Could Trump’s Iran ‘excursion’ be a bigger global turning point than Vietnam?

In a 1965 speech justifying the war in Vietnam, Lyndon B Johnson argued that the goal was to ensure “every country can shape its own destiny” since only in such a world could the US secure its own freedom. However, he also admitted “such were infirmities of man that force must often precede reason, and the waste of war, the works of peace”. It was the kind of elegant justification of the country’s moral mission to which successive US presidential speechwriters have turned at times of war. View image in fullscreen Lyndon B Johnson gives a televised speech about the war in Vietnam on 13 May 1965 in the White House. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images Assured by limitless military superiority and filled with such noble intent, US presidents have repeatedly been lured into launching wars only to find themselves confounded, ensnared and then broken by their inability to overpower an inferior opponent they wholly misjudged. It seemed safe to assume that this was a fate that would never befall Donald Trump. He was implacably opposed to endless wars that seemed disconnected to the everyday lives of his supporters. He would never equate military power with military victory. Yet Trump’s “little excursion to Iran”, judging by the drafts of the potential peace agreements that are circulating, is being universally perceived as a defeat. Almost regardless of the outcome – most likely a return to the old status quo – the war looks ill-conceived, a monument to confused objectives, bad planning and misplaced assumptions. View image in fullscreen Ironically for Donald Trump personally, the shadow of Vietnam has loomed large during his time in the White House. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images In scale, of course, the current conflict does not match the Vietnam war, which went on for years, led to the deaths of 58,220 US soldiers, and is often perceived as the totemic and unmatchable example of US hubris. By comparison with the Vietnam odyssey, Iran feels more like a day trip. But in terms of consequence, it is still possible that the “excursion” will prove to be the bigger geopolitical turning point for the unrivalled superpower, the moment when the US will have to concede it mishandled a war not just because it had no convincing battle plan, but also no grand strategy to match how the contemporary world works. In an interconnected world, Trump believes progress is achieved through conflict, not cooperation. Ironically for Trump, the shadow of Vietnam has always loomed large, and not just because he repeatedly dodged the draft. In many ways his political appeal is born of Vietnam. The Pulitzer prize-winning author Fredrik Logevall, professor of history at Harvard University, recently argued that “many of the troubles that plague America today – alienation, resentment, cynicism, the mistrust of government, the breakdown of civil discourse and of civic institutions, and the lack of accountability in powerful institutions – have their roots in the Vietnam war era”. “You could argue that Americans went from naivety at the outset of the Vietnam era to cynicism – and cynicism that alienates us from the government, threatens democracy because it destroys the power of the people to believe in change, and to work for change,” he said. It is in this polarised political ecosystem that Trump was to blossom. View image in fullscreen While Vietnam had a greater domestic impact on the US, the international strategic fallout may prove more long lasting. Photograph: Tim Page/Corbis/Getty Images Clearly the domestic US consequences of Iran will never match Vietnam. True, the war was unpopular from the start, but society has not been torn apart by it. Only 13 body bags, each a personal tragedy, have been sent home. At the most, inflation caused by the energy shock will ensure an already unpopular president is punished in the midterms, something he professes not to concern him. But it is arguable that the international consequences of the Iran war could yet prove more long lasting. The fall of Saigon in April 1975 did not have the widely forecast global fallout. The predicted “domino effect” of communism sweeping south-east Asia, as Henry Kissinger and Johnson feared, did not materialise, save in Cambodia and Laos. View image in fullscreen US Marines preparing the evacuation of civilians in south Vietnam during the fall of Saigon in April 1975. Photograph: Dirck Halstead/Getty Images View image in fullscreen A helicopter evacuation flight out of Saigon in April 1975. Photograph: Dirck Halstead/Getty Images By contrast, Trump’s war of choice looks to be a signal of defeat that will have an effect in several fields. It marks the collapse of Israel’s 20-year Iran strategy to produce regime change and will accelerate the already rapid decline in the influence of this Israeli government in Washington. Danny Citrinowicz, the former head of an Iran branch of Israeli military intelligence, describes the war as an operational success