Donald Trump must have been afraid that he was going to die. He had just turned 22, and it was the summer of 1968 — a bad time to be young. America was at war in Vietnam. For three years, US troops had been fighting Vietnamese communists backed by China and the Soviet Union.
But the Viet Cong and the People’s Army of Vietnam just couldn’t be licked. Their tenacity was an insult to America’s national pride. And, if you believed US policymakers, an existential threat too. If the communists won in Vietnam, they would take over other Asian countries. They wouldn’t stop there, though. Commies never do. They wouldn’t rest until they dominated the whole wide world. This was known as the domino theory. “If we quit Vietnam tomorrow we’ll be fighting in Hawaii, and next week, we’ll have to be fighting in San Francisco,” President Lyndon B. Johnson said.
Young men like Trump were cannon fodder in the showdown against the red threat. Every week, his peers were drafted into the military and dropped in Vietnam’s muggy jungles. They fought and bled and returned home in body bags. Between 1964 and 1967, nearly one million Americans were conscripted; in 1968, an additional 300,000 were.
Trump was supposed to be one of them. Until May 1968, he had been a university student, which ensured him automatic draft deferments. But after graduating, he no longer had a reason to dodge his patriotic duty. The time had come for him to put America first.
There was no way he was going to do that. “You think I’m stupid, I wasn’t going to Vietnam,” Trump reportedly told his lawyer years later. And he didn’t. He avoided the draft thanks to a medical exemption. In the autumn of 1968, as others his age were shipped off to Saigon, Trump went to see a podiatrist in Queens. Miraculously, the foot doctor found that he suffered from heel spurs — bony growths on both his heels. And just like that, ’Nam was null.
It was all a little too convenient. A New York Times investigation suggests that the diagnosis was fake. It had apparently been given as a “favour” to Trump’s father. The podiatrist, it turned out, was one of his tenants.
Just because Trump didn’t go to Vietnam doesn’t mean it left no mark on him. The war, which ended 50 years ago today with the victory of the Vietnamese communists, was the defining event of his generation. It traumatised Americans, leaving scars on the national psyche like napalm on human flesh. The casualties were huge: nearly 60,000 US soldiers and as many as three million Vietnamese. That it ended in ignominy for America only added to the trauma.
The conflict tore America apart, dividing families, triggering mass protests, and polarising politics. At the time, it really did feel like the apocalypse was now. Trump couldn’t help but soak up the vibes. And those vibes stayed with him, shaping his view of America’s role in the world. Half a century on, the Vietnam War can help us understand Trump’s seemingly erratic foreign policy.
“The Vietnam War can help us understand Trump’s seemingly erratic foreign policy.”
As historians Charlie Laderman and Brendan Simms have shown, the President has held a consistent worldview since the Seventies. To him, the US is a sucker, spending tonnes of money underwriting the security of other countries; in some cases, like in Vietnam, it even sends soldiers to fight and die for them. The outcome is always the same: America loses bigly.
For the President, the Vietnam War was a turning point. Before Vietnam, America was great. After Vietnam, it was in decline. “Prior to Vietnam, we never lost a war, right?” he said in 2015. “Vietnam was a loss. Nothing else you can call it. And then after that… we don’t even think about winning.”
Trump appears to have learned two lessons from America’s defeat at the hands of Vietnamese communists. The first: don’t wage war in faraway lands for spurious ideals like freedom and democracy. “I thought [Vietnam] was a terrible war,” Trump said in 2019. “I thought it was very far away. At that time, nobody had ever heard of the country.”
Of course, that wasn’t true. By 1965, when US troops were sent to Vietnam, the country had been the focus of relentless press coverage for two decades. Vietnam was initially a French colony. In 1941, communist leader Ho Chi Minh formed the Viet Minh to achieve independence. But France wasn’t on board with Vietnamese self-determination, and the Indochina War broke out in 1946.
The US didn’t sit on the sidelines. A new cadre of policymakers in Washington believed that Vietnamese communists couldn’t be allowed to win. The Cold War was underway, and the free world needed every inch of land it could get. America backed the French, supplying them with weapons and treasure. It made little difference. France lost anyway, and in 1954 Vietnamese communists established their own state in North Vietnam.
South Vietnam, however, fell under the protection of the US. For the North, an American puppet state on Vietnamese soil was intolerable. And so they fought for reunification. At first, America sent only military advisers. Their role: to train and mentor the South Vietnamese army. But that didn’t move the needle. Eventually, the US sent its own soldiers to do the fighting.
