From Vietnam to Ukraine: What US Presidents get wrong about war

In January, Donald Trump returned to the White House armed with a promise: under his direction, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza would end. On the campaign trail, he boasted, "If I’m president-elect, I’ll get it [the Russia-Ukraine war] done before even becoming president." Eight months into his second term, those promises are being tested in the same way that many others have been tested in the past: the messy, prolonged nature of contemporary warfare and the limits of presidential power. The Trump administration's strategy of putting pressure on Israel and imposing conditions on aid has done little to stop the bloodshed in the Gaza conflict, which has also only gotten worse. This is not new territory.
 From Harry S. Truman to Barack Obama, US presidents have campaigned for peace only to find themselves ensnared in or worse, escalating the very conflicts they had promised to end. The Vietnam War
 As the "peace candidate" in 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson took over John F. Kennedy's early troop deployments in Vietnam. Johnson deployed over five lakh American troops following the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, a disputed naval conflict used to justify escalation. What began as a limited advisory presence turned into one of the longest and deadliest wars in US history.
 Richard Nixon followed suit in 1968, capitalising on public discontent by suggesting he had a strategy to end the Vietnam War.  He never explicitly said that he had a "secret plan," but a reporter came up with the term to summarize Nixon's ambiguous rhetoric. He didn't do much to change the perception.