Viet Nam’s indigenous environment has long played a key role in its history and culture. My new book, Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present, begins with a quotation: “‘Mountains are like the bones of the earth. Water is its blood,’ wrote a Vietnamese geographer in 1820. Lowland Viet Nam is aquatic.”1

“The mountains are like the bones of the earth. Water is its blood,” wrote a Vietnamese geographer in 1820. Lowland Việt Nam is aquatic, but it is also multiregional and polyethnic. The country's three historic lowland regions are bounded by extensive uplands, all linked by interrelated landscapes, economies, and cultures. Throughout the plains, water plays a key role in the economy and communications. In the north and south, the Red River and the Mekong River form wide deltas and flow into the South China Sea. Linking the two deltas is the central region, many hundreds of miles of curving coastline, broken every twenty miles or so by river mouths and port towns.

Many commentators are likening the recent Taliban seizure of Kabul to a “repeat” of the 1975 “fall of Saigon”.

But the Taliban less closely resemble Vietnamese communists than they do Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. More than two decades ago, when the Taliban, a Sunni Islamist group, held power in Afghanistan, they massacred members of their country's Shia Muslim minority and others. In the late 1970s, the Khmer Rouge had committed genocide against Cambodia's Cham Muslim minority and others. In March 2001, the Taliban deployed dynamite to blow up their country's monumental 6th-7th century stone sculptures, the Bamyan Buddhas, part of Afghanistan's historic heritage. That act of vandalism resembled the Khmer Rouge's demolition of Phnom Penh's Catholic Cathedral, stone by stone, and their repression of Cambodia's Buddhist religion.

Debate over the nature and impact of civilian casualties from U.S. aerial attacks continues. “Are we creating more terrorists than we're killing?,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once asked of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq and of its offshoot ISIS, suggests the answer there. Reflecting in 2012 on U.S. drone strikes in Yemen, the former director of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center, Robert Greiner, wrote: “One wonders how many Yemenis may be moved in future to violent extremism in reaction to carelessly targeted missile strikes, and how many Yemeni militants with strictly local agendas will become dedicated enemies of the West in response to US military actions against them.” That same month a Yemeni lawyer warned: “DEAR OBAMA, when a U.S. drone missile kills a child in Yemen, the father will go to war with you, guaranteed. Nothing to do with Al Qaeda.”

Some features of the ideology motivating the Roman destruction of Carthage in 146 BC have surprisingly modern echoes in 20th-century genocides. Racial, religious or cultural prejudices, gender and other social hierarchies, territorial expansionism, and an idealization of cultivation all characterize the thinking of Cato the Censor, like that of more recent perpetrators. The tragedy of Carthage, its details lost with most of the works of Livy and other ancient authors, and concealed behind allegory in Virgil's Aeneid, became known to early modern Europeans from briefer ancient accounts rediscovered only in the 15th century, as Europe's own expansion began.