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No, Iran is not yet “another Vietnam.” There are no U.S. ground forces taking unsustainable casualties, no headlines tallying the week’s dead, no massive anti-war protests in U.S. streets. And of course, rather than a beaten-down Lyndon Baines Johnson, the current U.S. president is bragging that he’s only been at this war a few months and, by the way, he would have won Vietnam “very quickly.”

But the pressure that Tehran is applying to Donald Trump suddenly feels very much like what flummoxed LBJ in Vietnam. Specifically, it resembles the winning strategy so doggedly pursued by Ho Chi Minh, the iconic North Vietnamese leader.

No, Iran is not yet “another Vietnam.” There are no U.S. ground forces taking unsustainable casualties, no headlines tallying the week’s dead, no massive anti-war protests in U.S. streets. And of course, rather than a beaten-down Lyndon Baines Johnson, the current U.S. president is bragging that he’s only been at this war a few months and, by the way, he would have won Vietnam “very quickly.”

But the pressure that Tehran is applying to Donald Trump suddenly feels very much like what flummoxed LBJ in Vietnam. Specifically, it resembles the winning strategy so doggedly pursued by Ho Chi Minh, the iconic North Vietnamese leader.

By resisting talks to end the war quickly and forcing Trump to extend his cease-fire indefinitely—which the president insisted he wouldn’t do only days ago—the Iranian leadership (whoever that might be) appears to be following Ho’s playbook.

An area near Quang Tri serves as an outdoor chapel as members of the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division hold services for those killed in the area during the Vietnam War. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

It was Ho and his successor in the 1960s, Le Duan, who defeated two Western imperial powers—first France, then the United States—by understanding what Tehran appears to understand: Aggressors from far away, no matter how powerful, will tire of war well before you do. As Ho told the French colonialists back in 1946: “You can kill 10 of our men for every one we kill of yours, but even at those odds, you will lose and we will win.”

And it was Ho and Le Duan who repeatedly defied Johnson’s increasingly desperate pleas for negotiations, just as Tehran is now humiliating Trump. In a letter written to LBJ in 1967, Ho made clear that he would not consider entering into negotiations until “the unconditional cessation of U.S. bombing raids and all other acts of war,” adding that the “Vietnamese people will never submit to force, they will never accept talks under threat of bombs.”

During the 1960s, Johnson regularly fulminated in his councils of war about Hanoi’s  stubbornness, wondering why increased airstrikes and sustained bombing campaigns  beginning with Operation Rolling Thunder had failed to force North Vietnamese leaders to the table. “I don’t believe they’re ever going to quit,” he told his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, at one point.

Similarly in Iran—while there has been evidence of what Trump called “seriously fractured” leadership— Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the parliamentary speaker, declared that Tehran would “not accept negotiations under the shadow of threats.” This week, Iranian negotiators left Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance........

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