Tsitrian: Iran Is Trump’s Vietnam, China’s Boost

Vietnam veteran John Tsitrian says Donald Trump’s war on Iran is giving him China-flavored flashbacks:

I was on the front lines of a war that outlived expectations. Our incursion into Vietnam was planned to be short and decisive. Our intervention was intended to be limited. Our display of military might was supposed to stabilize the regime we supported. Our enemies were expected to quickly back down and negotiate.

The war was supposed to be this and supposed to do that and so on and so forth, but as it turned out, the “this and that,” whatever they were expected to be, never materialized. As to “so on and so forth?” It turned out to be a decade of wasted blood, a sense of futility that was reflected in our grunt lingo. When one of us was killed we said “he got wasted.”

What happened is this: We met up with a small, determined enemy that got support from a powerful ally named China … and it took us more than a decade to extract ourselves from that tangled mess. We accomplished nothing. Our adversaries took over the entire country.

American hubris turned into American humble pie [John Tsitrian, “A Vietnam Vet Ponders Iran, Presidential Lies, and the People’s Republic,” South Dakota Standard, 2026.09.02].

Tsitrian does a great job of providing links to observations from other experts who support the idea that the big winner in the Trump/Iran quagmire is China:

The Brookings Institution has done a study on this, concluding that China has benefitted from the U.S.-Iran war. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman recently published a piece titled How China Won the Iran War. There are those who disagree, but I have to lean with those who see the war in Iran as a net positive for China, if only because the U.S. has lost a lot of good will over this ill-advised venture that seems like it will fester for a while [Tsitrian, 2026.09.02].

While Trump continues to waste U.S. military resources and global credibility and stir Middle East turmoil with this aimless war that he says isn’t a war, China is making real deals to stabilize the region and expand its own influence:

Earlier this week, Chinese President Xi Jinping paid an official visit to Egypt. The trip was ostensibly to mark the seventieth anniversary of diplomatic ties between the two countries and to celebrate their growing economic and security partnership. But the visit also came amid ongoing wars and conflicts in the Middle East that have challenged the two countries’ strategic interest in regional stability and peace. Despite the anniversary pomp and celebratory atmosphere, the Middle East’s turmoil was the real motive for the deepening strategic partnership—but neither Cairo nor Beijing is looking for exclusivity.

…The two countries signed twenty-five bilateral agreements to deepen their economic, trade, technology, security, and military ties. Most significantly, China and Egypt agreed to link Egypt’s state-sponsored, long-term developmental strategy, Vision 2030, to the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative for the Global South and to enlarge the Chinese–Egyptian economic zone at the Suez Canal. As members of the BRICS, China and Egypt committed to increase bilateral trade using local currencies—a measure that helps Egypt reduce its dependency on the U.S. dollar. Also noteworthy with regard to the growing military cooperation between the two countries is the fact that Xi’s visit came only a few days after the second-ever joint air force training, Eagles of Civilization, in which Chinese fighter jets and Egyptian-owned, Western-manufactured fighter jets simulated combat situations [Amr Hamzawy, “The Two Key Takeaways from Xi’s Egypt Visit,” Carnegie Endowment: Emissary, 2026.09.03].

America falling, China rising—we should be having flashbacks to the protest chants of the Vietnam era: Hey, hey, Donald J, how much American influence have you killed today?