TAN SON NHUT, VIETNAM

AN AMERICAN DIPLOMAT, when he heard of the resignation of US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, and her replacement by veteran troubleshooter John Bass, is said to have looked out the window of his office and said: “Saigon. Shit. I’m still only in Saigon!”

He was actually in Kyiv. But the sentiment stood.

“In a way, the United States has been stuck in Saigon for decades now,” says Professor Herodotus De Stamerer, whose nine-volume history of the first Trump Administration, Tweet Tweet, is due for publication in 2045. “In a kind of Classical Underworld punishment, condemned to endlessly repeat its Vietnam folly even as it tries to escape it by throwing itself into fruitless war after fruitless war.

“We were led into Vietnam by the technocrats, the so-called brightest and best who turned out neither to be the best nor very bright; then into Iraq and Afghanistan by the Neo-Cons, most of whom had dodged military service when it was their turn; now their successors are finding out the hard way that war is an unpleasant way to do business. It never quite works out the way you think it will. Even great victories contain hidden defeats. And defeat is rarely the end of things. Often it’s the start of something else.

“The Ukrainians must be getting nervous. If Trump wins in November, they will get very nervous. Of course, they were probably never meant to win, just weaken Russia. I wonder how that’s working out.”