Ukraine: the next South Vietnam?

This past week, the Trump administration announced that it would suspend crucial weapons shipments to Ukraine.

This decision met with praise in a few quarters, condemnation in many others.

In any event, the suspension of US weapons (particularly air defense systems) leaves Ukraine especially vulnerable to Russian attacks.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, analogies of Hitler and Nazi Germany have been rife on the news, and on social media.

Any western politician who wants to reduce our involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian War has been compared to Chamberlain, who infamously appeased Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1938.

The analogy is always Munich and World War II, events of 80 to 85 years ago.

I have been thinking about another, more recent war.

I am just barely old enough to remember the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War. When I was a kid, Vietnam vets were not old men, but young men in their late twenties and early thirties.

The fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, is the first major geopolitical event that I remember watching on television. The North Vietnamese tanks crashing through the gates of South Vietnam’s presidential palace.

That was 50 years ago. Will Ukraine become the South Vietnam of the twenty-first century?

Vietnam, like Ukraine, had become deeply entangled in our domestic politics. You could tell how a person was going to vote, based on their position on Vietnam, and vice versa.

After the last US combat troops were withdrawn from South Vietnam, the United States more or less walked away from that country. The US abandoned South Vietnam to the depredations of Soviet-backed, communist North Vietnam.

This was after the US spent $170 billion (around $1 trillion in current money) on the conflict, during the administrations of three presidents.

More importantly, the US had real skin in the game in Vietnam. More than 58,000 American service personnel died in the Vietnam War.

If the US would walk away from a commitment like that, should anyone really be surprised that Ukraine has become expendable?

But we don’t even need to look back that far. Consider the Biden administration’s hasty pullout from Afghanistan in 2021. This subjected a nation of 41 million people to the brutal rule of the Taliban.

The Afghanistan pullout also came after a 20-year US military commitment there, and 2,420 American deaths.

The lessons of South Vietnam and Afghanistan are: Americans don’t like foreign wars. And when the US is done with a foreign war, it’s done.

What about Europe, you ask?

The Europeans will have meetings. European leaders like Macron and Starmer will posture. They will continue to send some arms to Ukraine.

At the end of the day, though, the European voters are more attached to their socialized medicine and long vacations than they are to Ukraine. Many of these nations have not been primary belligerents in a major conflict since the Napoleonic era.

And as for young Europeans, marching onto the battlefields of Ukraine? Perish the thought. Recent polls have shown that Europe’s teens and twentysomethings are unwilling to fight and die for their own countries—let alone for Ukraine. These are nations that have been totally stripped of their patriotism—the one thing that Russia has in reserve.

Europe has also lost its animal spirits. For at least a generation now, Europeans have been unwilling to even reproduce themselves. So there aren’t that many European Gen Zs to place on the battlefield, even if there was a will to do so.

The Europeans are not going to save Ukraine.

***

Back to the Hitler analogy. Russia has spent more than three years trying to subdue Ukraine, a valiant, but second-tier power. Putin’s aggressive war has had tremendous costs for Russia, demographically, financially, and reputationally. (Any “soft power” that post-Soviet Russia might once have had has been erased for the foreseeable future.)

And Russia has still not succeeded.

***

Russia will therefore not be in a position to conquer France or Germany, or even Poland, as incompetent as the leaders of those countries are.

Ukraine, however, is unlikely to prevail—not without a dramatic shift in the political winds in the west. Ukraine’s defenders are unquestionably brave; but the math is stacked against them, especially with North Korea, China, and Iran all backstopping Russia.

What seems increasingly likely is that Russia will accomplish its conquest of Ukraine, in some form. This may take the form of a complete collapse of the Ukrainian state. What is more likely, though, is a radical partition, with a rump Ukrainian state west of Kyiv, and everything east and south going to Russia (or becoming a puppet state controlled by Russia, like the Donetsk People’s Republic).

This outcome will (possibly) pull the Europeans out of their stupor, and motivate them to become self-sufficient military powers again.

But this won’t happen in time to save Ukraine.

***

I don’t make any of these predictions gleefully, mind you. But I saw the collapse of Afghanistan in 2021, and I remember the collapse of South Vietnam in my childhood.

There is no “right side” of history. If the world could allow South Vietnam to fall in 1975, it is not inconceivable that it could allow Ukraine to fall in 2025.

