GRAVE NEW WORLD
WHEN SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON and Warren Demian Manshel, the founders of FOREIGN POLICY, asked me to write for their inaugural issue in 1970, university campuses were riven by students who feared being drafted to fight and possibly die in a misbegotten war in Vietnam. The central claim in my essay was that “No More Vietnams!” would become a new foreign-policy mantra. While some 2 million Americans had been sent to fight in Korea in the 1950s and more than 300,000 U.S. troops were still bogged down in Vietnam when I wrote, I offered my bet that the next decade would see no equivalents. What I did not imagine, however, was how dramatic the decline in combat deaths would be. An estimated 33,000 Americans died fighting in Korea and 47,000 in Vietnam. But since the fall of Saigon in 1975, the total number of U.S. battle deaths stands at fewer than 7,500.
My 1970 essay brims with youthful overconfidence in identifying trends and forecasts for the decades ahead. Fifty years on, I’ve come to recognize that my crystal ball is cloudier than I imagined then. As Americans today look past an that included not only a pandemic
