The prediction that Iran will become America’s next Vietnam—a moral disaster, a pool into which money and lives have been plunged, with the sole effect of weakening the United States and emboldening its enemies—is already widespread among Americans. A few days ago, the Iranian embassy in Hanoi joined the destruction. His X account highlighted AI-generated image of a mouth-breathing American GI being tutored by a smiling Vietnamese soldier in Saigon on April 30, 1975. “We thought that after the Vietnam War, you’d never invade any country again,” the soldier says. “It seems after 50 years you have forgotten that failure.”
Fifty years before 1975 it was 1925. Why not show Vietnam today? Perhaps because it would be a terrifying experience, not for an American but for a Vietnamese Communist or, for that matter, a modern-day Iranian hardliner. Modern Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) is the site of a complete triumph of the market economy, international trade, and consumer culture. American products compete without stigma: You can get Vietnamese-style coffee at Starbucks. In 2023, Vietnam entered into comprehensive strategic cooperation with the United States, the official diplomatic name for the highest level of cooperation. Vietnam is not a democracy, and its government would happily forget Western concepts of human rights and civil liberties. But it doesn’t hate America—that’s why, to welcome Vietnam in parallel, Iran has to pretend that 50 years ago went differently.
At this point, Iran as America’s next Vietnam looks more like a curse than a hopeful scenario for all concerned. Here is the sequence of events:
- The United States attacks and escalates when the enemy refuses to surrender.
- The United States is growing sad and confused that this enemy continues, despite the destruction.
- The United States leaves in shock, and in denial about losing the war.
- The embattled country celebrates its heroic resistance—but soon realizes it has been reduced to rubble.
The Iranian case follows the Vietnamese one, with a merciful shortening – five weeks instead of two decades – at least until the second stage. Stages 3 and 4 are likely to come. If they do, once the faint glow of defeating America fades, Iran’s best hope will be to fast-track the Vietnamese road from victory to prosperity, and even support Americanism.
I asked Vietnam experts how a country destroyed by anti-Americanism finally came to be interested in it – and whether Iran, now in a self-congratulatory phase, could have anything to do with Vietnam after their war. KW Taylor, a historian at Cornell, told me that at least one aspect of postwar conditions is already consistent. “In Vietnam,” Taylor said, “you had a totalitarian regime, and that element was reinforced by the war.” Iran, according to most analyses, is more tightly controlled by extremists than it was before the war. While supposed reformers such as former Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif have been has said to gently suggest a compromise, the government has given threatened arrest them.
After the fall of Saigon, normalization with the United States took another 20 years. That is enough time for a generation to pass. But Taylor emphasized that extremists who had supported anti-American ideology were seeking reconciliation with the United States in the early to late 1970s. “Vietnam moved directly to another war, this time with China and Cambodia,” Taylor said. “Vietnam was ready to legalize early, but the United States bet on China.” The intervening two decades were marked by isolation, poverty, and eventual abandonment by Vietnam’s remaining main protector, the Soviet Union.
“Vietnam was supported by China and the Soviet Union during the war,” Carlyle Thayer, a Vietnam expert at the University of New South Wales, told me. “But that collapsed, and when the Soviet Union collapsed, there wasn’t much left.” Vietnam’s economic recovery coincided with Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms of the late 1980s, and reflected the consensus that the alternative to growth through reform was poverty through stagnation. Thayer offered that Iran may already face the kind of isolation that forced change on Vietnam. Vietnam was supported by international communism. Iran, by contrast, “doesn’t have a Shiite community in the world that supports it,” Thayer said. Iran is not a small planet in the Shia galaxy. It is the sun, and when it gets dark, no one else will be there to rule it.
Many of the problems that plagued Iran even before the war—economic catastrophe, ecological collapse, diplomatic isolation, social unrest—had already brought it to its nadir. Each of these problems is worse than it was then, and some are worse. Iran’s steel mills have been destroyed. (There is some hope for an industrial revival.) Its second largest trading partner, the United Arab Emirates, is now an enemy. And his proposed economic bailout—giving fees to ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz—is an affront to international law that will probably lead to another war. Under this analysis, the pessimists of Iran are the optimists of Iran, because Iran has already come out of the pit of despair that Vietnam took two decades to overcome.
All this suggests that Iran’s leaders so far have a hidden scientific streak. No despair has so far led the leaders of Iran to compromise at all, whether with the United States or with its people. And attempts to help the Islamic Republic change into a normal country, through dialogue, have made the defenders of that dialogue stupid. Americans got Vietnam wrong, Thayer told me, in part because they failed to understand that national independence was Vietnam’s goal and communism was the means to that goal. (At international Communist conferences overseas, Ho Chi Minh sometimes frustrated his colleagues by changing the topic from “worldwide workers’ revolution” to freedom for his small piece of Southeast Asian soil.)
What can keep a Vietnam-style Iran out of its hole is if the exact opposite is true, and if revolutionary Shiite Islam is the end and everything else is the means. The United States, if not the Iranian people, seems to have accepted the continuation of Iranian leadership and butchers and tyrants. Last week, I wrote about Iran fetishization of resistanceeven at the cost of his survival. It has already resisted, and all Iran needs now is to admit that it has won the war. Unwillingness to take Wlike North Vietnam, and moving forward is a self-destructive path that Iran is unfortunately still capable of following.