Nor does every historical tragedy automatically revert to a worst-case “Hitler” scenario. The USA fought the Vietnam War partly because it wanted Vietnam to be democratic and capitalist. Vietnam is still not a democratic country, but any recent visitor to Hanoi will agree that Vietnam is no longer doctrinaire Marxist, either.

In 2023, the USS Ronald Reagan visited Vietnam. In 2024, the USS Blue Ridge visited a former US Navy base in Cam Ranh Bay. The US and Vietnam—once bitter enemies—are now mutually seeking closer military ties, as well as economic ones.

Which might make one wonder what would have happened, had we never fought the Vietnam War in the first place.

Vietnam would have gone communist, but that’s what happened anyway. And without the long American war, a lot of long-dead Americans and Vietnamese would still be with us today. So would their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, who were never born in the first place.

***

The collapse of South Vietnam in 1975 was still a tragedy. So would be the collapse of Ukraine in 2025.

But history often involves a choice between two bad outcomes. A nation losing its sovereignty or territory is a bad outcome. So is an endless war, that does nothing but bleed two nations of their youth and resources.

If a historical tragedy is inevitable, sometimes it is better that it happen as quickly as possible, so as to minimize further losses of life. Then the next stage can begin.

Sometimes there is no choice but to move on—as many would argue was the case in both Afghanistan and South Vietnam…and a few would argue is the case in Ukraine.

-ET

Zohran Mamdani and the case for government-run brothels in New York

A wise man once said, “Try everything once, except for Russian roulette, incest, and residing in New York City.”

I live just outside Cincinnati, Ohio, about 640 miles from the Big Rotten Apple, and I don’t intend to go one mile closer.

(Note: I did live in Chicago, another chaotic big city, in the early 1990s. I lasted three months before I pulled the plug. So big-city living is definitely not for me.)

Therefore, the question of who is going to be the next Mayor of New York City falls under the category of “problems that don’t directly concern me”.

But I’m having fun watching the misguided enthusiasm and general alarm surrounding Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, who has become a parasitic presence in the Democratic Party.

(Ever notice that Democratic Socialists of America candidates never want to run as Democratic Socialists of America candidates? That’s because they know, full well, that a candidate bearing the DSA label wouldn’t be elected dog catcher.)

Fox News, et al are having a field day calling Zohran Mamdani a “Muslim socialist”. But hey, the guy is a Muslim, and he is a socialist. When someone refers to me as a 56-year-old bald man, I don’t necessarily like that, but I can’t accuse them of lying, either.

Among Mamdani’s brilliant ideas is the establishment of government-run grocery stores. That particular brain fart is literally plagiarized from the Soviet Union.

(Why not reduce taxes and crime instead, so that private-sector grocery chains will have more of an incentive to locate stores in New York City?

Why? Because that would involve common sense, a commodity in which Zohran Mamdani is sorely lacking.)

Mamdani has also gone on record supporting the legalization of prostitution. While I’m not here to cheerlead for the World’s Oldest Profession, I’ve never understood the logic of telling a woman that she is free to sleep with anyone she wants, except for the odd man who happens to hand her a wad of cash. A blanket ban on sex work defies both logic and personal autonomy.

That said, one imagines that in Zohran Mamdani’s New York, not even the most in-demand call girls would be able to save much money, once they’ve paid all their taxes.

I would also have to ask: will the legal sex workers be restricted to government-run brothels? That would make just as much sense as Mamdani’s government-run grocery idea.

-ET

“Hardball” and the Middle East: memories of 1986 and beyond

On April 14, 1986, President Ronald Reagan ordered the US bombing of Libya. This mission, code-named Operation El Dorado Canyon, was in retaliation for the Libyan government’s involvement in the bombing of a Berlin discotheque ten days prior. Two US soldiers had been killed in that attack.

In April 1986, I was a senior in high school. We discussed the retaliatory strike on Libya in one of my classes. This led to the kind of back-and-forth you might expect, from any group of callow teenagers debating complex world events.

There was a peacenik faction, of course, who thought that we should merely turn the other cheek and make nice with the Libyans. There were also students who declared that the Libyans had gotten off lightly. (There was a case to be made for this latter position. The US bombed a series of Libyan military targets on 4/14/86. The Libyans suffered about 40 casualties.)

