Trump at a Cabinet meeting at the White House on May 27, 2026. Photo by Kent Nishiumra/AFP via Getty Images What the United States is doing in Iran shows, once again, that the United States has learned the wrong lessons from its war in Viet Nam, which remains an important measure of war strategy for the United States. The wrong lessons include believing that overwhelming military force will lead to victory, as well as supporting an anti-democratic, authoritarian ally in South Viet Nam and Israel. South Viet Nam disappeared after 1975 without American support, and Israel’s policies of occupation and apartheid in Gaza and the West Bank, its erosion of democracy for its citizens, and its reliance on ever-more expansive and ever-more violent use of military power have only been possible with that support. That power has culminated – but probably not concluded – with genocide in Gaza and a return to invading Lebanon, parallel actions and a parallel war to the American attack on Iran.
Whereas Yoav Gallant, the former Israeli defense minister, said of the Palestinians that we are “fighting against human animals” after October 7, Trump has said that Iran’s leaders are “animals.” Whereas Ghassan Alian, the former head of COGAT (Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Occupied Territory), said that “Israel has imposed a complete blockade on Gaza. You will not have electricity or water, just destruction. You want hell, you’ll get hell,” Trump has said, “Open the Fuckin’’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.” Whereas Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people,” symbolically erasing them as a foreshadowing to literally erasing them, Trump has said, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
Of course, Trump has yet to follow through on that threat – or similar threats he’s made over the last month, while, often at the same time, touting supposed “progress” in negotiations to end his war.
Either he’s continuously bluffing, in which case he should still be condemned for his genocidal threats. Or he’s not bluffing, in which case he should be brought to trial for war crimes that include the killing of Iranian civilians. If he’s not bluffing, we should all be terrified and, for those of us who are Americans, ashamed of what our country is doing. But it is important to remember that the genocidal impulse that Trump is tapping into emanates from the origins of the United States, and that the genocidal foundation of the nation is something that it shares with Israel.
The American war in Viet Nam remains important as one of the two wars that define what a “postwar” United States is. World War II is usually taken to be the war that marks the beginning of a postwar era, and it does so because it is enshrined in American mythology as the “good war.” The war in Viet Nam, which Trump has invoked when talking about Iran, was the bad war, both because of its failure for Americans and also because of how it was perceived globally and by the American domestic antiwar movement. The postwar era of the United States has been an effort to foreground the good war as an emblem of what the United States has done and can do, with the bad war lurking in the background as a reminder of the possibilities of defeat and quagmire.
The correct lessons for the United States to take from its humiliation in Viet Nam should have been to reconsider its imperial ambitions, to focus on the welfare of its own people, and to use American power for the global good. Instead, the United States – including presidents of both parties as well as the generals and leaders of the armed forces – built a “postwar” military that could continue to apply overwhelming force with none of the mistakes of the war in Viet Nam. It was not a coincidence that Israel won its Six-Day War in 1967, just as the American war was reaching its peak, with the confidence-shattering Tet Offensive taking place in January 1968. With its military success, Israel began to draw more and more support from Jewish Americans and the United States as a whole. The novelist Leon Uris, in the enormously popular Exodus of 1958, had portrayed the founding of Israel in 1948 as an exercise in heroic frontier settlement, explicitly designed to evoke the same narrative of American frontier settlement, and this shared mythology would continue to deepen its grip on the American understanding of Israel after the 1960s.
The image of Israel as a valiant, Sparta-like nation with a communal warrior ethos, a lonely outpost of democracy in Southwest Asia, would dominate in the United States and the West until the aftermath of October 7. “Kill everything that moves,” the journalist Nick Turse’s description of American military strategy and tactics in Viet Nam, applies equally well to Israeli military policy in Gaza after October 7. Underneath the mythology and the rhetoric of freedom and democracy that united Israel and the United States was the threat of unrestrained violence and the practice of asymmetrical warfare, which has always been the basis of colonial domination. The point was never about having an equal fight. The point was to subjugate natives and savages with overwhelming force and technological superiority.
A Palestinian boy looks at the destroyed residential building that was targeted by an Israeli strike in Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on May 21, 2026. Photo by Eyad Baba/AFP via Getty Images Just as the American war in Viet Nam revealed to the world, and to many Americans, the willingness of the United States to disregard human life and to fetishize its military power as a sign of cultural and civilizational superiority, so did Israel’s genocide in Gaza demonstrate that Israel’s existence can only happen with the continual and violent subjugation of Palestinians, preferably leading to their disappearance, one way or the other. And just as the desires of the United States to continue expanding its global reach and domination continued after the war in Viet Nam, so have Israel’s desires to occupy, dominate, or shatter ever-greater parts of its region, from Lebanon and Syria to Iran.
