Iran Could Be America’s Next Vietnam

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.

[Robert Kagan: America is now a rogue superpower]

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.

[Graeme Wood: Trump’s Stone Age threat will lead to tragedy]

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.