Decent interval
Consider the 1973 Paris Peace Accords. Kissinger won a Nobel Prize, but Saigon fell.
Mr. Trump campaigned that he was the man to negotiate a deal that would end the carnage in Ukraine.
If he does and the deal ultimately goes south—meaning that Vladimir Putin resumes his aggression—it would be a huge stain on his legacy. And rightly so.
As he considers his options, Mr. Trump might want to study a conversation between another Republican president and his secretary of state.
The date was Aug. 3, 1972, when Henry Kissinger told Nixon he thought the odds were about 50/50 he could reach a peace deal with the North Vietnamese.
Then as now, security guarantees were a top concern.
The fear was that after the U.S. troops left, North Vietnam would resume the war. What would happen, Nixon asked Kissinger, if Hanoi simply waited a while and then gobbled up South Vietnam?
“If a year or two years from now North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam,” Kissinger said, “we can have a viable foreign policy if it looks as if it’s the result of South Vietnamese incompetence.”
Nixon did have seem some moral pangs about what they would be agreeing to: “Vietnam, I must say . . . Jesus, they’ve fought so long, dying, and now . . . I don’t know.”
This conversation became the basis for the accusation that Nixon and Kissinger privately believed the Saigon government couldn’t survive an American withdrawal.
Two years after the US withdrawal, the North Vietnamese launched a full-scale invasion of the South BBC 22/8 2007
US President George W Bush:
The "unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people', 're-education camps' and 'killing fields'
So what they were really after was a “decent interval” between the U.S. withdrawal and South Vietnam’s collapse.
William McGurn Wall Street Journal 17 February 2025
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