but a strategic fiasco for Israel. The war is also prompting Gulf monarchies to profoundly reappraise their geopolitical relationships, including the question of whether the existence of US bases brings the security required for their economies to diversify. Mojtaba Khamenei, the new Iranian supreme leader, may be indulging in wishful thinking in saying the clock can never be turned back to support for US bases. But equally, claims by Trump that countries such as Saudi Arabia or Qatar would now normalise relations with Israel, or join the Abraham accords, sound absurd – in the words of the former US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro: as “delusional as a moon made of green cheese”. The Gulf states would prefer an imperfect peace because they see no other way out, Barbara Leaf, a former US undersecretary for the Middle East, told a seminar last week. View image in fullscreen The status of cheap drones as the great leveller in modern conflict has been confirmed by the conflict. Photograph: US Central Command/X For students of war, the status of cheap drones as the great leveller in modern conflict has been confirmed – a lesson Iran learned from the Ukraine conflict better than the Pentagon. The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, promised “death and destruction from the sky”, hitting 13,000 targets in the first month alone, but it did not bring victory, only the alarming depletion of US missile stores and of the treasury. The fallout is likely to hit Europe hard. As a squeeze on living standards seeps through the global economic system over the next year, centrist incumbents in France, Germany and the UK may face an electoral beating that tears at the architecture of the EU. The task of the incumbents will be made harder if Trump acts on his threat to withdraw US troops from Nato states in retribution for their “cowardly” refusal to come to his aid. View image in fullscreen The Tehran regime survived the chaos of the wave of assassinations of its leadership at the start of the war, including the loss of its supreme leader. Photograph: Henry Nicholls/AFP/Getty Images For the US foreign policy establishment, exemplified by the Council on Foreign Relations, the missteps in Iran are the final confirmation that Trump’s highly personalised, instinctive system of predatory diplomacy creates only more disorder. Last week, the CFR launched a fundamental review of US strategy post-Trump. Its convener, Rebecca Lissner, has already warned the war “has delivered a potentially fatal blow to a US-led international order that was already on life support”. Allies are hedging, middle powers are forming their own coalitions, and regions once firmly in Washington’s orbit are shifting toward new power centres, she said. The former state department official Mira Rapp-Hooper was more brutal at Chatham House, describing it as superpower suicide. In the short term, two questions from the Iran war have been thrust upon the Democrats, and in effect have already been answered. Has the US interest been furthered by being so close to Israel and its leadership? Would the US not be more powerful if it returned to alliances built on values, and the law, as well as self-interest? View image in fullscreen In the strait of Hormuz, Iran has realised how geography and globalisation have given it an immeasurable asset. Photograph: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images For Iran, weakened, impoverished and yet emboldened, the path is unclear. Tehran may yet have to make concessions in the talks on its nuclear programme, including many it was on the verge of offering in Geneva in February. Iran’s internal politics is unpredictable, but this is a more military government, and at the same time the hardest hardliners in parliament have been marginalised. Ali Vaez from the International Crisis Group says the war has given Iran three presents: ideological revitalisation, the discrediting inside Iran of foreign military intervention, and the repair of its deterrence strategy. The US deployed its ultimate deterrent on Iran – war – and it did not work. In the strait of Hormuz, Iran has realised how geography and globalisation have given it an immeasurable asset, one that it will take years of new pipeline construction to devalue. Not surprisingly, so universally damning are the global verdicts on Trump’s war that he agonises and balks at signing a document that will in essence get him back to where he started, at a cost of $50bn. His predicament is reminiscent to the one Johnson described to his wife, Lady Bird, in 1965: “I have the choice to go in with great casualty lists or to get out with disgrace. It’s like being in an airplane and I have to choose between crashing the plane or jumping out. I do not have a parachute.” View image in fullscreen Trump’s fallback message that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon had multiple drawbacks. Photograph: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg/Getty Images Indeed, Trump seems in a few short few months to have raced through the v