But one student’s comment stuck in my head:

“You’ve got to play hardball with those guys over there,” he said. “If they’ll bomb night clubs filled with innocent people, they aren’t going to listen to reason.”

Hardball. Certainly a case can be made for playing hardball in the Muslim Middle East. That is, after all, a brutal part of the world filled with brutal leaders.

But here’s the problem: The American version of “hardball” never seems to work in the Middle East. Nor does any version of American “softball”.

Nor does it much matter who happens to be in the White House. Consider the history of roughly the last 50 years:

Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter, a peacefully inclined US President, if ever there was one, was in the White House during the Islamic Revolution of Iran, and the resultant Tehran hostage crisis. In November 1979, Iranian student radicals overran the US Embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage.

Jimmy Carter bluff, cajoled, and negotiated for the hostages’ freedom. He even attempted a limited military operation to rescue the hostages: Operation Eagle Claw. This resulted only in the deaths of eight American service personnel, and the loss of seven American aircraft.

The Tehran hostage crisis was one of the factors behind Carter’s landslide defeat in the 1980 US general election, making him a one-term president.

Ronald Reagan

Some would say that Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, did a good job talking tough to the Soviets. But Reagan was baffled by the Middle East. In October 1983, Iranian-backed radicals bombed the US Marine barracks in Beirut. Two-hundred forty-one US personnel were killed in the suicide bombing. In 2004, the Iranian government established a memorial in Tehran—to the suicide bombers who carried out the attack on the US Marines.

Throughout the 1980s, Reagan famously aided the mujahideen in Afghanistan, where the USSR was attempting to establish a Soviet-style Marxist state. The American military aid grievously undermined the Soviet Union. It also facilitated the rise of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, two groups that would cause America much larger problems in the twenty-first century.

George H.W. Bush

In 1990, President George H.W. Bush used military force to oppose Saddam Hussein’s takeover of Kuwait. The resultant conflict, the Persian Gulf War, was relatively short and bloodless, as wars go.

But the presence of American infidel troops on Saudi soil would serve as a rallying cause for Islamic radicals everywhere. This was one of the primary casus belli cited by Osama bin Laden as his inspiration for the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001.

Bush drove Iraqi troops out of Kuwait, but he did not drive Saddam Hussein from power. This left America with a wounded, vengeful foe who would continue to make trouble until his removal in 2003—which brought even bigger problems.

Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton brought about a [temporary] respite in the Israel-Palestinian conflict with the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Clinton did not adequately foresee the dangers arising in Afghanistan, where the Taliban was rapidly taking control, and Osama bin Laden was planning 9/11.

The first al Qaeda strikes against American interests occurred while Clinton was still president. In October 2000, al Qaeda operatives carried out a suicide attack against the USS Cole, killing 37 Americans.

George W. Bush

President George W. Bush involved America in one of its greatest foreign policy disasters ever: the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Bush’s intentions were probably good, but the costs—for America and the people of the Middle East—were unacceptably high. More than twenty years later, Iraq is still not secure, and still not a safe place for Americans to visit. 

Barack Obama

Barack Obama came into the White House with the ambition of establishing a new relationship between the United States and the Muslim world. In his 2009 Cairo speech, he was notably apologetic of past western transgressions—both real and imagined.

Obama ended up being criticized for his extensive use of drone strikes in the region. ISIS came into existence on Obama’s watch. President Obama’s critics charged him with being too easy on Iran, which was then making strides in its nuclear program.

Nor did Obama protect us from Islamic terrorism. While Obama was in office, Islamic radicals perpetrated numerous terrorist attacks in the West, including the 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.

And then there’s Israel

Almost 80 years ago, the United States became the de facto guarantor of Israel. This really should not have been the case. The Jewish state came into existence because of Ottoman and British imperialism, and centuries of virulent antisemitism throughout Europe.

But America took on this burden in 1948, because all of the nations of Europe were still devastated from World War II—a conflict in which European antisemitism played a significant role, in the form of the Holocaust.

Since then, Americans have sometimes liked to think of Israel as our “special friend” in the Middle East. The Israeli government has often taken pains to demonstrate that this is not necessarily the case, pulling—and threatening to pull— us into one conflict after another.

***

And now, barely one week after Israel bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, it turns out that the United States has bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, too.

