Published on, Sept. 30 -- September 30, 2025 12:23 AM

Perhaps historical amnesia is not such a bad thing despite George Santayana's warning in his 1905 book The Life of Reason that those who "cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." One reason is that even with recollections of the past, we are often doomed to repeat the blunders and even catastrophic errors that have been made. After all, what did the US learn from its Vietnam failures that it did not repeat in Afghanistan and Iraq three decades later?

That said, links between the Ukraine War and Vietnam do provide intellectual fodder in assessing how this conflict may evolve and eventually end. What is interesting is that after the 1954 division of French Indochina into N...