It is becoming very clear that Trump has no idea of how to get himself out of the mess he got himself into with starting the war with Iran. He seems to be increasingly disengaged with fewer unhinged posts about the war on his social media site. This may be because after oscillating back and forth between threats and calls for negotiations, between bombing and ceasefires, between demands that the Strait of Hormuz be opened to blockading it himself, between sending incompetent negotiators to talk with Iranian negotiators and then calling them back at the last minute, he seems to have run out of ways of reversing himself without seeming to look even more ridiculous. His latest announcement that he has extended the ceasefire indefinitely looks like he wants to get the war out of the headlines, like the way he stopped talking about Greenland when it became clear that his threat to take it over was going nowhere and he looked like a fool.

The Vietnam war has been analyzed extensively and many lessons drawn from it, the main one being that getting involved in a war in a distant country, especially a ground war, leads almost inevitably to a quagmire from which one cannot extricate oneself easily. But what is notable is how successive administrations tend to think that the next time will be different, with the Trump administration falling into the same trap. Each time they start out hoping for a quick victory, and quickly discover that that is not going to happen and end up in a stalemate, desperately looking for a way to extricate themselves without looking humiliated. Each time they launched massive bombing campaigns (Operation Rolling Thunder in Vietnam and Operation Epic Fury in Iran) thinking that it will destroy morale and lead people to overthrow their leaders or cause them to surrender, only to find that bombing only arouses local anger and nationalist sentiment and causes people to rally round their government however much they may have disliked it before.

In The New Yorker, Louis Menand reviews some books on Vietnam and says that once the first marines landed in Da Nang in 1965, the US was stuck, and they knew it.

The Johnson Administration downplayed the significance of the landing. It explained that the marines were being deployed to secure an airbase used for Operation Rolling Thunder, a bombing campaign against North Vietnam that had begun a week earlier and that would continue, with two brief pauses, for three and a half years.
…

You can always stop bombing, though. When boots are, as they say, on the ground, your off-ramp options dwindle. Everyone understood that sending in the marines marked a fork in the road that could not be easily unforked. Once Americans started getting killed, it would be hard to leave without winning the war, and the war might prove very hard to win.

Ten years later, in 1975 the US left Vietnam ignominiously, with the puppet government it had installed being quickly toppled by North Vietnamese forces. The last days of evacuation were a shambles, with desperate South Vietnamese who feared being seen as American collaborators climbing over the US embassy walls, trying to get on to the last helicopters and planes, even clinging to their undercarriages as they took off.

What the Pentagon Papers revealed is that the American government had reason to know all along that the venture was ill-fated. After 1968, the goal was to somehow abandon the war but avoid defeat. Richard Nixon’s euphemism for this was “peace with honor.” 
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What was the United States fighting for in Vietnam? “Humiliation” is a word that recurs continually in memorandums circulated in the Administration when the decision was being made to send the marines, back in 1965. In March, shortly after the Da Nang landing, an Assistant Secretary of Defense, John McNaughton, wrote a memo assigning relative weights to American objectives in Vietnam. In his view, the principal aim was “to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat.” He assigned this a weight of seventy per cent. Second, at twenty per cent, was to keep Southeast Asia out of Chinese hands. And the third, at ten per cent, was to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life.

Another State Department official, George Ball, told Lyndon B. Johnson in late June, “Once we suffer large casualties, we will have started a well-nigh irreversible process. Our involvement will be so great that we cannot—without national humiliation—stop short of achieving our complete objectives. Of the two possibilities, I think humiliation would be more likely than the achievement of our objectives—even after we had paid terrible costs.”

From the beginning, in other words, a paramount American interest in Vietnam was “face.” The important thing was not to lose. “I knew from the start that I was bound to be crucified either way I moved,” Johnson told Doris Kearns Goodwin. “If I left the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. . . . If I left that war and let the communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.”

Johnson had to do it to show that he could do it. Much like Vietnam, only a lot faster, the American war in Iran has reduced itself to saving face. Within two weeks, the United States was trying to figure out how to end the war without losing it. Meanwhile, people were being killed.

Now even the German chancellor is saying that the US is being outmaneuvered by the Iranian leadership.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz tore into Washington on Monday, warning the Trump administration is being played and “humiliated” by the regime in Tehran and lacks a clear strategy to end the conflict.

Speaking during a school visit in his home region in western Germany, Merz said the U.S. had misjudged the Iranian regime and entered the war without a clear exit plan.

“The Iranians are clearly stronger than expected and the Americans clearly have no truly convincing strategy in the negotiations either,” Merz said, according to German Press Agency dpa. “A whole nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership.”

Merz’s comments came after a chaotic weekend for U.S.-Iran diplomacy. U.S. President Donald Trump abruptly scrapped a planned trip by special envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner to Pakistan, pulling back from what had been billed as a potential jump-start to fragile Iran talks.

Trump is floundering and seems to be at that stage of trying to find a face-saving way out. He has threatened but not yet introduced ground troops into the conflict which would make the task of extricating himself even more difficult. He has not yet coined the equivalent of the face-saving fallback position of ‘peace with honor’ and I do not expect him to since that is not his style. He will instead claim that the US has achieved a crushing victory even as he cuts and runs, leaving behind in his wake a terrible toll of destruction and suffering.

The only lesson that US governments took from the Vietnam war that they actually acted upon is that it is a mistake to give reporters free access to combat zones because then the reality of negative news undermines public support. Ever since then, the US military strictly limits access to reporters, thus ensuring that they can put out glowing reports of progress with little or no contradiction except after a lapse of time. For example, reports have recently emerged that Iran’s early attacks damaged US bases in the region far more extensively than previously reported.

US military bases and equipment in the Persian Gulf have been hit much harder by recent Iranian strikes than initially reported, according to several US officials and people familiar with the situation. 

The extent of the destruction is much greater than what has been publicly shared so far and the repair is expected to cost billions of dollars, the officials told NBC News.

Iran has carried out strikes across several countries in the region since the war began on February 28. These attacks hit important military sites in at least seven countries, including storage warehouses, command centres where operations are managed, aircraft hangars, and systems used for satellite communication.

It also damaged runways, radar systems, and even some aircraft, which are all critical for military movement and surveillance. In one case, even an older Iranian F-5 fighter jet was able to get through and carry out a strike despite powerful US air defence systems.

It is surprising that with so much destruction of buildings and equipment, there are no reports of any US casualties.

There are also some strange silences. For example, there was the case of two US fighter jets that were shot down in Iran. Both pilots were rescued but since then there has been nothing said about them. One would expect that the US military would put them in front of the media to make them into heroes and highlight their ability to rescue people from within Iran. But there has been nothing. Those pilots have disappeared and remain anonymous.

The suppression of such news may be to make leaving easier, enabling Trump to claim that it is a loss-free war and that he has achieved his objectives, however absurd that claim is.