Vietnam taught America the limits of its power. Hormuz is teaching it again

Submitted by Sami Al-Arian on Tue, 09/29/2026 - 17:43 Washington believed the 1991 Gulf War had overcome the 'Vietnam Syndrome'. Seven months of bombing and blockade against Iran have brought it back

Vessels sit in the Strait of Hormuz near Bandar Abbas, Iran, on 28 September 2026, a week after commercial crossings of the strait fell to two in a single day (Amirhosein Khorgooi/ISNA/WANA via Reuters) On

On 22 September, only two commercial vessels crossed the Strait of Hormuz. A narrow choke point that normally handles a fifth of the world's daily oil supply, as well as a fifth of globally traded liquefied natural gas, sits almost silent under the watch of multibillion-dollar American warships that cannot convince commercial insurers to risk even a handful of tankers.

Washington can still destroy almost anything it targets across the Middle East, but whether that destruction can buy the political outcome it wants is a vastly different question.

Seven months into the war against Iran that began on 28 February 2026, Washington has cycled through three strategies of coercion: massive aerial bombardment, economic strangulation through a naval blockade and direct tit-for-tat escalation. None restored normal passage through the strait.

The US military can dominate the skies, sink ships and eliminate political and military leaders, yet it remains unable to compel Tehran to accept its terms.

Vietnam, the Gulf War of 1991 and the current war in the Gulf belong to different eras and involve radically different adversaries that cannot be mechanically equated, yet each tells us something important about the limits and reach of American power.

The "Vietnam Syndrome" was more than a domestic aversion to casualties. It was a crisis of confidence in the efficacy, morality and political utility of American military power.

At its peak, the United States had deployed more than half a million military personnel to Indochina. By the time the war ended, more than 58,000 Americans were dead, alongside millions of Vietnamese. Washington dropped staggering quantities of bombs, fielded the world's most technologically advanced forces and spent years propping up a government in Saigon, yet it still lost.

In Vietnam, Washington learnt that overwhelming firepower could not force a political settlement on an adversary willing to outlast it. Sixteen years later in the Gulf, the American political establishment convinced itself it had buried that lesson forever.

Today, in the quiet waters of Hormuz, Washington is learning it again.

Ghost of Saigon

The Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973, marking the departure of American combat forces. Two years later, on 30 April 1975, North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon while US helicopters evacuated personnel from rooftops across the collapsing capital.

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The State Department's official history records that day as the effective end of the war. The images became indelible because the defeat was as psychological as it was military.

Vietnam exposed the limits of firepower: the United States enjoyed vastly superior technology and inflicted enormous losses, yet it remained incapable of engineering a viable political order in Vietnam. Hanoi grasped what Washington took years to realise: a weaker adversary did not need a decisive battlefield victory, only to survive long enough to exhaust US political resolve.

The war had already begun reshaping policy in Washington itself. In 1973, Congress overrode President Richard Nixon's veto to enact the War Powers Resolution in a direct attempt to restrain executive war-making, while the Nixon Doctrine, announced in 1969, had already called on regional allies to assume primary responsibility for their own defence.

For 15 years after the fall of Saigon, Vietnam haunted American foreign policy elites as a reminder that there were limits to what US military force could achieve. Every proposal to deploy substantial ground forces abroad ran straight into the ghost of Saigon, until Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

On 2 August 1990, Iraqi forces crossed into Kuwait. The international environment could scarcely have been more favourable to American power.

The Soviet bloc was collapsing, and Germany was reunifying, while Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was actively seeking cooperation with the West.

China, far weaker economically and militarily than it is today, remained internationally isolated following the Tiananmen Square crackdown. No peer competitor was capable of organising an alternative coalition or seriously challenging Washington.

President George HW Bush skilfully exploited the moment, assembling a broad international coalition rather than launching a unilateral campaign. On 29 November 1990, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 678 by a 12-2-1 vote, with Cuba and Yemen opposing and China abstaining, authorising the use of "all necessary means" to liberate Kuwait unless Iraq withdrew by 15 January 1991.

Hanoi grasped what Washington took years to realise: a weaker adversary did not need a decisive battlefield victory, only to survive long enough to exhaust US political resolve

Major Arab governments, including Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Morocco, joined the military alliance. Washington deployed military power on a scale not seen since Vietnam. By January 1991, the US Air Force and Navy had deployed roughly 2,000 military aircraft to the theatre, supplemented by another 600 from coalition partners.