I’m not here to second-guess President Trump’s historic decision, nor to laud it. There were plenty of arguments against taking decisive action against Iran. There were plenty of arguments against allowing Iran to continue with its nuclear program, while the Islamic Republic ran circles around the feckless Europeans, and negotiated in bad faith.

But we can all agree on one thing: President Trump is certainly “playing hardball”, in the words of my long-ago high school classmate.

Now comes the hard part of hardball.

In an ideal scenario, the Iranian regime falls in a matter of days, or a few short weeks. Some form of democratic, secular government comes to Iran—perhaps under a constitutional monarchy, or perhaps under a different form of secular republican government.

But this is the Muslim Middle East, where everything can—and usually will—go wrong. 

-ET

Iran: the case for a Pahlavi restoration

Iran is an ancient civilization, far older than the United States or any European country. The ancient kingdom of Persia (what Iran used to be called) predates the Roman Empire.

For most of its history, Iran was not even a Muslim nation. Iran has fundamentally changed in the past. It can fundamentally change in the future. There is no reason to believe that the Islamic Republic, an oppressive regime by any standard, will—or should be—a permanent predicament for the 92 million people of Iran.

In the 1990s, one of my work colleagues was a forty-something American man named Mike. Mike was quite a character. He had served in Vietnam, and had no shortage of stories to tell about that conflict. Mike was not a combat veteran, though. Based on his stories, Mike seemed to spend much of his time in the military on leave, cavorting in the fleshpots of Bangkok and Manilla.

Mike had also lived in Iran during the late 1970s, just prior to the Islamic revolution of 1979. During that time, Mike was employed as a representative of the Bell Helicopter Company.

Mike loved Iran. Iran in the late 1970s was nothing like the country that it was soon to become, following the imposition of the Khomeini death cult.

Tehran was a bustling city back then. There were discos. (Hey, it was the late 1970s!) Women walked around in miniskirts and other western attire of that era. Tehran was sometimes compared to Paris.

Mike married an Iranian woman while he was there. They later divorced. But from what I knew of Mike, that was probably more Mike’s fault than hers. Nevertheless, he had nothing but good things to say about Iran before the ayatollahs.

Iran in the 1970s was also moving toward authentic modernity and real prosperity. In 1978, Iran was the most prosperous country in Asia outside of Japan. The country had oil, of course, but there was also a move toward economic diversification: light manufacturing and services.

Iran in those days was run by a monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran. Iran had always been a monarchy, just as Persia had always been a monarchy. In ancient Persia, the ruler was known as Shāhanshāh, or King of Kings. (This is the term from which the modern “shah” is derived.)

The reader will therefore not be surprised to learn that Iran under the shahs was not an Athenian democracy.  The Pahlavi dynasty, which lasted from 1925 to 1979, was imperfect in many ways, and fell short in many ways, when measured by the most exacting western standards.

But Iran under the Pahlavi dynasty was a far better place than the Islamic Republic of Iran, under Khomeini and the mullahs. And it was indisputably better for women and non-Muslims.

Iran under the Pahlavi dynasty was also a more responsible member of the global community. Pre-revolutionary Iran had good relations with its Sunni Muslim neighbors, the United States, and Israel. (No, that is not a typo.)

At the time of this writing, the surviving head of the Pahlavi dynasty is Reza Pahlavi, born in 1960. Reza Pahlavi was the Crown Prince of Iran when the revolution broke out. In 1980, in a ceremony held in Cairo, Egypt, the twenty-year-old Reza was sworn in as Iran’s monarch, following the line of succession from his recently deceased father.

Reza Pahlavi is now in his sixties, and he remains Iran’s monarch in exile. As events in Iran unfold and constantly change, there has been talk of Reza returning to Iran, perhaps as a constitutional monarch, and perhaps as the figurehead of a new, authentically democratic government in Iran.

That will, of course, be a decision for the people of Iran. But it would not be without historical precedent. It has happened before, in a country much more familiar to most Americans: England.

In the 1640s, the English fought a civil war. This ended with the overthrow and execution of King Charles I. The English Civil War also resulted in the formation of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth of England. The Commonwealth was run by puritans. Under the Commonwealth, plays, public celebrations, and dancing were all forbidden. So was the traditional observance of Christmas, which the puritans saw as idolatrous.

The Commonwealth, thankfully, did not last long. It collapsed after only eleven years.

