Many of us who are old enough to have watched the humiliating April, 1975 flight from Saigon of American generals, consuls, contractors, and tens of thousands of Vietnamese who'd trusted them are gripped now by a depressing, disgusting, and, for some, I fear, a gloating sense of deja vu. Some of us warned several years ago that this defeat was inevitable, for reasons I advanced in Dissent magazine in 2009 and again in Washington Monthly in 2017. (See below.)