Despite the hyperbole, Trump’s point stands. Vietnam meant little to Americans. And it turned out that a poor country in Asia turning communist didn’t endanger US national security. The proof is that Vietnam did become a communist state after 1975. Needless to say, San Francisco didn’t become the battleground of World War Three.
It would, however, be a mistake to conclude that Vietnam turned Trump into a peacenik non-interventionist. In fact, the very opposite happened. The second lesson Trump learned from the war is that losing is unacceptable. If America does fight, it must win by any means necessary. Failure is not an option. “I guess if you do it, you have to go to win. We didn’t go to win [in Vietnam],” he lamented in 1999.
These two lessons are now guiding Trump’s actions on the world stage. Since returning to office, he has been reducing US support for Ukraine. He looks hellbent on forcing some sort of peace settlement, even if it ends up rewarding Russia for its aggression and destabilising Europe. At this moment, Vietnam is surely in the back of his mind: Trump believes that if the Ukraine war drags on, the US will eventually get sucked in. Steve Bannon, the godfather of the MAGA movement, has said as much. “If we aren’t careful, it will turn into Trump’s Vietnam,” he told Politico in January.
It’s a glib historical parallel. For one thing, the Vietnamese were fighting each other; the Ukrainians are fighting an imperialist invader. For another, there’s little risk that American troops would end up in Ukraine. If any countries were to put boots on the ground, it would most probably be European ones.
Another reason Trump is disengaging from Ukraine is to redeploy US power to the Indo-Pacific. The President has long believed that China threatens America. In 2000, he warned that the country was “our biggest long-term challenge”. Ten years later, he said, “I don’t see greatness [for America] unless we do something about China.” Unsurprisingly, he has surrounded himself with China hawks.
Yet the Trump administration will struggle to contain an assertive China. Far from being a genius geopolitical move, abandoning Ukraine signals that the US is no longer willing to stand by its democratic allies. That makes it more likely that China will invade Taiwan in the near future. And this, in turn, could result in a showdown between the US and China. Ironically, in trying to avoid another Vietnam, Trump may well be precipitating a massive conflict in Asia.
As former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd argued in his 2022 book The Avoidable War, the risk of “armed conflict between the US and China… has become a real possibility”. Beyond a potential war over Taiwan, Rudd points to one in the South China Sea, where China is sabre-rattling: “Perhaps one of the most likely — albeit unintentional — scenarios would arise from a collision between Chinese and American vessels.” It’s not difficult to imagine how a larger US presence in the Indo-Pacific could trigger exactly that kind of scenario.
In recent weeks, Trump’s tariffs on China have been another source of friction. In response, China has hinted at a possible fight with the US. “If war is what the US wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war, or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end,” the Chinese government said.
There are signs that the American mindset is similar. In a secret memo leaked last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the Pentagon to prepare for war with China. “China is the Department’s sole pacing threat,” Hegseth wrote, “and denial of a Chinese fait accompli seizure of Taiwan — while simultaneously defending the US homeland is the Department’s sole pacing scenario.”
Trump is probably well aware of these risks. He may even be at peace with the prospect of facing China. After all, the second lesson he took from Vietnam is that if America goes to war, it has to win. Make no mistake, though: a conflict with China would be unwinnable.
For starters, nuclear weapons could come into play. If that happened, to borrow a line from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, the living would envy the dead. The devastation on both sides would be total. “The United States would suffer unimaginable levels of death and destruction,” says defence analyst Alex Alfirraz Scheers, who modelled an America-China nuclear war in his paper “The Illogic of Strategic Superiority”.
But even if it didn’t involve nuclear weapons, the war would not go well for America. The fighting would occur mainly in the seas and skies of the Western Pacific. “It would be a strategic quagmire,” warns Scheers. China makes for a formidable enemy: it has the largest military in the world, with more than two million active personnel, and a navy that now outshines the US.
The Vietnam War would look like a mere skirmish by comparison. And this time, the stakes would be of another order of magnitude. After all, America was able to walk away from Vietnam. The war broke its confidence, yes, but it didn’t destroy its status as a superpower. Even after the humiliation of Vietnam, the United States remained the global hegemon. The American century marched on.
A war with China could bring the American century to an end. What a legacy that would be for a president obsessed with big, beautiful wins.