Following the misery of the Commonwealth of England, the British people were ready to go back to the future. They invited Charles II, the son of the deposed (and executed) Charles I to return to England, and the British throne, in 1660. This event, known as the Stuart Restoration, began a period of cultural and economic renewal in England.

It is therefore not too farfetched to believe that, after nearly five decades of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the people of Iran might opt for a Pahlavi restoration. They are certainly ready for a change.

-ET

The end of the US penny: nostalgia, but no real sense of loss

Coin collecting was one of my childhood hobbies.

I collected historical coins of all denominations: Morgan and Eisenhower silver dollars, Buffalo nickels, and Mercury dimes.

And yes, pennies, too.

I’m not an active collector anymore, but coins still interest me. This is why I note the passing of the US penny with mixed feelings. The US Mint has confirmed that it will begin phasing out the penny after 2026. Existing pennies will remain legal tender for the foreseeable future. But the heyday of the one-cent coin is clearly behind us.

Perhaps I saw this coming, even when I was collecting coins as a kid in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That was, after all, an era of high inflation. As a kid, I always picked up a stray penny found on a sidewalk, but there was no sense of having hit the jackpot. As a kid of that era, found wealth began with the quarter.

Moreover, this isn’t the first time that US currency has been phased out or changed in my lifetime. Almost all currency has undergone design changes since I was born. Throughout my life, I’ve seen the two-dollar bill and the one-dollar coin revived, discontinued, and revived again. At present, the Kennedy half-dollar seems poised to make a genuine comeback.

But the penny? Maybe we can live without it. As a collector I hoarded wheat pennies and Indian head pennies. Few of them were worth any real money, according to the 1980 Whitman coin value guide that served as my bible.

Some casual research has shown me that historical pennies have even less relative value than they did 45 years ago. The childhood coin collector in me, that kid from 1980, will miss the penny. But the penny’s fate was sealed even then.

-ET

‘The Americans’: is now the time for a sequel?

I don’t evangelize many 21st-century television shows. But I am unabashed in my enthusiasm for The Americans, the period spy drama that originally aired on FX from 2013 to 2018.

The Americans is about big events of the final decade of the Cold War. But it is also a family drama: about Philip and Elizabeth Jennings and their two children. The Jenningses are deep-cover Soviet KGB operatives. Philip and Elizabeth do all the bad things you would expect KGB agents to do. But they also cope with the pressures of maintaining their cover, and keeping their secret from their two children, who were born in the USA.

The series finale was set at the end of 1987/early 1988, just as Cold War tensions were easing. No spoilers here, except to say the series ended in a way that was satisfying, while simultaneously leaving the door open for sequels.

And it’s easy to imagine any number of sequels, based on a myriad of post-1988 plot lines. So much was yet to happen: the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan (1989), the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), and the collapse of the USSR (1991).

And what about the post-Soviet, Yeltsin and Putin eras? The possibilities are endless.

In a March 11, 2023 interview on The Rich Eisen Show, series star Matthew Rhys hinted at the possibility of The Americans continuing in some form.

That was almost two years ago. I remain cautiously hopeful. But I am also realistic about these things. Despite the high quality of the show’s concept and execution, a revived version of The Americans would face certain obstacles.

To begin with, young audiences may have difficulty relating to the subject matter. I am in my 50s and I remember the 1980s as if that decade ended last year. Viewers under 40, who lack such a perspective (and who have suffered the intellectual depredations of American public education) may struggle to get a foothold as they begin a show that involves Cold War-era history.

The Americans premiered in a crowded 2010s TV arena, filled with more accessible shows involving dragons, superheroes, and teenagers performing magic. The Americans was always a critical success, but it never got the viewership it deserved.

That may also have been an issue of timing. Between 2013 and 2018, the US public was focused on economic recovery, ISIS, Islamic terrorism, and the 2016 presidential election. The Cold War and Russia seemed far, far away.

That faraway perception of Russia may have changed, however, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and talk of a Cold War II from all quarters.

Now may be the perfect time to revive The Americans, in fact. A post-Soviet storyline would make the most sense. But there is plenty of material surrounding the fall of the USSR, too.

Even if The Americans zoomed forward to the present era, it could be made to work. All of the main characters, though much older, could plausibly still be alive.

I’m crossing my fingers for a sequel to my all-time favorite television show. As the above interview with Matthew Rhys suggests, I’m not alone in hoping for more seasons of The Americans.

-ET