Perhaps historical amnesia is not such a bad thing, despite George Santayana’s warning in 1905’s “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 its blunders and even catastrophic errors. After all, what did the U.S. 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 Indo-China into North and South Vietnam, Ukraine could be seen as a representation of either.

The North was determined to unite Vietnam. As it recovered from the war with France and began rebuilding a state under communist design, its leader, Ho Chi Minh, understood it would be a long struggle, possibly lasting decades.

Ho also realized that the basis for his unification strategy would be to exploit fault........

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