuring photos of them then and interviews with many of them now.

A 1951 photo shows a congressman named John Kennedy dining in Saigon. There is an interview with Le Quan Cong, who became a guerilla fighter in 1951, at age twelve. Viewers will meet Madame Le Minh Khue, who was 16 when she joined the “Youth Shock Brigade for National Salvation”: “I love Hemingway. I learned from For Whom the Bell Tolls. Like the resourcefulness of the man who destroys the bridge. I saw how he coped with war, and I learned from that character.” As did another combatant who loves that novel, John McCain.

Eleven years after his Saigon dinner, President Kennedy said, “We have not sent combat troops in the generally understood sense of the word.” Obliqueness and evasions greased the slide into a ground war of attrition. Kennedy, his successor (who said, “Foreigners are not like the folks I’m used to”), and their advisers were determined not to make the Munich mistake of confronting an enemy tardily. Tapes of Lyndon Johnson’s telephone conversations with advisers are haunting and horrifying: To national-security adviser McGeorge Bundy: “What the hell am I ordering [those kids] out there for?”

In 1966 alone, 18 large-scale U.S. offensives left more than 3 million South Vietnamese — approximately one-fifth of the country’s population — homeless. Just on the Laos portion of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, more tons of bombs — 3 million tons — were dropped than fell on Germany and Japan during World War II. By body counts, America was winning. As an Army adviser says in episode four, “If you can’t count what’s important, you make what you can count important.”

Vincent Okamoto earned in Vietnam the Army’s second-highest honor, the Distinguished Service Cross. He recalls the platoon he led:

“Nineteen-, 20-year-old high school dropouts . . .  they looked upon military service as like the weather: you had to go in, and you’d do it. But to see these kids, who had the least to gain, there wasn’t anything to look forward to. . . .  And yet, their infinite patience, their loyalty to each other, their courage under fire. . . .  You would ask yourself, ‘How does America produce young men like this?’”

Or like Okamoto. He was born during World War II in Arizona, in a Japanese-American internment camp. Karl Marlantes, a Rhodes Scholar from Yale who voluntarily left Oxford for Marine service in Vietnam, recalls a fellow lieutenant radioing to battalion headquarters over 20 kilometers away the fact that he had spotted a convoy of trucks. The battalion commander replied that this was impossible because intelligence operatives reported no trucks near there. In a Texas drawl the lieutenant replied: “Be advised. I am where I am and you are where you are. Where I am, I see goddamned trucks.”

Weary of hearing the prudence that was so painfully learned in Indochina derided as the “Vietnam syndrome,” Marlantes says (in his Wall Street Journal review of Mark Bowden’s book Hue 1968): “If by Vietnam syndrome we mean the belief that the U.S. should never again engage in (a) military interventions in foreign civil wars without clear objectives and a clear exit strategy, (b) ‘nation building’ in countries about whose history and culture we are ignorant, and (c) sacrificing our children when our lives, way of life, or ‘government of, by, and for the people’ are not directly threatened, then we should never get over Vietnam syndrome. It’s not an illness; it’s a vaccination.” The Burns/Novick masterpiece is, in Marlantes’ words about Bowden’s book, “a powerful booster shot.”

Courage and Cowardice in the Vietnam War’s Final Hours

By Kyle Smith

Wednesday, May 03, 2017

What everyone knows about the Vietnam War is that it was unwinnable, that the South Vietnamese didn’t much want us there, and that our military involvement was a moral outrage that did us all deep dishonor.

We know all of this from the movies, don’t we? And yet there is a movie that shows it up for the pack of lies that it is. It’s a brilliant, harrowing, emotionally potent documentary by a director with unimpeachable liberal credentials — a Kennedy, no less. The 42nd anniversary of the fall of Saigon on Sunday was an excellent opportunity to revisit what happened between the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, in which the North Vietnamese Communists agreed to a ceasefire and accepted democratic elections in the South, and the spring of 1975, when a failure of American will allowed the Communists to reverse the result for which so much blood had been spilled.