What justifies these ambitions is not, in the end, the rhetoric of democracy and freedom but the confidence in wielding overwhelming violence. “We’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age,” Air Force General Curtis LeMay is reputed to have said about the North Vietnamese. LeMay had led the firebombing campaign of Japan during World War II, and then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who helped with the logistics of that campaign, connected the American approach to Japan and Viet Nam in ‘The Fog of War,’ Errol Morris’s documentary about him. McNamara, who ran the war during its peak years, would later publish a memoir, In Retrospect, where he said he was wrong about the possibilities of American victory and had misled the American public. LeMay would claim that he only said the United States could bomb Viet Nam into the Stone Age, not that it should. Trump appears unaware of these nuances when he said of Iran, “We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong.”
This threat echoes the words of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, set in the Belgian Congo, where King Leopold II pretended to the Western world that he was civilizing its inhabitants while killing hundreds of thousands of them in his efforts to extract its enormous wealth. Kurtz is a colonial station master and believes he is deserving of worship from the inhabitants. Poisoned by his own desire for power and profit, he writes of the inhabitants, “Exterminate all the brutes!” Conrad was clear that Kurtz was not an exception to the European civilizing mission but the very embodiment of its paradox, that saving those deemed to be less than human was inevitably intertwined with destroying them through genocidal violence, since their lives mattered less than those of Westerners. Or, as General William Westmoreland put it in the context of Southeast Asia, “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.”
As Edward Said showed us in Orientalism, the Orient for the British and the French imperialists was composed of places like Palestine and Iran. Israel and the United States are the inheritors of that Orientalism, and as such, they continually demonstrate Westmoreland’s conclusion that if, for the Oriental, “life is not important,” then neither is that life important to the West. From the perspective of the pilots dropping the bombs, it must indeed seem life below them is plentiful and cheap, since that is also the view of their societies, which privilege their pilots and give hardly a thought to those below. But if Americans (and Israelis) see their pilots as heroes, that is not how they are seen by the people being bombed. People who are being bombed don’t like being bombed. And they don’t like the people who bomb them. It really doesn’t matter whether the people doing the bombing say “bomb them back to the Stone Age” or whether they say “surgical strikes” and “targeted killings” and “collateral damage.” Bombing can defeat an enemy – although that did not work in Viet Nam and probably will not in Iran or Palestine – but bombing cannot liberate people and persuade them that the people bombing them are their friends. The American bombing of Japan and Germany did not liberate the Japanese and the Germans, but instead contributed to their defeat. If Japan and Germany are allies of the United States, then that result came about from the American contribution to rebuilding those countries.
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The power of genocidal violence is such that those who possess it cannot understand the cultures and psychologies of those they bomb. That people who are being bombed would resent the bombers is a basic and universal human sentiment, and yet the people who have the capacity to bomb never seem to understand that, since they do not really see those they bomb as human. How the West exercises this assumption and how it carries out its genocidal violence can vary. The “best and the brightest” of the American generation of the war in Viet Nam sought to provide cover for that war with diplomacy and Ivy League polish. That war and its domestic and international fallout have shaped the contemporary United States, including in its selection of Donald Trump as president, an authoritarian and fascist figure who serves as a rebuke to the movement for greater democracy and domestic equality that the protests against the war helped to accelerate.
MAGA associates that movement with elite, multicultural expertise disattached from the common (white) people. The result is that the dumb and the dumbest of this current American generation are carrying out a MAGA war that is the apotheosis of American stupidity, led by white men who will have no one but themselves to blame but who will try, nevertheless, to say that they were stabbed in the back – by women, by people of color, by immigrants, by queer and trans people, by non-Christians, by liberals, by dissidents, by students, by intellectuals, and more.
So it is that the bombing of the natives over the border must be accompanied by the persecution of the dangerous others within the borders. In the case of the United States, this is being done with weapons and tactics imported back from the so-called War on Terror and the Forever War. The wars of counterinsurgency overseas are transformed into the war of counterinsurgency against the subversives within the country. Some of those counterinsurgent tactics and tools, from surveillance technology to tear gas, from indefinite detention to expulsion, come from Israel and its treatment of Palestinians. If the United States is a global imperial power, Israel is a subimperial power, fulfilling the ambitions of Theodor Herzl in his vision of “The Jewish State,” to be “a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” Since the barbarians will always be there, unless they are exterminated, this is a vision of perpetual war, which is already the reality of the United States.
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Pulitzer-Prize Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of several books. His latest includes To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other. He is also the co-editor of the anthology The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora