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vietnam war
Is Iran War Another Vietnam for the US? No, It's Even Worse
It will not be a localized loss in a specific theater of the American Imperium, like Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan were. It will be the defeat on a global scale of the Imperium itself.
Apr 17, 2026
Twenty-two years ago this week, I published an article in this space, “Is Iraq Another Vietnam?” It proved prescient, for the Iraq War was, inevitably, lost. Part of the reason—and this was the burden of that article—was that the US hadn’t learned the obvious lessons from Vietnam, the first war America had ever lost. Nor has it, since.
Because of that, Iran, too, will prove another Vietnam: not the first or even the second or third war America ever lost, but certainly the most consequential. It will not be a localized loss in a specific theater of the American Imperium, like Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan were. It will be the defeat on a global scale of the Imperium itself. It’s worthwhile understanding why this has happened.
The contexts for Vietnam and Iran are different, but they bear haunting similarities; situations the US couldn’t stay out of, but conflicts it couldn’t win, either. That is the working definition of “quagmire.”
Vietnam became a US challenge in the most perilous years of the Cold War. India had joined the Soviet camp when it gained independence, in 1947. China went communist in 1949. The Korean War ended in 1953 but was only fought to a draw. The Vietnamese defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The US was clearly losing the Cold War, at least in Asia.
By its actions, the US has explicitly, unambiguously repudiated its legitimacy as the global leader. It is taking care of itself, and to hell with everybody else.
In the middle of all that, Vietnam declared that it wanted to detach from the US orbit and align itself with the Soviet Union. If successful, it would be a model to the scores of other nations in Africa and Asia that were then fighting Western imperial powers to become free, themselves, from centuries of colonial bondage.
Where it ended, nobody could tell. President Dwight D. Eisenhower saw dominos falling from Vietnam through Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, all the way to the Persian Gulf and the world’s greatest supply of oil. It had to be stopped.
Because of this, there was no way the US could stay out of Vietnam. But neither would it ever be able to win. Why?
Ho Chi Minh had approached Harry Truman in 1946 asking for US help in ejecting the French who had occupied his country as a colony since 1870. Truman not only didn’t help Vietnam, he sided with the French. That was the “original sin” that made it impossible for the US to ever “win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people, and, therefore, to ever win the war.
Iran: fraught with the seeds of defeat
The stage, today, is no longer the Cold War but the global transition to multipolarity. The Global South wants to end the unipolar era of US dominance and replace it with a more equitable, peaceful, collaborative, sovereignty-respecting global order. The US doesn’t want that. It wants to retain its position as global hegemon. But it is faltering, badly.
It lost its war in Iraq. It lost its war in Afghanistan. It isn’t announced, yet, but it has lost its war against Russia, through its proxy, Ukraine. The US destroyed incalculable moral stature through its lusty, broad-spectrum support of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. It’s hard to fathom more rapid, self-inflicted imperial damage.
As for its economy, the US is actuarily bankrupt. It deindustrialized in the 1980s and 1990s, moving its manufacturing base to low-cost countries. That forced it to have to borrow $38 trillion in the past 45 years (almost $1 trillion a year). It will never be repaid. If foreign countries do not help fund the US’ $2-odd trillion per year budget deficit (in a good year), the lights will go out. That’s not hysteria. It’s accounting.
Meanwhile, China has blown by the US, lifting more people out of poverty in a shorter period of time, than has any country, ever. It became the largest economy in the world, in 2014. China dominates the planet in all manner of manufacturing, trading, exports, and development assistance to other countries. It is the global economic powerhouse of the 2020s that the US was in the 1950s.
The US strategy to deal with this epic, decades-long decline is to try to seize control of the world’s oil and use that control to extort wealth from all the other countries of the world, especially China. It is pure banditry masquerading as muscular strategy.
That’s what the destruction of Libya and Iraq were all about. It’s what the attack, via Ukraine, against Russia was about. It’s what the piracy of seizing Venezuela’s oil was about. It’s what this illegal, unprovoked attack on Iran is about. Control the oil. The US doesn’t have a Plan B to regain its privileged perch atop the global order. It has to try to make this strategy work.
But, as was the case in Vietnam, the US will not be able to win, here, either. The reasons are eerily similar.
In 1953 (the same time the US was helping the French fight the Vietnamese), the US staged a coup d’etat against Mohammed Mossadegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran. It installed a brutal dictator, the Shah Reza Pahlavi, who ruled until he was deposed in the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
In 1980, in retaliation for Iranians taking back control of their own government, the US had its local proxy, Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, attack Iran. The Iran-Iraq War lasted until 1988 and killed an estimated 500,000 Iranians. Since then, the US has imposed a harsh regimen of sanctions against Iran designed to foster domestic discontent and undermine the Iranian state.
