Why the war in Iran means a more severe defeat for the US than Vietnam, according to an expert

Donald Trump's decision to launch a campaign against Iran has resulted in a strategic calamity for the United States, far more severe than the nation's defeat in the Vietnam War, according to Paul Musgrave, an associate professor of political science at Georgetown University in Qatar.

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The defeat in the war with Iran does not, at first glance, resemble other U.S. military defeats.

Musgrave, writing for Foreign Policy, notes that while Trump was encouraged by others, the initiative was entirely his. He observes that the war's rapid pace and remote location lent it an "unreal" quality. The absence of significant U.S. casualties, with fewer than 20 American soldiers killed, masks the true extent of the defeat, even as thousands of Iranians perished.

In contrast, the "American War" in Vietnam, as it is known in Vietnam, claimed millions of lives, mostly civilians, over more than a decade. The experience left a deep scar on the American psyche, becoming a symbol of national pain and a cautionary tale about hubris and strategic miscalculation for generations.

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The absence of significant U.S. human losses in this conflict also masks the scale of the American defeat.

While the Vietnam War inflicted immense personal suffering and became a national "dark moment" for a majority of Americans, the Iran conflict's impact, though strategically devastating, has been less viscerally felt domestically due to its distant nature and low U.S. death toll. Musgrave suggests this difference in experience obscures the magnitude of the American strategic failure in Iran.

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In American language, Vietnam was understood primarily as a metaphor or symbol of an American experience.