Iran and Vietnam: A president needs to save face.

You fasten all the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you sit back and watch
While the death count gets higher
          Bob Dylan, "Masters of War," 1963

March, 2026: Trump: we will leave "in two to three weeks."

April, 2026: Trump: we will leave "pretty quickly."

May, 2026: Trump: we are willing to wait "a few days."

June, 2026: Trump says "very soon."

Trump wants a way out of the Iran war that doesn't look like losing. 

Trump is scrambling. The polls are bad. Gas prices are high. Republicans expect to lose the House, even with all the gerrymanders. Senate Majority Leader John Thune cannot round up 50 Republican votes to meet Trump's demands. The war that was supposed to be quick, decisive, and glorious has become a political liability.

The strategic goals of the war — regime change, elimination of Iran's nuclear program, end to support of regional proxies — are unmet. The regime is still in place, with younger leadership and a fresh sense of national grievance. Their nuclear ambitions remain, only now inspections are a matter of negotiations. And Iran has acquired something more dangerous than a bomb: control of the Strait of Hormuz. Before February 28, the strait was an international waterway. Now it isn't. Iran can threaten the flow of oil the world needs. Countries that depend on it are seeking side deals. The goalposts have shifted so much that now we are negotiating to try to keep the strait from becoming a toll road for Iran. 

This war may bring regime change -- at the U.S. Iran can flip the power balance in the U.S. House by what they can do to the price of gasoline and the mood of the stock market. This war gave Iran "the cards."

Today's Wall Street Journal

So the war continues. Not because we can turn this into a win, but because Trump needs a formula that lets him say we won. He cannot pretend we won if Iran keeps shooting at ships and lobbing missiles into the oil kingdoms of the Gulf. We are supposed to protect them and their fragile, exposed economies, but we have shown we cannot. The oil kingdoms can protect themselves, though, by making nice with Iran and demanding we remove our regional military bases. 

This war is a loser, but the war continues.

I've seen this before.

In 1971 I was in my last year of college. My student deferment was expiring. When I graduated, I would be eligible to be drafted and sent to Vietnam.

My lottery number was 202. The army estimated that it would need to call up the first 195 numbers, unless something came up and they needed more. I was seven numbers from a war that Nixon and Kissinger had concluded could not be won. I didn't know that then. I thought they thought we were fighting for principles of democracy and anti-communism. I thought our leaders were sincere, but wrong. They weren't. The tapes and diaries that were revealed after their terms of office showed that they were cynical, selfish, and immoral. They were fighting to win an election. American lives were just the price to pay to avoid Nixon having to admit the war was pointless.

Here is what Nixon and Kissinger knew, and said to each other privately:

They said the war was unwinnable. Soldiers would be sent there, some would die, but the outcome was already determined. The Pentagon, State Department, and CIA had told them that even after Vietnamization — the plan to train the South Vietnamese to defend themselves — Saigon would not survive without U.S. combat support. Leaving meant losing. Our military was going to leave as soon as it could do it without endangering the 1972 re-election. Nixon wanted to claim "peace with honor." Since it couldn't, it needed to wait until the re-election was safely squared away. Then admit reality.

On December 21, 1970, White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman recorded in his diary that Kissinger "argues against a commitment that early to withdraw all combat troops, because he feels that if we pull them out by the end of '71, trouble can start mounting in '72 that we won't be able to deal with, and which we'll have to answer for at the elections."

On March 19, 1971 — the year I would have been drafted — Kissinger told Nixon on tape: "We can't have it knocked over — brutally — to put it brutally — before the election." Nixon's response: "That's right."

On August 3, 1972, Kissinger told the president: "We've got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two, after which — after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater."

They called it a "decent interval." A face-saving delay between when American troops came home and when the communists took over — long enough that Nixon wouldn't have to own the loss before Election Day.

What they did not discuss, in any of those conversations, was what it meant for the men who would fight and die in the interval. Miller Center of Public Affairs historian Ken Hughes, who spent decades on the Nixon tapes, noted this specifically: "Neither man mentioned the additional losses that prolonging the war would cause — there is nothing about what it meant to American POWs in the North, American soldiers in the South, or the Vietnamese on either side."

More than 20,000 Americans died during Nixon's first term. 

Trump is now doing a version of what Nixon did. He is carrying on a war with a strategic outcome baked in, willing to accept any "deal" so long as it gets us out of there, with the stock market happy and gasoline prices down. Karl Rove wrote about it frankly in a Wall Street Journal column on Sunday: We are settling for a very bad deal because we want out at any cost. When Trump loses Karl Rove and The Wall Street Journal, all that is left is pretense and the politics of the midterm elections. 

Young Americans are in harm's way while a president worries about how to avoid embarrassment while pretending there is some higher purpose for the war. A decade from now, lives lost, money spent, diaries and documents and tell-all memoirs by aides will reveal that it was all done for the self-serving political goals of the president. I have seen this movie.

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