David Halberstam’s Warning Is More Urgent Than Ever

The New York Times reported that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, had warned the administration that the conflict would be much more complicated and dangerous than many top officials anticipated. Although the swift success in capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro evidently bolstered Trump’s confidence in what U.S. forces could achieve with ease, Iran is no Venezuela.

Any time a U.S. president deploys U.S. forces overseas, it is worth revisiting one of the most influential books about the U.S. war in Vietnam: The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam. The book serves as an enduring reminder of the mistakes presidents and their advisors have made when sending the U.S. military into harm’s way, always with the promise of acting in the nation’s best interests.

Vietnam was a historic military and political disaster. The United States lost more than 58,000 troops in a war that deeply divided the nation during the 1960s and 1970s and shattered confidence in the United States’ role in the world. The war wreaked havoc on the Vietnamese and failed to prevent the eventual reunification of North and South Vietnam under communist rule in 1975.

David Halberstam went to Vietnam in 1962, at the age of 28, to cover the region for the New York Times. He spent more than 15 months witnessing firsthand the problems that arose from the United States’ decision to ally itself with the corrupt and unpopular South Vietnamese government. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in 1964. Halberstam later wrote for Harper’s, where he continued to cover foreign policy, including a 1969 article about former National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy.

At the heart of Halberstam’s book, published in 1972, was the question of what went wrong. His answer focused on the foreign policy establishment, a group that included some of the most talented figures from industry, law, and academia.

Focusing on officials like Bundy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, as well as advisors Walt Rostow and Maxwell D. Taylor, Halberstam revealed a world of overly confident individuals who had possessed impeccable academic and professional resumes. Some of them had been involved in foreign policy for decades, regardless of who sat in the White House. They were smart, sharp, and arrogant. Having gone to the right schools and married the best people, they literally constituted “the establishment.”

But as Halberstam revealed in devastating fashion, these men were deeply flawed, and as a result, the nation was plunged into a disastrous war. As sophisticated as they were in their thinking, these officials were collectively driven by a series of faulty assumptions that turned out to be dead wrong. “[T]hey had,” Halberstam wrote, “for all their brilliance and hubris and sense of themselves, been unwilling to look and learn from the past.” As a result, he wrote, they “had been praised as the best and brightest of a generation and yet … were the architects of a war which I and many others thought the worst tragedy to befall this country since the Civil War.”

All of these men were driven by their political fears from the early Cold War, namely, conservative attacks that President Harry Truman had “lost China” to communism in 1949 and that, as a result, Democrats were weak on communism. This political perspective pushed them away from appreciating the promise of negotiated settlements rather than military action.

For all their expertise in international relations, these men often lacked a deep understanding of the countries with which the United States was engaged. They viewed Southeast Asia through the prism of the Cold War conflict between the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, rather than seeking to understand the internal politics and cultural divides that drove much of the conflict between South and North Vietnam. They also ignored those elements of history that were not convenient to the arguments they wanted to make; engaged in groupthink; and were fiercely dismissive of critics, who were quickly banished from their inner circles.

These men also overestimated U.S. military power. This generation, which had seen the United States and its allies defeat global fascism in World War II, believed the military was capable of almost any objective. Even the stalemate in Korea between 1950 and 1953 had not dampened their confidence in what U.S. forces could accomplish. With Taylor, Halberstam wrote, John F. Kennedy had found someone whose “social and academic hubris was matched by his military self-confidence.” When the facts on the ground contradicted their strategic promises, these advisors simply moved forward. McNamara manipulated and manufactured statistics; all of them kept pushing for more force even when force was not working.

Halberstam’s book, which received glowing reviews and enjoyed robust sales, had enormous influence on the way Americans thought about foreign policy and the disaster of Vietnam. According to the Washington Post, Halberstam’s work was an “absorbing, detailed, and devastatingly caustic tale of Washington in the days of the Caesars.” The title itself has endured, continuing to serve as a reminder of what can go wrong when the government entrusts an insulated group of experts to make decisions about war and peace.

Today, President Donald Trump and his advisors are exhibiting many of these same flaws even if the war will be much smaller than Vietnam in scale and scope. Trump, too, is driven by longstanding political belief in the importance of “being tough” with adversaries. Trump’s America First strategy, which means unleashing force when it serves U.S. interests, grew out of his coming of age in 1970s and 1980s, when Republicans regularly blasted Democrats as weak on defense. Indeed, at some level, Trump is offering his own response to President Jimmy Carter’s way of handling the 1979-81 Iran hostage crisis through protracted negotiations (and a failed military rescue operation).

Moreover, the quick success in Venezuela appears to have given Trump confidence that concerns about a drawn-out war are overblown. He believes that modern military technology and special operations forces—combined with Israel’s bombs and airpower—can crush the Iranian regime.

Finally, it is unclear how firm a grasp Trump has on the history of Iran and the particulars of the political system, which makes dismantling it extraordinarily difficult. He might call on Iranians to revolt, but the long history of U.S. policymakers betraying the Iranian people and actually undercutting democracy—from U.S. instigation of a coup in 1953 to Trump drawing and ignoring red lines earlier this year—will loom large as vulnerable individuals decide whether to take to the streets to protest.

But there is one glaring difference between the individuals who surrounded Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and those who have the ear of Trump: The current U.S. president is not being guided by the “best and the brightest” and as a result has lost the guidance that seasoned experts are capable of—despite Halberstam’s warning.

Since starting his second term, Trump has gutted large chunks of the national security establishment. Steve Witkoff, a real estate investor, has led Middle East negotiations. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth spent much of his public career as a Fox News commentator. Under Marco Rubio, the State Department has undergone a major restructuring and laid off roughly 1,300 employees. The president fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. C.Q. Brown; Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the chief of naval operations; and the Air Force vice chief of staff, Gen. James Slife. There was a massive purge of the National Security Council with dozens of staffers losing their jobs. The president told the New York Times that the only thing that constrains his foreign policy decisions is his “own morality,” a metric that embodies the mindset of an imperial president.

War is always a dangerous game. A military operation of choice, which is the best way to think about the situation in Iran, carries as many risks as wars launched after an attack or when a threat is imminent. Although some presidents like to believe they can navigate these difficult situations on their own, success or failure often depends on the advisors who help guide them through each stage of the conflict.

Unfortunately, there is evidence that the voices in the room in 2026 carry with them many of the problems exhibited by Halberstam’s “best and brightest,” and this time they do so without the deep experience and breadth of foreign policy knowledge that the earlier generation still had to offer.