Category: current events

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After the last US combat troops were withdrawn from South Vietnam, the United States more or less walked away from that country.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

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