Vietnam Redux

If a key lesson of the Vietnam War was the United States should avoid fighting guerrilla wars in faraway countries of little strategic importance, whose people, histories, and cultures we do not understand, then the U.S. failed to heed that lesson in Afghanistan. As the final American and NATO troops prepare to exit Afghanistan after 20 years of war and nation-building, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Fredrik Logevall of the Harvard Kennedy School joins the podcast to discuss the similarities and differences between the two lost conflicts. Logevall is a preeminent scholar of the French and U.S. wars in Southeast Asia.