Tehran is following Ho Chi Minh’s playbook in Vietnam.
Foreign Policy
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No, Iran is not yet “another Vietnam.” There are no U.S. ground forces taking unsustainable casualties, no headlines tallying the week’s dead, no massive anti-war protests in U.S. streets. And of course, rather than a beaten-down Lyndon Baines Johnson, the current U.S. president is bragging that he’s only been at this war a few months and, by the way, he would have won Vietnam “very quickly.”
But the pressure that Tehran is applying to Donald Trump suddenly feels very much like what flummoxed LBJ in Vietnam. Specifically, it resembles the winning strategy so doggedly pursued by Ho Chi Minh, the iconic North Vietnamese leader.
By resisting talks to end the war quickly and forcing Trump to extend his cease-fire indefinitely—which the president insisted he wouldn’t do only days ago—the Iranian leadership (whoever that might be) appears to be following Ho’s playbook.
A group of about three dozen soldiers in green fatigues rest on a hillside stripped of most of its vegetation. Shattered tree trunks and fallen branches litter the ground, and a military helicopter is visible in the background.
An area near Quang Tri serves as an outdoor chapel as members of the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division hold services for those killed in the area during the Vietnam War. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
It was Ho and his successor in the 1960s, Le Duan, who defeated two Western imperial powers—first France, then the United States—by understanding what Tehran appears to understand: Aggressors from far away, no matter how powerful, will tire of war well before you do. As Ho told the French colonialists back in 1946: “You can kill 10 of our men for every one we kill of yours, but even at those odds, you will lose and we will win.”
And it was Ho and Le Duan who repeatedly defied Johnson’s increasingly desperate pleas for negotiations, just as Tehran is now humiliating Trump. In a letter written to LBJ in 1967, Ho made clear that he would not consider entering into negotiations until “the unconditional cessation of U.S. bombing raids and all other acts of war,” adding that the “Vietnamese people will never submit to force, they will never accept talks under threat of bombs.”
During the 1960s, Johnson regularly fulminated in his councils of war about Hanoi’s stubbornness, wondering why increased airstrikes and sustained bombing campaigns beginning with Operation Rolling Thunder had failed to force North Vietnamese leaders to the table. “I don’t believe they’re ever going to quit,” he told his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, at one point.
Similarly in Iran—while there has been evidence of what Trump called “seriously fractured” leadership— Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the parliamentary speaker, declared that Tehran would “not accept negotiations under the shadow of threats.” This week, Iranian negotiators left Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance waiting anxiously at the White House for a phone call that never came. For good measure, Ghalibaf—who is supposedly more moderate than the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders in charge—said Tehran was using the cease-fire to prepare “to reveal new cards on the battlefield.”
Trump’s response on April 21 was to announce on Truth Social that he will “extend the Ceasefire until such time as their proposal is submitted.” Translation: Iran now seems to be calling the shots.
“Fifty years after the Vietnam War concluded, once again the U.S. is repeating this history in the war with Iran,” said Hai Nguyen, the co-founder and director of the Global Vietnam Wars Studies Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School.
“In an asymmetric war, similar to the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, Iranians have advantages beyond what the Americans could comprehend,” Nguyen told me. “They understand that the U.S. could drop thousands of tons of bombs, but it does not possess the patience to withstand a prolonged war. Like the Vietnamese revolutionaries, the Iranians appear ready to fight a protracted war with much sacrifice of national resources. Iran, in other words, understands the Achilles’ heel of the U.S.”
“This is what surrender looks like,” wrote former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder in a blog post. “It was Trump who wanted a ceasefire, seeing that further escalation wasn’t bringing Iran around and fearing the economic and political fallout of continuing the war. If Trump now extends the ceasefire indefinitely, Iran is fine with that. Right now, all of the advantages are with Iran, not with Trump. The US president’s only card is restarting a war he doesn’t want. Meanwhile, Iran holds the rest of the cards.”
Even with huge swaths of its leadership wiped out, the Islamic Republic controls access to the Strait of Hormuz and appears to be increasing that control, seizing several vessels this week and sneaking past the U.S. blockade. According to the Financial Times, citing cargo tracking group Vortexa, as of Tuesday, approximately 34 oil tankers linked to Iran have passed through the blockade.
Meanwhile, the director of the U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Intelligence Agency, Marine Corps Lt. Gen. James H. Adams, conceded during congressional testimony that Iran “retains thousands” of missiles and one-way attack drones. CBS reported on April 22 that about half of Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles and launch systems were still intact as of the start of the cease-fire on April 8, along with about 60 percent of the IRGC’s naval arm, which is used to disrupt the strait.
These numbers tend to belie statements from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who declared on the day the cease-fire began that “Operation Epic Fury was a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield.”
