U.S. President Donald Trump in the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 22, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
As the war with Iran drags on with no conclusion in sight and its consequences continue to spin out, former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta has a dire assessment of the situation: the conflict in the Middle East is “Trump’s Vietnam.”
Panetta — who presided over the Pentagon during the Obama administration and helped lead the operation that killed Osama bin Laden — delivered this alarming appraisal on Thursday while appearing on CNN to discuss the faltering U.S.-Iranian peace talks, saying, “I think what you're seeing is that this war is very much turning into Trump's Vietnam. In Vietnam, we negotiated, but in the end, the North Vietnamese took total control. We were lucky to get our forces out. I think we're heading in the same direction with this war.”
Spanning 1955 to 1975, the Vietnam War famously became a quagmire from which the U.S. could not extract itself, resulting in the deaths of nearly 60,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians. The conflict left a major stain on the U.S. reputation, and it is today invoked when discussing intractable wars with particularly severe political fallout. Commentators have increasingly raised the specter of Vietnam as the war with Iran has ground on, but Panetta’s assertion raises the volume of such talk.
“In Vietnam, we never got a straight story from the administration as to what was happening,” said Panetta when asked what brought him to his conclusion. “And I'm not sure we're getting a straight story right now from this administration as to what's happening in negotiations with Iran.” He also noted that though US-Vietnamese negotiations went on for some time, resolving some issues, “in the end, North Vietnam won that war.”
He projected that something similar will happen with Iran.
“What I sense here is that no matter what we try to negotiate with a hardline regime in Iran, they're going to be in control of the Straits of Hormuz," he warned. "And they are going to do everything they can to try to continue enrichment so that ultimately, they can develop a nuclear weapon.”
Panetta went on to note another parallel between the wars in Iran and Vietnam: a presidential tendency to miscalculate how easily the confrontation would be won.
“At the very beginning of this war, the president said, based on Israeli assurances, that once the leadership was killed, that within a few days the regime would collapse,” Panetta explained. “That did not happen. Our intelligence made very clear that was never going to happen, so it was a terrible miscalculation.”
With all this in mind and the shadow of Vietnam looming, Panetta’s conclusion was not optimistic: “The hardline regime remains in power, and as long as they are in power, whatever we try to negotiate, very frankly, is only going to be temporary. I think where we're headed is some kind of flimsy agreement here, but in four or five years, I think the United States and Israel may very well have to go back to war with Iran.”
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