When Operation Desert Storm began on 17 January, the technological and operational disparity was overwhelming. Over six weeks, coalition forces flew more than 116,000 combat sorties and dropped approximately 88,500 tons of munitions.

When the ground war finally began, it lasted just 100 hours before Kuwait was liberated. Nearly 700,000 American personnel took part in the operation, and fewer than 300 lost their lives.

The political impact in Washington was electrifying. Bush presented the victory as something far greater than the liberation of Kuwait. On 1 March 1991, he famously declared: "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all."

The political establishment believed it had recovered what was lost in Southeast Asia: confidence that overwhelming military superiority could once again deliver political results. The United States had defeated a major regional army and restored a sovereign state, and in its own mind it had banished the ghost of Vietnam.

Unipolar trap

The Gulf War coincided almost perfectly with the final dissolution of the Soviet Union. What followed was an extraordinary moment in modern history, as no great power was left capable of balancing the United States on a global scale.

America had the world's largest economy and its principal reserve currency, along with an unmatched network of alliances. Nato expanded eastward. The World Trade Organization was created in 1995, while the IMF and World Bank promoted economic integration largely on western terms.

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American power extended well beyond aircraft carriers and military bases, as Washington increasingly defined the rules by which the international system operated.

Yet the confidence born in Kuwait eventually became its own trap. Washington increasingly mistook the power to destroy an enemy's military for the power to determine what came next.

Afghanistan and Iraq exposed the mistake after 9/11.

In Afghanistan, two decades of military operations and nation-building ended with the Taliban back in power in Kabul by the time the last US transport plane departed in 2021.

In Iraq, Saddam Hussein's regime fell within weeks in 2003, but the resulting occupation consumed trillions of dollars, destabilised the region and ultimately expanded Iranian influence in Baghdad.

The Vietnam Syndrome had supposedly been buried in 1991, but Iraq and Afghanistan showed that battlefield supremacy did not give Washington the power to dictate political outcomes.

The unipolar order was already eroding before the current regional war. China had become a great economic power, Russia had grown more militarily assertive, the "war on terror" had exhausted the American public and the Global South carried greater economic weight.

Gaza presented Washington with a different problem: a crisis of legitimacy and credibility. In 2024, the International Court of Justice found Israel's continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful.

In the separate South Africa genocide case, the court issued binding provisional measures against Israel. Those measures and other international legal findings were repeatedly rejected or disparaged.

In 2025, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, characterised the genocide in Gaza as a "collective crime".

Amnesty International and B'Tselem separately concluded that Israel was committing genocide, while Human Rights Watch documented extermination and acts of genocide.

Throughout this period, across both the Biden and Trump administrations, Washington used its diplomatic power to shield its Zionist ally. The United States repeatedly vetoed ceasefire resolutions under Biden, including a 14-1 vote in November 2024.

The pattern continued under Trump. In June 2025, the United States again stood alone in vetoing a resolution demanding an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire, a result repeated in another 14-1 vote that September.

For much of the Global South, Gaza reinforced an existing perception: the so-called "rules-based international order" was applied rigorously against strategic adversaries such as Russia and Iran, but suspended when American allies were involved. That double standard forms the immediate political background to the crisis in Hormuz.

Hormuz Syndrome

When the US-Israeli war against Iran began on 28 February 2026, the balance of power appeared heavily tilted in Washington's favour. Iran had suffered significant setbacks in the preceding months.

Hezbollah's leadership and arsenal had been severely degraded, the fall of the Assad government in December 2024 had cut off Tehran's principal land route to Hezbollah, and Israeli intelligence had demonstrated deep penetration inside Iran. Facing a weakened Axis of Resistance, Washington and the Zionist regime commanded overwhelming conventional power.

Yet tactical superiority did not translate into strategic success. Seven months into the campaign, the picture looks radically different.

By early September, official Pentagon estimates placed the direct US military cost of the war at approximately $44bn, including $28bn spent on advanced munitions and missile-defence interceptors alone. The Department of Defense reported at least 18 American fatalities and more than 830 wounded, while officials warned of dwindling inventories of Patriot, Thaad and Tomahawk missiles.

Iran may not have defeated the US military, but it does not need to. Tehran does not have to match the US Navy ship for ship or clear the skies of American fighters.

Geography gives Tehran enormous leverage. Before the war, roughly 20 million barrels of oil transited the Strait of Hormuz daily, accounting for 20 percent of global petroleum consumption and roughly a quarter of all maritime oil trade, along with a fifth of global LNG trade.