Last Days in Vietnam, the Oscar-nominated 2014 film by Rory Kennedy (the youngest child of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who died before she was born) is available for streaming on Netflix. It’s a devastating counterpunch to the anti-American propaganda Hollywood and the rest of the leftist culture have been spewing about Vietnam for more than four decades. Kennedy’s film should make us angry only that America didn’t go far enough. South Vietnam could have been another South Korea if our cultural-political resolve had just remained steadfast at the crucial moment. It’s as if we spent years painstakingly building a billion-dollar palace, then let termites destroy it rather than spending money on an exterminator.

Mixing in interviews with, among others, Henry Kissinger and Richard Armitage, who was then a Special Forces adviser, as well as astonishing archival footage of the events of 1975 in Saigon, the film explains that the North Vietnamese were “terrified” of President Nixon in 1974. The Paris Peace Accords had sparked a full withdrawal of American troops, and Nixon had warned in writing that the U.S. would “respond with full force” if the North failed to abide by the ceasefire terms. But after Nixon’s resignation in August of 1974, says then-CIA analyst Frank Snepp in the film, “Hanoi saw the road to Saigon as being wide open.” In the spring of 1975, the North Vietnamese army scythed through South Vietnam with astonishing force. Five thousand or so Americans and their families were all that remained of the U.S. presence, and when President Ford asked Congress for $700 million in new military aid, he was scorned, to the undying shame of the lawmakers in question. Democratic senator John McClellan of Arkansas said, “I think it is too late to do any good. Further military aid could merely prolong the conflict and perhaps postpone briefly the inevitable — a Communist victory.”

The U.S. ambassador, Graham Martin, who had lost his only son in combat earlier in the war, was tragically slow to respond as the Communist army rampaged through the South in April. Not until the airport in Saigon had been shelled, on the morning of April 29, 1975, did he order an evacuation to begin. Armed Forces radio played the prearranged signal that all was lost, announcing that it was “105 degrees and rising,” followed by a playing of Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” Soon a photographer snapped a picture of a helicopter landing on the roof of the apartment where the CIA’s deputy station chief lived, and the chaos metastasized. (The photo would later be erroneously described as having been taken at the embassy.) A tamarind tree in the parking lot of the embassy that Martin had frequently called “as steadfast as the American commitment in Vietnam” was chopped down to create room for evacuation helicopters to land.

Kennedy’s film locates one devastating emotional moment after another. When a pilot landed his chopper at the embassy with orders to take the ambassador and flee, the ambassador simply refused to board, ushering dozens of Vietnamese on board in his place to be taken out to the safety of U.S. ships at sea. Hundreds more would follow as Martin repeatedly declined to leave. South Vietnamese helicopter pilots scrambled to airlift their families out to the nearest ship, the U.S.S. Kirk, with each aircraft simply shoved overboard by the crew when it had done its work. Miki Nguyen, then a boy of six, remembers that his South Vietnamese father landed a gigantic Chinook on a playground to pick him up along with his mother and siblings. The bird was far too large to land on the Kirk, so each member of the Nguyen family in turn simply jumped to safety below; one, a year-old baby, was caught by one of the men on the deck. The pilot, Ba Nguyen, while flying the twin-rotor aircraft just feet above the sea, somehow managed to extricate himself from his flight suit, tilt the bird to the right, and jump out the door to the left, maybe 20 feet from the rotors. Kennedy delivers spectacular footage of the episode.

Some 75 Marine pilots shuttled Americans and Vietnamese out of the embassy on helicopters all day and deep into the night. “You’re very tired, and you’re not seeing an end to this thing,” one pilot recalls in the film. “And the word comes back: ‘No. Marine pilots don’t get tired.’” North Vietnamese tanks would be spotted in the Saigon streets nearby by 7:45 the morning of April 30. The last eleven Americans left the embassy at 7:58.

The effort Kennedy documents so vividly led to the rescue of 77,000 Vietnamese. The immense courage and honor of the heroes depicted in the film, and the clamor of the South Vietnamese to receive their share of American liberty as Communism descended upon their homeland, make for an eloquent rejoinder to those who dismiss the entire war as a misbegotten mess. Our troops earned a victory in Southeast Asia that as of 1974 was all but secure. Washington betrayed them and the people of South Vietnam in equal measure.