The Trump administration has not sent significant ground forces to Iran, relying instead on a vast air and sea armada. But Robert D. Kaplan, writing in Foreign Affairs, has warned that this air-only approach follows the same incremental logic that transformed Vietnam from a small advisory mission into America's most divisive war.
The critical danger, Kaplan argued in an essay published by Foreign Affairs and reported by "Hvylya", is what he calls "the slippery slope of incrementalism." If civil war or factional fighting erupts inside Iran as a result of continued U.S. and Israeli bombing, the administration may feel compelled to deploy special forces and advisers to support one side - and "the risks of escalation spiral from there."
Kaplan drew the Vietnam parallel explicitly. "The war in Vietnam took years to evolve into a middle-sized war, spanning the entire Kennedy administration and the beginning of the Johnson administration," he wrote. "The situation in Iran might follow a similar trajectory." Each step appears manageable in isolation; the cumulative effect is a war no one planned.
Trump promised to end forever wars, Kaplan noted. But "through loose rhetoric, poor planning, a lack of policy discipline, and the normal collection of mistakes and miscalculations that any individual leader makes in a volatile world, he has found himself blundering into new ones." The gap between the president's stated intentions and the operational reality on the ground continues to widen.
Kaplan also pointed to a structural problem specific to Iran. The clerical regime has not surrendered as Trump demands, and the continued bombing campaign risks producing not a compliant successor government but outright anarchy - destabilizing the entire Persian Gulf. Kaplan argued that "the gap between toppling an existing order and erecting a new, more pliable one can be vast," a lesson the U.S. should have internalized after Iraq but apparently has not.
Also read: Tied America's Hands, Not Tehran's: WSJ Interview Exposed the Real Legacy of Obama's Iran Deal