JONATHAN ALTER:
Hi, I’m Jonathan Alter of Old Goats.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
And I’m Julian Zelizer from The Long View.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
Jon, you know, I’ve been thinking a lot as I follow the Trump administration and the president saying the war in Iran is over, while the war in Iran then looks like it’s continuing. It’s just tons of information coming at us. None of it seems to be particularly credible or solid.
I was thinking about one of the famous moments in the ’60s, the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, which was a surprise attack by the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong against South Vietnamese and U.S. forces that really caught the military and the country by surprise.
In the end, U.S. forces were victorious, but it was really a shock here because it came at a time when President Johnson and William Westmoreland, the head of the military effort, had all been saying the war was about to end. Everything was coming to a close. And this just showed that wasn’t true.
It increases the credibility gap that President Johnson faced back then. So I was curious, thinking about that, how you think of that moment and what it might tell us today.
JONATHAN ALTER:
It was a critical moment, and it helped drive Johnson from the race. A couple months later, he withdrew from the 1968 campaign, and it also kicked off the Paris peace talks in May 1968.
Actually, there had been a kind of second Tet Offensive just before those peace talks. And what’s mind-blowing to me about those talks, where they started out arguing about the shape of the table, is that they went on from May of 1968 until January of 1973. Four years.
And what that indicates to me is that what we might be in for now is a protracted series of talks between the United States, Iran, Israel, and there might be some other parties, as there were during the Vietnam War, trying to make peace.
This will fade from the headlines. Trump wants it off his plate. The Iranians have a lot of leverage with the Strait of Hormuz, and it’s just going to sink into one of these endless negotiations that bores people pretty quickly but does long-term damage to the economy.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
Of course, as you once said, this is all heading toward reopening the strait that was open before this started, and a deal that will look a lot like what President Obama already had on the books, if that.
JONATHAN ALTER:
Yeah, but what’ll happen is, they’ll sort of make a preliminary deal, and they’ll get the strait open, and then the ceasefire will be violated. They’ll talk again. It’ll be violated again.
This is going to go on for years before there’s any kind of endgame. I mean, nobody knows what’s going to happen, right? It will start to feel like the Vietnam War, with many fewer casualties.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
Yeah. Well, this is Then and Now, and Jon we’ll talk again next week. Thanks for talking.
