In December 2005 Senator Barbara Boxer (D – California) declared that “The war in Iraq is producing the greatest number of wounded and psychologically wounded veterans since the Vietnam War – men and women who will return to their communities forever changed.” (States News Service, 2 December 2005). Commonalities in the combat experience of Vietnam and Iraq veterans – such as the shared difficulties in distinguishing friend from foe – are clearly evident. But there are other parallels between Vietnam and Iraq that politicians, media commentators, and academics have identified over the past four years. In a carefully edited collection of essays, John Dumbrell and David Ryan have enlivened this debate with a substantial contribution to our understanding of these two wars: one a clear-cut American defeat and the other moving towards a similarly bleak denouement.

Dumbrell and Ryan begin with the perceptive observation that while Democrats were the key proponents of waging wars on “idealistic” grounds through the Cold War period, it is Republican hawks like Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney who have opted to meet President John F. Kennedy's challenge of “meeting any hardship and opposing any foe … to assure the survival of liberty.” There are certainly some close similarities between Kennedy's self-assured “Best and the Brightest” and the so-called neoconservatives. Walt Rostow and Paul Wolfowitz, for example, share a common belief that the United States is beholden to take a lead in exporting liberal capitalism to the developing world.

The parallels between the 1960s and the present are explored by eleven fine historians from both sides of the Atlantic. Marilyn Young contends that the wars in Vietnam and Iraq have few obvious strategic similarities, but that the shared outcome might be the same: “Vietnam haunts the war in Iraq in part because it has begun to smell like defeat but more significantly, I think, because the task the US has taken upon itself is similar: to bend a country about which it knows little … to its will”. Richard Lock-Pullan focuses on military commonalities (which he concedes are not as numerous as the differences), concluding that “the US and its army is still better at winning battles than wars and it struggles to win the peace. It has an over-reliance on one operational concept regardless of the strategic situation”.

During the Vietnam War, Senator Stuart Symington (D – Missouri) complained that “we should express less interest in South Asia and more in South St Louis.” What happens next in the United States is anyone's guess. But after a period of intense activism on the international stage, it appears highly probable that President Obama, Clinton, McCain, Giuliani or Romney will look to a pragmatist – a George Kennan or Henry Kissinger – rather than an ideologue, like Rostow or Wolfowitz, for foreign-policy advice. Spreading good – whether in Southeast Asia in the 1960s or the Middle East today – is an exhausting business, and America's exertions are having serious repercussions in the homeland.