Know the local war
Great-power categories (containment) can miss land and legitimacy.
The "Vietnam syndrome" named a US reluctance to commit ground conscripts -- a political mood, not a law of nature.
ASEAN, Sino-Vietnamese conflict, and Cambodia's genocide are regional sequels, not a neat "peace".
Lessons
Allies are not extras
ROK and Australian wars were real; so was Hanoi's Chinese/Soviet rear.
Exit needs a politics
A ceasefire that leaves the main armies in place is a schedule, not a peace.
Veterans come home to a policy
Welcome, care and memorials are part of the war's last campaign.
Memory colonises later wars
Iraq and Afghanistan were argued through Vietnam analogies, for better and worse.
Unresolved
Full casualty census
Especially southern civilian and Cambodian/Laotian figures.
Agent Orange compensation
Uneven across Vietnamese victims and US veterans.
MIA accounting
A diplomatic industry that outlasted the Cold War.
Re-education memory
Still contested between diaspora and the SRV state narrative.
Shifts
End of the draft in the US
The all-volunteer force is a Vietnam-era political outcome.
Sino-Soviet rivalry in Asia
The 1979 war showed the bloc was not one fist.
ASEAN and a later trading Vietnam
Doi Moi (1986) recast the wartime state -- a sequel, not a denial.
Cultural template
English-language "quagmire" talk is this war's linguistic export.
Outlook
Archival thickening
Vietnamese local studies and US declassifications still move the story.
Generational handover
US veterans age; Vietnamese-American memory is now second- and third-generation.
Analogy fatigue
Better history would use Vietnam less as a slogan and more as a specific file.
Risk
analogical overuse
The fighting ended in 1975. The live risk is bad analogy: using "Vietnam" as a substitute for thinking about later wars' local politics.
Normalisation of US-Vietnam relations (1995) did not settle Agent Orange or memory disputes.
Every later US debate about limited war still reaches for this file, often badly.