At a time when President Trump is “upending the table” by combining a neo-imperial foreign approach with a libertarian questioning of the domestic system, it is interesting to revisit a key episode in contemporary American history. In the 1950s, Trump’s predecessors also “upended the table” on the Indochinese theater of operations. They were replacing the former French colonial empire in a strategic zone of the world. And they believed they were waging a dual war, lethal and non-lethal, that would lead them to victory against a communist bastion in Asia. All of this ended in defeat. The lessons to be drawn from this operational memory must be placed in perspective with the current period.