Indeed, what feels most Vietnam-like right now may be the daily declarations of battlefield success by Hegseth, who is proving to be a cartoonish version of McNamara, the “best and brightest” numbers whiz who repeatedly deceived the nation into believing that the United States was winning in Vietnam. McNamara became notorious for citing “body counts” and other statistical evidence of battlefield attrition. Similarly Hegseth—whom Pentagon staff have reportedly nicknamed “Dumb McNamara”—has been keen on quantifying Washington’s “decisive military victory” in Iran by citing numbers of missiles, launchers, and ships destroyed, along with leaders killed.
But that no longer counts as much as it did a month or two ago. In an assessment of the Paris peace talks over Vietnam in 1969, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote: “We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion.”
The Vietnamese achieved exhaustion of their enemy in Washington well before the Americans could succeed at sufficient attrition in Vietnam. That led to an uncompromising stance by Hanoi when talks did begin and prompted Kissinger himself to declare falsely before the fall of South Vietnam that “peace is at hand.”
A similar dynamic may be at play with Iran at the moment. The main difference, perhaps, is that by closing the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranians are trying to swiftly exhaust Trump with an economic assault as well as a political war—one that could hurt him and his party badly, especially only six months away from the midterms.
“Tehran may well be making the same calculation Hanoi did: If we absorb and endure U.S. aerial punishment while refusing to negotiate seriously, American public support for protracted indecisive war will erode over time, thus increasing the pressure on Washington to make more concessions in negotiations,” said Brian VanDeMark, a historian at the U.S. Naval Academy.
Vietnam hurt Johnson economically too, of course, as spending on the war increasingly led to a budget crisis for Johnson and his beloved “Great Society” programs—eventually contributing to high inflation and devastating electoral defeats for the Democrats.
But the chokehold that the Iranians have is much more substantial and immediate than anything that Ho once enjoyed, driving up energy prices worldwide. The Strait of Hormuz closure is already the worst oil supply disruption in history and could lead to a global recession, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Still, the stock market and other indices have continued strong, and Trump is giving no indication that he’s on a back foot, suggesting that he has all the time in the world. In an interview with CNBC on April 21, he rattled off a dubious list of figures about U.S. involvement in previous wars going back to World War I, claiming he was only “five months” into his current conflict (actually, it’s closer to three months). “I would have won Vietnam very quickly. I would have, if I were president, I would have won Iraq in the same amount of time that we won, because essentially, we won here,” he said.
But so far, little seems to have been won at all.
A group of seven workers in bright orange jumpsuits use shovels and brooms to clear dust and debris from a street. In the background, a building has been heavily damaged, with large sections of its structure collapsed into a pile of rubble.
Workers clean at the site of Israeli-U.S. strikes in Tehran on April 7. AFP via Getty Images
It is an all-too-familiar strategic error made by great powers when they invade one too many smaller ones, as Washington itself has learned since 9/11. Indeed, the Trump administration has made clear that the president has sought to avoid the quagmire of Iraq and Afghanistan by avoiding the deployment of ground troops if possible.
In Afghanistan, before the United States pulled out following a fitful two-decade effort to pacify the nation, the Taliban used to say, “You have the watches, but we have the time.” The common thread tying together Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan is that nationalist resistance—whether by the Viet Cong, Iraqi jihadis, or the Taliban—will often outlast the endurance of even a powerful foreign occupier.
As Nguyen put it, “After the war, McNamara said that one of the reasons for the Americans’ defeat in Vietnam was that they did not understand Vietnam’s long history of struggle against invasions.”
Last June, following Trump’s involvement in the short U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities, Vance—known to be a skeptic of such conflicts—said in a speech: “What I call the Trump Doctrine is quite simple: Number one, you articulate a clear American interest, and that’s—in this case—that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon. Number two, you try to aggressively diplomatically solve that problem. And number three, when you can’t solve it diplomatically, you use overwhelming military power to solve it, and then you get the hell out of there before it ever becomes a protracted conflict.”
In this case, Trump has not stated a clear goal, and if he does eventually get Iran to the table, it’s looking increasingly like the United States may have to accept compromises similar to President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal. That includes the question of what to do about Iran’s nearly-bomb-ready enriched nuclear material. The earlier pact, before Trump canceled it, required Iran to ship 98 percent of it out of the country. Now Trump keeps insisting Iran will hand over its nuclear material, while Tehran says it’s made no such concession.
“Where the stronger power’s interest is limited, it’s frequently the case that weaker beats the strong because the stronger power reaches its threshold to quit before the weaker power does,” said retired U.S. Army Col. C. Anthony Pfaff, a strategist at the Atlantic Council.
“That’s what I see in this exchange,” he added. “Even if we present Tehran with reasonable demands from their point of view, they’re incentivized to hold out for more.”
