As we approach the 25th anniversary of 9/11, isn’t it time we learned the lessons of history? From Vietnam to 9/11, the War on Terror, and now Iran, America never seems to understand what ought to be obvious conclusions about its actions: that superior military power and overconfidence don’t guarantee victory.
For neoconservatives in former President George W. Bush’s administration, the War on Terror — the invasion of Iraq specifically — was meant to erase the failure of Vietnam. Following America’s first military defeat, many worried that the nation was in decline, that its role in the world, whether it remained a force for good, was in question.
Bush’s advisers, dubbed the Vulcans for the God of Fire, scoffed at such notions, arguing instead that America remained on the rise and needed only conviction and overwhelming power to defeat any threat. As author James Mann explained, the Vulcan “vision was of an unchallengeable America, a United States whose military power was so awesome it no longer needed to make compromises or accommodations.”
Quick victory in Iraq was to be proof of both that conviction and power — but it wasn’t. Like Vietnam, Iraq descended into chaos and defeat.
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President Donald Trump suffers from the same afflictions as Bush: arrogance and a lack of imagination. It is now absurdly clear that America’s high-tech weaponry — a hallmark of the Donald Rumsfeld school of warfare — will not automatically result in victory, and that “lesser” nations, those composed of rabble, in Trump’s words, “scum” and “cuckoo,” cannot possibly stand against the morally and militarily superior U.S.
Like Bush, Trump thinks that sheer belief, and expensive weapons, mean certainty. The “Shock and Awe” bombing of Iraq began on March 20, 2003; a mere five weeks later, on May 1, Bush delivered his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln.
Trump’s Iran war launched on February 28, 2026; in lightning speed, on March 7, he assured the nation we were “winning the war, by a lot.” Just four days later, he went further: “We’ve won. Let me tell you, we’ve won. You know, you never like to say too early you won. We won. We won the [bet]. In the first hour, it was over.”
Trump is well known for exaggeration, but these claims are far more than one president’s overstatements. They represent consistent American blunder, conflating military force and first-world hubris with instantaneous victory.
Neither will cow a committed enemy into submission nor guarantee the outcome of armed conflict. The now-closed Strait of Hormuz and the sailors living in squalor aboard the USS Lincoln, located in the Gulf of Oman, assure the world of such facts.
The sad truth is that America should have learned these lessons decades ago. Let’s return to Vietnam, when high-volume bombing failed to defeat a nation of rice farmers. That conflict, a proxy to the larger Cold War, was lost, but the commitment to defeating the Soviet Union wasn’t.
Ironically, the U.S. embraced the same essential strategy exploited by the Vietcong to defeat the Russians following their 1979 invasion of Afghanistan: asymmetric, guerrilla warfare, this time carried out by the Islamic Mujahedin, financed and trained by the CIA. In less than ten years, the USSR quit and even warned the U.S. to stop schooling the most radical Islamists in modern warfare techniques. The CIA’s response: they make the best fighters — Al Qaeda was born.
Why couldn’t the U.S. anticipate that these same fundamentalists might turn their new skills against America? More accurately, the nation’s leaders simply dismissed the threat, concluding that a bunch of goat herders living in caves didn’t pose a threat to the mighty U.S. — until iconic towers in New York City came crashing down on a beautiful day in September.
The 9/11 Commission noted ominously that the attacks were successful because the nation’s leaders suffered from a “failure of imagination.”
Nothing changed. No lessons were learned.
Bush’s “Shock and Awe” bombing was predicated on the military doctrine “rapid dominance,” that massive destruction paralyzed an enemy’s will to fight through overwhelming force and confusion — no one apparently considered that America had refused to succumb following the 9/11 attacks, which revealed Osama bin Laden’s own “Shock and Awe” calculous.
There was, however, a difference. The mastermind of 9/11 had learned American history; he understood U.S. arrogance, frequently writing that it viewed itself as the “master of the world.” Bin Laden counted on American vanity.
As I’ve written elsewhere, 9/11 was a trap to draw an overconfident U.S. into a prolonged, grinding struggle; it was meant to be another Vietnam, but worse — bin Laden studied that conflict and used it as a model for both military strategy and domestic unrest in America.
He understood U.S. vulnerability. Why couldn’t we?
Because the arrogant rarely understand their own conceit. Instead, they double down, get louder, exert more force, and fail again. Trump and Iran are the perfect example, and they are more tangled within this long history than most appreciate.
Trump rose to power on his oft-repeated slogan, “Make America Great Again,” but when did we lose our greatness? For Trump, it was the post-WWII era, when our industrial might waned, along with global respect and the idea that the nation, as he put it, “was not pushed around by anybody.”
Can it be any clearer that Vietnam and 9/11 factor into America being pushed around? Both revealed that the mighty United States is vulnerable.
Iran exposes the very same reality. What Trump thought was going to be simple, has again proven false. In many ways, Iran is better prepared than bin Laden, who called for jihadists to flood into Iraq and fight, but had no way to establish a larger organizational strategy.
Iran has been planning its fight since 1979 and easily expanded its scope beyond the limited anticipation of Trump. Like the Vulcans and the failure of Iraq to erase Vietnam, Trump has further eroded America’s standing in the world.
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We are weaker militarily and morally; we remain in decline. Even our friends now say aloud that America is not a force for good. It didn’t begin with Trump.
The real turning point was Bush’s response to 9/11 — we remain in the dark shadow of towers that no longer exist. But Trump, as the arrogant are wont to do, has doubled down, and both America and the world are worse for it.
Matthew Warshauer is Distinguished Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University and the author of Creating and Failing the 9/11 Generation. (Routledge Publishing, 2025)
