Fifty Years On, America’s Reopening the Vietnam Playbook

Fifty years ago, the Vietnam War ended. Not with triumph, but with helicopters lifting off rooftops and a superpower forced to retreat, stunned by a smaller nation that refused to fold.

Vietnam was supposed to be quick. Containment, credibility, dominoes. Instead, it became a brutal lesson in geography, culture and hubris. Jungle swallowed tanks. Villages blurred into battlefields. An enemy without uniforms outlasted the most lavishly-funded military campaign in history. The United States left behind 58,000 dead, millions of Vietnamese casualties, and a permanent stain on its self-image.

Now, America seems destined to relearn the same lesson—this time in the Caribbean and northern South America. The talk is back. Regime change. Easy wins. Venezuela’s framed as a failing petrostate begging for intervention. Cuba, once again, is cast as the stubborn parasite propping up a neighboring regime. The logic is seductive. Oil-rich. Isolated. Sanctioned. Surely this time it’ll be different.

It rarely is.

The renewed push, driven in part by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, assumes that toppling Venezuela will send shockwaves through Cuba. Topple Caracas, weaken Cuba, tidy up the hemisphere. On paper, it sounds surgical. In reality, it sounds familiar. Vietnam, too, was once reduced to a diagram on a chalkboard.

Geography alone should be enough to stop this cold. Venezuela is vast and unforgiving. Any large U.S. military presence would be swallowed by terrain built for attrition. Mountains, jungle, heat, and cities where armed groups can disappear at will. Its borders spill into Colombia and Brazil and open onto the Caribbean, creating endless routes for weapons, fighters, and outside backers. Cuba offers an even starker lesson. Like Venezuela, it’s shaped by geography—an island built to absorb pressure. Cuba has endured six decades of pressure, sanctions, covert operations, and economic strangulation. It still stands.

Soldiers in either country would drain U.S. power, not project it. It would lock America into another open-ended commitment, stretch the military, inflame regional instability, and hand propaganda victories to adversaries. The pattern’s familiar: intervention framed as decisive strength, followed by years of costly stalemate.

The danger isn’t that these countries fall. It’s that the United States does—into another conflict that consumes attention, resources, and credibility, while delivering none of the promised results. Wars fought in jungles are never clean. Supply chains break down. Visibility vanishes. Local fighters melt into terrain that foreign troops never master. Vietnam taught this brutally. So did Central America in the 1980s, where interventions multiplied violence without delivering stability.

The United States likes to remember the invasion of Panama as proof that small wars can be neat. They usually cite speed. They forget context. Panama was urban, compact, and politically isolated. Even then, civilian casualties were quietly buried. Panama was an exception, not a template.

Since the end of World War II, America hasn’t conclusively won a war. Vietnam was a disaster. Iraq fractured. Afghanistan reverted. Libya imploded. Syria metastasized. Victory, redefined endlessly, has become little more than a press release followed by a withdrawal timetable.

And yet the temptation persists—especially for presidents under domestic pressure. There’s an old, cynical strategy in Washington: when pressure builds at home, export it. Find a smaller country. Raise the flags. Promise it’ll be fast.

Presidents of both parties have done it. From Grenada to Iraq, from Kosovo to Libya, the pattern repeats. Begin with confidence. End with complications. The bill always arrives later, usually addressed to someone else.

With the economy wobbling, the MAGA coalition fracturing, and the Epstein affair hanging overhead, foreign action starts to look tempting. Venezuela, with its oil reserves and political dysfunction, can easily be pitched as a “win.” The rhetoric writes itself. Energy security. Hemispheric stability. Moral obligation. A swift strike to restore order. But Vietnam was once sold the same way—protecting freedom, confronting communism, defending credibility.

America keeps entering wars like a gambler convinced the next hand will fix everything. It never does. The terrain always matters. The people always resist being rearranged by outsiders with maps.

Fifty years after Saigon fell, the lesson is still painfully simple. Small wars are rarely small. Easy victories are marketing myths. Militias and mountains don’t care about talking points. Nations on the receiving end of “liberation” decide their own endings. America doesn’t need another Vietnam to remember this.