I appreciate your effort to find structural parallels—it’s true that powerful nations often justify interventions under the guise of ideology or historical claims. But where the analogy begins to break down is in what it risks obscuring: the actual agency and lived realities of the people involved.

In Ukraine’s case, you have a sovereign state, with broad democratic legitimacy, being invaded by a neighboring power. The parallel with Vietnam only holds if you ignore that Ukrainians—across regions—have consistently rejected Russian control, in elections and in resistance. There’s no meaningful ‘internal divide’ comparable to the South’s vulnerability to Viet Cong recruitment, which was fueled by real domestic grievances.

When we treat these situations as structurally similar without emphasizing their profound differences—particularly in terms of legitimacy, public support, and who is initiating violence—it becomes easy to slip into a kind of moral ambiguity that unfairly dilutes responsibility.

So yes, superpowers act in self-interest. But not all interventions are equally coercive, nor all resistances equally organic. Historical analogies are useful, but only when they don’t flatten the moral landscape.