One of the sturdiest conventions about human affairs is the notion that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
This sage original formulation comes from the Spanish-born American philosopher and poet George Santayana, but close variations abound, correctly or wrongly attributed to a wide variety of thinkers and politicians, from Edmund Burke to Winston Churchill.
Last week, I reread a modern classic by the late journalist David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest. Originally published in 1972, Halberstam’s account of the arrogant way the administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson led the United States into a senseless and unwinnable conflict in Vietnam offers a series of potent reminders of the wisdom of Santayana’s insight at a moment when Washington has once again stumbled into war.
Much has changed about the United States and the world since the Vietnam War, which was a human tragedy and a profound debacle from the perspective of U.S. power. But many of the basics of the cognitive blindness that Washington displayed in pursuing that conflict are on exhibit in the Iran war today. They have even deepened and become more glaring.
One might start with Halberstam’s title, which at first glance may appear to be an endorsement of the intellectual brilliance that Kennedy assembled around him and relied upon for foreign-policy advice. The title is, in fact, meant to be ironic. Kennedy’s advisors, many of whom were retained by Johnson, were indeed avatars of almost absurd excellence, measured by their achievements prior to entering the president’s inner circle.
McGeorge Bundy, to take one, had graduated at the top of his class at the elite boarding school Groton, where he once feigned to “read” an assignment out loud that he had not bothered to write, extemporaneously delivering his composed thoughts so coherently that his professor and fellow students were left stunned. After racking up numerous distinctions at Yale and Harvard, Bundy was named dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the age of 34, when most academics are struggling to obtain tenure. He eventually served as Kennedy’s, and later Johnson’s, national security advisor.
Robert McNamara, a former head of Ford Motor Company who served under both presidents as secretary of defense, was another of the brilliant technocrats, men who believed fervently in the ability of applied reason, intelligence, and learning—sheer brain power, in other words—to overcome all but the rarest of problems. One of McNamara’s reputed superpowers was his sophistication with data, coupled with a legendary memory.
As Halberstam writes, “Once, sitting at CINCPAC [a military presentation] for eight hours watching hundreds and thousands of slides flashed across the screen showing what was in the pipeline to Vietnam and what was already there, he finally said, after seven hours, ‘Stop the projector. This slide, number 869, contradicts slide 11.’ Everyone was impressed, and many a little frightened.”
The current U.S. president, Donald Trump, is fond of pointing out that the present war and the Vietnam conflict bear little comparison because, despite his initial boast that the Iran campaign would be concluded in a matter of weeks, it remains incomparably shorter than the latter. It is hard, nonetheless, for anyone who reads Halberstam today to come away less than impressed by how much the two wars already share with each other.
Each was pursued with ill-defined and frequently shifting goals. Each proceeded on the basis of designs drawn up by ideologically driven people bereft of expertise in the country that Washington had decided to go to war against. The planning of each was conducted largely in secret, with little public airing of strategy or aims, let alone consultation with Congress or with allies. Each gave almost no room for dissenting voices to be heard. Each placed unshakeable faith in the ability of superior U.S. technology and overwhelming firepower to ensure victory. Neither White House thought clearly about what victory would look like, or how to know when and how to get out. And as the respective tragedies unfolded, each fell under the spell of its own rhetoric. “Being verbal seemed to be an end in itself,” Halberstam wrote in an updated foreword for the 1993 edition of his classic.
This passage, in particular, chilled me:
The other thing I learned about the Kennedy-Johnson team was that for their considerable reputations as brilliant, rational managers they were in fact very poor managers. They thought they were very good, and they were always talking about keeping their options open, even as, day by day and week by week, events closed off those options. The truth was that history … was a hard taskmaster and from the early to the middle sixties, when we were making those fateful decisions, we had almost no choices left.
Those choices consisted, Halberstam added, of either facing up to defeat and getting out or sending in combat troops to fight an unwinnable war.
Finally, each conflict lacked any clear sense of moral purpose. In Trump’s case, Washington’s stated goals have included something never heard before in U.S. politics: a vow to wipe out another country’s—Iran’s—civilization. Even against Japan, where atomic weapons were used for the first (and so far, only) time in World War II, U.S. war aims had never sunk to such nihilism.
But for all of the resemblances of past to present here, I find the contrasts, if anything, even more powerful. A Halberstam criticism of the Kennedy team is that whatever the strengths of its members’ credentials on paper, few of them had the hard-won experience of the officials who had managed U.S. foreign relations in the postwar era: “The men who had made those early hard decisions of the Cold War had served a much longer, much more complete apprenticeship in their professions.”
Who among the shoddily qualified Trump team has earned a deserved reputation as a brilliant or rational manager? Surely not McNamara’s counterpart, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whom Trump appears to have chosen to lead the Pentagon in the confused belief that being made for television is the same as being made in television. Surely not Marco Rubio, the former senator who combines the roles of secretary of state and national security advisor but has never managed a large organization or exercised executive authority before. Surely not the shape-shifting vice president, J.D. Vance, whose rise to high office was as swift as Bundy’s, but largely on the strength of having written a memoir. I’ll pass further comment on the prominent, if ex officio diplomatic roles given to pure amateurs such as Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his businessman friend, Steve Witkoff.
Nowadays, the person for whom being verbal seems like an end in itself is the president himself—a man who has boasted implausibly of knowing more about military affairs than any general, of knowing more about how to manage Europe’s problems than the Europeans themselves. U.S. hubris is part of Halberstam’s central diagnosis for the Vietnam debacle, but never has there been hubris like this.
Strategic aims aside, the parlous management of the war speaks for itself. Trump and Hegseth have implored Congress to boost military spending to $1.5 trillion, a vast increase of the Pentagon’s already enormous budget. After foolishly believing that Iran could be defeated from the air—another unlearned lesson from Vietnam—the United States is running out of the costly, high-tech missile systems on which its supposed military superiority is based. This leaves the country not only incapable of sustaining an intense campaign against Iran, but also dangerously exposed in other parts of the world, from East Asia to the eastern flanks of Europe.
Meanwhile, morale has become so bad aboard the U.S. warships that enforce a naval blockade on Iran that multiple crew members of the USS Abraham Lincoln have reportedly tried to leap to their deaths after more than 250 days at sea.
Trump has both boasted of having “rebuilt” the United States’ armed forces less than two years into his second term and vowed to make the country’s armed forces so powerful that in the future, no one would dare challenge Washington.
Iran, a middle power of 93 million people, has apparently not gotten the memo. In an interview with PBS News Hour this week, Iranian Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Naqdi said, “We had never seen a real war to gain real experience to learn how to fight with America. In these five months, we have learned how. We have also seen how the American military is weaker than what we perceived.”
Ominously, this sounds more credible than most of what one hears these days out of Washington.