🇮🇷🏆🇺🇸 Iran Is a Bigger Defeat Than Vietnam | Foreign Policy

At his second inaugural, U.S. President Donald Trump pronounced his hope “that our recent presidential election will be remembered as the greatest and most consequential election in the history of our country.” By losing his Gulf war, Trump has achieved that goal. His choice to launch a campaign against Iran was encouraged by others, but fully his own. It has led to a reversal that marks a strategic calamity far greater than the U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War.

Defeat in the Iranian war looks, on the surface, nothing like other U.S. military defeats. The speed of the war and its remoteness have lent an air of unreality to the whole endeavor. The White House has not been burned, as it was in 1814; there have not been protests against a nonexistent draft. The absence of substantial U.S. casualties in this conflict also masks the scale of the U.S. defeat. To be sure, the war has been deadly: Thousands of Iranians, combatants and civilians, have died in the fighting. Americans, however, have endured far fewer deaths: To date, fewer than 20 U.S. soldiers have died—and many of those in a single strike.

By comparison, the scale of what the Vietnamese call the American War is breathtaking. Millions of people, mostly civilians, died in more than a decade of fighting waged over much of the skies and jungles of Southeast Asia; of those, just under 60,000 were Americans. So bitter was the experience that, for a generation, when Americans mentioned the word “Vietnam,” they did not refer to the actual country or society that bears that name—about whom they remained largely ignorant even after years of struggle. In American usage, Vietnam was understood to be primarily a metaphor or a symbol for an American experience.

To many ordinary Americans, it meant personal grief. For some elites, Vietnam was a cautionary tale about the hubris of power; for others, it was an error that hindered proper strategic calculation in the present. There was, however, a national consensus that Vietnam was a stain on the national fabric: A 2014 Chicago Council on Global Affairs poll found 58 percent of Americans described it as a “dark moment” and only 12 percent as something to be proud of.

The most difficult point to grasp about that conflict today may be why the United States fought so hard given how little the conflict turned out to matter to Washington. For all that U.S. policymakers waging war tolerated what would now be almost unimaginable casualties, U.S. failure in the war ultimately mattered little to broader American strategic objectives.

Those observations do not change the fact that, for the United States itself, the consequences of a costly defeat were, in the long run, relatively minor and inward-looking. The United States emerged from the wider Cold War triumphant. Vietnam itself is a power surprisingly friendly to the United States today.

Compare that situation with the aftermath of Trump’s war. The United States is inarguably in a weaker position than when it began this war of choice, with core U.S. strategic objectives harmed.

Contrast how its military performance has seemed during this conflict with the U.S.-led coalition’s war to reverse Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s conquest of Kuwait. In the 1990-91 conflict, the seeming ease with which Iraq’s military was dismembered stunned the world.

By contrast, the technically superior performance of U.S. arms in the Iran conflict has been overshadowed by the shallowness of U.S. arsenals, calling into question U.S. preparedness for a conflict with any foe more powerful than the Islamic Republic. The lasting image of high-tech combat from this conflict will be the blood-spattered bags of Iranian schoolgirls killed as the result of an apparent database error. And although U.S. defensive systems have performed well against Iranian missiles and one-way attack drones, Iran was nevertheless able to penetrate those systems to great effect, calling into question how those systems would fare against a more focused enemy or over a longer conflict.