During the first 39 days following the 28 February strikes, the United States and Israel carried out an intense air campaign against Iran, with the US military alone hitting more than 13,000 targets. Israel separately reported dropping 18,000 munitions on some 4,000 targets.

Iran did not capitulate, responding instead with ballistic missile and drone strikes against US and Israeli installations and interests, and inflicting damage that satellite analysis later showed was far more extensive than initially acknowledged.

When talks in Islamabad collapsed in April, Washington imposed a naval blockade to choke off the Iranian economy and force a surrender. The blockade brought no surrender, as Tehran held firm on its core demands, and in June the two sides reached a temporary memorandum of understanding, signed on 17 June, in which Washington conceded key terms.

The agreement broke down within three weeks. Fighting resumed in early July, and by 14 July the Trump administration had reinstated the blockade, but by the second half of August this second push had also stalled.

By September, none of these forms of pressure had restored normal traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Seven months after launching the campaign, the United States found itself confronting a maritime crisis that did not exist on 27 February, with commercial traffic through the strait having collapsed from a pre-war average of 125 large vessels a day to just a handful.

That is the Hormuz Syndrome: America can dominate the battlespace and inflict immense damage on thousands of targets, yet fail to compel its adversary to accept its terms.

Yemen offers another example. The Houthis, long dismissed in Washington as a marginal regional militia, have expanded their territorial reach along the Red Sea coast and into Yemen's highlands. Their strikes disrupted commercial shipping and raised questions in Gulf capitals about the limits of American security guarantees.

A $50,000 attack drone does not need to shoot down a $100m stealth fighter to achieve its purpose. If it forces the defender to launch a $2m interceptor, grounds commercial air traffic or spikes global maritime insurance rates, it has already imposed a disproportionate cost.

A multibillion-dollar carrier strike group can dominate the waters around it, but it cannot force commercial shipping lines or insurance companies to risk sailing into a contested waterway.

A changed world

Gulf states are already reconsidering their security arrangements. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar cannot change their geography: Iran is their neighbour, and China is their largest trading partner.

Rather than relying entirely on the US defence umbrella, these states are increasingly hedging through regional arrangements. One example is the Mecca Agreement, a joint defence pact signed on 7 August by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The pact seeks to build a regional security architecture less dependent on Washington, with the potential to eventually include other major powers such as Egypt and Iran.

There is no need to declare a victor to understand what has changed. Iran has suffered immense physical and economic destruction, and the United States remains the most powerful external military actor in the region. The balance of military power has not shifted. What has changed is Washington's demonstrated ability to convert that power into political outcomes.

The United States may still be the most powerful country on earth, but it no longer operates in a world where it can single-handedly dictate the terms of international politics

Even with Iranian strikes degrading operational capabilities across as many as 20 American bases in eight countries, Washington still commands unmatched power projection.

Iran has shown that imposing Washington's preferred regional order would carry costs the American political system and economy are unwilling to sustain.

Israel faces a similar predicament. It demonstrated formidable intelligence capabilities and long-range precision strike power, inflicting considerable damage inside Iran, yet those achievements have not by themselves produced the political outcome Israel sought. The war also exposed Israel's dependence on American resupply, missile interceptors, diplomatic protection and naval deployments.

Before 28 February, Israel had hoped to emerge as the military hegemon of a new regional order, an ambition whose limits Hormuz has exposed.

Here the parallel with Vietnam becomes clearest. That war did not bring down the United States, yet it exposed the limits of American power for the world to see.

None of the geopolitical conditions that enabled the triumph of 1991 exists today. China is no longer an isolated observer watching from the sidelines.

Russia actively challenges the western security framework. Middle powers such as Turkey, India and Brazil increasingly pursue multi-alignment rather than accept binary choices.

Global trade is more fragmented, while political polarisation within the United States is severe. Washington's moral authority has also been eroded by decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan and by its complicity in the genocide in Gaza.

The United States may still be the most powerful country on earth, but it no longer operates in a world where it can single-handedly dictate the terms of international politics.

Washington emerged from 1991 believing that its military supremacy could organise the international order around American priorities. Hormuz is demonstrating the limits of that belief. The world's most advanced military can ravage an adversary without gaining the power to dictate how the war ends.

The Vietnamese understood that distinction more than half a century ago, and Washington absorbed it only as its last helicopters left Saigon. The Gulf War allowed the American political establishment to forget the lesson. Hormuz is forcing Washington to remember it.

The Strait of Hormuz is 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, and for decades the shadow of American power made it feel wider.

It no longer does.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

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