“I’m not going to be the first American president to lose a war.”
In 1969, Richard Nixon uttered this quote about the Vietnam War, and needless to say, it didn’t age very well.
In 1973, American troops departed Vietnam, and in 1975, Saigon, the capital of then South Vietnam, fell to the communist North, uniting the country under communist rule, ending the war, and officially marking the United States’ objective failure in Vietnam.
But Nixon was wrong in more ways than one because the failure in Vietnam cannot be solely laid at his feet; multiple presidents had a significant role in the lengthy process of American involvement in Vietnam.
Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy each played a role in supporting either the French colonial presence in Vietnam or the South Vietnamese government that followed.
And, of course, when President Lyndon Johnson escalated the war in 1964, it became a massive American campaign that evolved into a mess.
Eventually, Nixon’s role in the war and expansion into other places like Cambodia made things worse, all culminating in the Paris Peace Accords, a terrible peace deal in 1973, and an embarrassing end in April 1975, with the last evacuees being helicoptered out of Saigon from rooftops.
All in all, I would mostly credit LBJ and Nixon for the failures of the war, and after, America was cautious about something like that ever happening again.
But as they say, history has a way of repeating itself, and if you were to ignore all the specific references to Vietnam in the last few paragraphs, you might have a difficult time discerning whether I was talking about the Vietnam War or the War in Afghanistan.
That’s because they’re eerily similar, and just like LBJ and Nixon before them, Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s Presidential failures resulted in eerily identical results: a terrible peace agreement, the collapse of a country to the enemy, and an embarrassing end.
In this article, we’ll explore how the failures of Donald Trump and Joe Biden led to the collapse of Afghanistan and the similarity of these failures to Vietnam.