So, just as it had done to the 35 million Vietnamese, the US has unified 93 million Iranians into a visceral, unshakable compact against it. That unification was solidified when, in February, President Donald Trump tried to decapitate the Iranian leadership. That gambit backfired, spectacularly, unifying the county even more.
So, that’s the context. As was the case with Vietnam, the US can’t afford to stay out. But it won’t be able to win, either. Again, that is the definition of “quagmire,” the essential, fateful trap of the US in Vietnam.
What about strategy?
In both wars, the US relied on overwhelming force to bring the enemy to submission. In Vietnam, it dropped 12,000,000 TONS of bombs, four times the tonnage dropped in all theaters in all of World War II, combined. Did it work? Obviously not.
The US lost the war, including 58,000 soldiers killed and another 300,000 wounded. It spent $450 billion, or $3 trillion in today’s dollars. It wrecked its economy, inflicted traumatic civic pain on itself, and grievously damaged its reputation in the world.
Against such overwhelming force, Vietnam’s strategy was enervation: Stay alive and sap the foe of its will to fight. Knowing the superiority of US fire power, the North Vietnamese army avoided direct conflicts. It fought opportunistically, when odds favored it, and melted away when necessary, to preserve men, ammunition, and weapons. Did this work? Obviously, it did.
Even though the US inflicted 9 casualties for each 1 it incurred, it couldn’t sustain those losses in its war-fighting context. As more and more boys came home in body bags, the American people demanded the war be ended. The Vietnamese watched this seething, swelling discontent and waited the Americans out. Ho Chi Minh commented, “Eventually, the Americans will tire of their losses and will have to go home.” He was right.
Iran’s strategy reflects many learnings from Vietnam, mainly the learning of resilience. It knew it could not match US firepower. It had to do only two things. It had to survive a withering first attack. And it had to have deep enough resources to deliver a devastating counterattack. It has done this, brilliantly.
Within 48 hours of the US first strike, Iran took out almost all US radar installations in the Persian Gulf, leaving the US largely sightless. Then, it waited while the US fired off thousands of offensive missiles and defensive interceptors, gravely depleting its finite inventories. Then, it began its counterattack.
It decimated more than a dozen US bases in the Persian Gulf, including the Al Udeid airbase in Qatar, the largest air base in the Middle East. Al Udeid is and was the headquarters of the US’ Combined Air Operations Center, which manages US air assets from North Africa to South Asia.
It dealt extensive damage to the Manama Naval Base in Bahrain, the headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet responsible for naval activities in that part of the world. It has destroyed more than 40 US aircraft and billions of dollars worth of other military assets. It drove the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, the largest military ship ever built, from the field of battle.
With both the US and Israel having fired a huge share of their existing stocks of missiles in the expectation of a quick decapitation, they are left gravely exposed. Iran has declared “missile dominance” over Israel, easily choosing the time, place, and nature of the attacks it now freely rains down.
Similarly for the US in the Persian Gulf. Its open-aired military assets with radars destroyed are becoming defenseless against sustained fusillades of Iranian drones and missiles. The US has proven unable to protect its Gulf allies—Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Oman, and Saudi Arabia—against Iranian attacks. Hundreds of billions of dollars of their economic assets have been destroyed, recompense for their providing staging areas for US attacks on Iran.
This is why Iran is not intimidated by Trump’s or Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth’s childish, simian-like chest beating about “bombing them back to the Stone Age.” By the way, it was Curtis LeMay, head of the US Air Force in Vietnam, who, in response to North Vietnam’s resilience, issued the original threat to “bomb them back to the Stone Age.” Who won that face-off?
The tactic of asymmetric warfare
In Vietnam, the Viet Cong had infiltrated US operations, from military bases and fuel depots to armories, staging yards, and more. A single mole—one individual—so placed, could tip off the enemy about US forces’ planned activities, exposing potentially thousands of soldiers to ambush and death. The asymmetry of such effect is almost impossible to register, or counter. It’s a major reason Vietnam won the war, defeating “the greatest military power the world had ever known.”
In Iran, the asymmetry lies with its control of the Straits of Hormuz through which 20% of the world’s oil flows. It needs only threaten to attack ships and all shipping is stopped. With little more than a feint, a bluff, a head fake, it has inflicted hundreds of billions of dollars of damage on the world through higher oil prices.
Most of the world blames that on the US, since the Strait was open before the war, and Iran had announced it would close the Strait if it was attacked, which the US did, unprovoked. At virtually no cost to itself, Iran can inflict hundreds of billions of dollars of damage, which falls to the discredit of the US in the eyes of the world. That is asymmetry exponentiated. Iran has played it masterfully.
A final word about Vietnam and Iran’s allies.
Vietnam’s allies were the Soviet Union and, to a lesser extent, China. In Iran, they are Russia and China. The difference is that in Vietnam, the Soviet Union and China were nowhere close to being able to challenge US power. In the early 1960s, they even became adversaries, making them still less effective in standing up to US aggression.
Today, Russia has shed its inefficient communist past and crushed US weapons, its proxy, and strategy in Ukraine. China, too, abandoned communism and has crushed US manufacturing, technology, and commerce throughout the world. The two now work more closely than ever to provide a new, non-US-centric paradigm for global organization, one that honors civilizational differences, respects national sovereignty, and promotes collaborative frameworks for national development. Most of the world is lining up behind it.
Where does all this leave us?
The context, strategy, tactics, and alliances in the war all weigh heavily against the US, just as they did in Vietnam. That’s why the US has not achieved any of its objectives. It hasn’t achieved regime change. It hasn’t seized the enriched uranium. It hasn’t deterred Iran from enriching more uranium, nor going for a nuclear weapon. It hasn’t stopped the missile and drone attacks. It hasn’t opened the Strait. It hasn’t undercut Iran’s support of its regional allies: Hezbollah; the Houthis; the Islamic Resistance in Iraq; etc. These things matter, greatly. Here’s why.
The most important public goods a global leader must provide to earn its legitimacy in the eyes of the world are peace, respect for the rule of law, and an economic environment that makes possible prosperity for all. With its nakedly illegal, unprovoked attack on Iran, the US has delivered exactly the opposite: the hottest war in decades, piracy as policy, and a global economic environment that, through higher oil prices, reliably syphons wealth and, therefore, prosperity from every country in the world.
By its actions, the US has explicitly, unambiguously repudiated its legitimacy as the global leader. It is taking care of itself, and to hell with everybody else.
Russia and China, on the other hand, however imperfectly, form an able and ready replacement for the US as the organizing locus of the global community. The world sees the destruction attendant on the US hegemonic model: economic extortion, resource banditry, military thuggery, and diplomatic blackmail. Nobody wants it anymore. Even US allies are distancing themselves from it.
Iran will prove the catalytic event where US primacy in the world was taken down, where it was defeated militarily, broken economically, isolated diplomatically, and humiliated strategically. Had it better learned from its errors in Vietnam, instead of repeating them, again, and again, and again, it might have enjoyed a more graceful, self-directed descent. That is the fatal cost of arrogance, immaturity, and stupidity.
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You Cannot Bomb Your Way to Peace—We’ve Tried
In Iran as in Laos, you cannot claim to negotiate in good faith while destroying civilian life. And you cannot escape the long shadow of toxins and explosives that outlive every justification offered in their name.
Apr 12, 2026
April brings back a memory I cannot shake: the 1973 Pii Mai, or Lao New Year, bombing in Laos. This year, that memory unfolds against the backdrop of the US’ war in Iran that is repeating history—killing civilians, destroying homes and infrastructure, and setting the stage for suffering that will last generations. The war in Iran has already claimed over 1,500 civilian lives, including 217 children.
Like the US war in Vietnam, this new war has regional ramifications. In Southeast Asia, the conflict did not stay within Vietnam—it spilled into Laos and Cambodia, devastating communities that had little say in the war itself. Today, the consequences of the war in Iran are already crossing borders. In places like Lebanon, families are being pushed from their homes as violence escalates and instability spreads, echoing the same kind of regional unraveling we saw decades ago.
Once again, we are confronted with the consequences of sidelining diplomacy and the rules-based order.
As a US Air Force veteran, I’ve witnessed firsthand the devastating human cost of bombing strikes, both at the moment and in the decades to come. From December 1966 to December 1968, I was assigned to the 56th Air Commando Wing at air bases in Thailand, where our primary mission was to interdict the flow of personnel and supplies along the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” through Laos. As a 26-year-old newly promoted captain, I was shocked to discover that nearly all of our missions involved flying over Laos, where we dropped over 2.5 million tons of ordnance over nine years—580,000 bombing runs in total.
A new year should bring hope, but when war arrives, it replaces hope with memory—and its shadow has a way of returning, year after year, long after the headlines fade.
Some of those strikes took place during Pii Mai 1973—just as we recently witnessed US bombing during Nowruz, the Persian New Year.
Today, as the United States wages war in Iran while diplomacy is said to continue, I recognize a familiar contradiction. We are told negotiations are ongoing. We are told peace and safety are the goal. Yet bombs continue to fall, and civilians continue to die.
I have seen where that leads.
Even as negotiations to end the conflict moved forward—including the talks that led to the Paris Peace Accords—the bombing did not stop. In April 1973, after those agreements were signed, US aircraft continued striking Laos, justified as leverage—pressure deemed necessary to secure peace.
On April 16, 1973, the last day of the Lao New Year, American B-52 bombers and F-111 fighters struck the village of Tha Vieng, near the Plain of Jars in Xieng Khouang province, after it was reportedly occupied by North Vietnamese forces. US officials described the operation as a response to a “major violation of the ceasefire.”
President Richard Nixon warned Hanoi to comply—or face consequences. Those repercussions included renewed bombing in the neutral country of Laos during what should have been its most festive and peaceful celebration.
That is not diplomacy but destruction wearing the mask of strategy.
I returned to Laos in 2023, decades after the war, and for the first time I was part of the solution. I didn’t see “targets” anymore—I saw what was left behind. I walked through villages where the war never truly ended, where farmers still dig into soil that can explode beneath their hands, and where families continue to lose children long after the last airstrike. Many of the bombs that were dropped failed to detonate on impact, leaving behind a deadly legacy of unexploded ordnance covering about one-third of the country.
In one remote village, I helped detonate two cluster munitions near a home under construction. That family can now live without fear, but countless others cannot. With roughly 10% of the contamination cleared, the war is not past—it is ongoing, just out of sight.
And then there are the poisons—the part of war that doesn’t explode, but seeps.
Toxic exposure and unexploded ordnance do not just end when the fighting stops—they create multigenerational harm for both civilians and those sent to fight. The US Department of Veterans Affairs now recognizes 19 cancers and other serious conditions as linked to Agent Orange exposure, along with more than 20 conditions tied to burn pits and other toxic exposures from the Gulf War and post-9/11 conflicts. As of 2024, 6.5 million veterans or their dependents were receiving $163.1 billion in disability benefits.
Those numbers are evidence that war reaches far beyond the battlefield. The true costs of war are delayed, dispersed, and often denied until they can no longer be ignored.
And still, we repeat the pattern.
We are told that bombing Iran strengthens our negotiating position. That it brings adversaries to the table. These are the same arguments made during Southeast Asia—arguments that left behind unexploded bombs in Laos and dioxins embedded in human bodies for generations.
If I have learned anything, it is this: You cannot bomb your way to peace. You cannot claim to negotiate in good faith while destroying civilian life. And you cannot escape the long shadow of toxins and explosives that outlive every justification offered in their name.
For me, Laos is not just a part of my history. It is a warning written into the Earth and into the bodies of those still living with what was done there.
I remember what Pii Mai was meant to be—joyful, cleansing, a turning of the page. We are now bombing through another New Year, just as we did in 1973. Today it is Nowruz. Different place, same justification, same consequences. A new year should bring hope, but when war arrives, it replaces hope with memory—and its shadow has a way of returning, year after year, long after the headlines fade.
The question is whether we are willing to listen—or, are we destined to relive it.
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Incorporate Armbands in the May Day Strike: A Lesson from the Past
If the goal of the movement is to engage people as broadly as possible, as well as to demonstrate power, then the armbands can offer additional options and bring the day of protests into more places.
Apr 12, 2026
Major unions like the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, and citizen groups like Indivisible and Public Citizen, are calling for a national May Day strike. It’s a powerful idea, building off of a Minnesota day this past January where people didn’t go to work or school, didn’t shop, and didn’t otherwise participate in ordinary activities. The Minnesota day was spearheaded by major unions, 700 local businesses closed in solidarity, and 75,000-100,000 people marched in the streets.
For the national day, I’d suggest adding one more element: incorporating armbands, like black armbands, so people who are participating can make clear their sympathies. And those who can’t take off from work or school, or who are retired, so have no jobs to leave, can show support as well.
The armband idea comes from the October 15, 1969 Vietnam Moratorium. They didn’t call it a strike, but it was a similar day of marches, walkouts, teach-ins, and other activities that gave as many ways as possible to participate. Two million participated in the day’s marches, but far more in other activities. New York City’s Council endorsed it. Milwaukee held a funeral procession. Small towns rang church bells to commemorate the dead. The Moratorium took place while President Richard Nixon was threatening North Vietnam with nuclear weapons, and although Nixon said at the time the protests made no difference to him, he later revealed that the breadth of support led him to back off from the threat.
I was in high school in Los Angeles. I wore my black armband to school and my after-school job at a drugstore. My manager told me to take it off. I resisted as politely as I could. As I recall, he finally backed down. Another friend wore his armband at his high school in a mill town north of Seattle. In both cases, the armbands got people talking and thinking. They gave an additional way to participate for those who couldn’t join the walkouts. They reinforced anti-war solidarity. US soldiers in Vietnam even wore armbands as a way of joining the protests, following a full-page New York Times ad signed by 1,366 active service members.
So why not include a call for armbands as part of the May Day strike? It’s true that some people might use them as a substitute for visibly leaving jobs or schools. But if the goal of the movement is to engage people as broadly as possible, as well as to demonstrate power, then the armbands can offer additional options and bring the day of protests into more places. They’re an alternative for retired people who don’t have jobs to walk out of. They’re one more antidote to powerlessness, allowing people to participate step by step. It seems important to add them as part of the day’s organizing.
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