President Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine takes me back to 60 years ago, when I first set foot in Vietnam as a journalist after covering the end of the era of anti-Americanism in Indonesia and the downfall of Sukarno.

In the face of corruption, destructive political rivalries and the failure of U.S.-advised South Vietnamese forces, the Americans were having a deeper impact on the Vietnamese than many realized. It was not that “we are winning,” as U.S. commanders claimed, but that American influence pervaded every corner of the culture of what we then called South Vietnam to differentiate it from the perceived enemy, North Vietnam.

As I flew in and out of Vietnam on extended visits from Hong Kong and then Tokyo, then spent a couple of years writing a book in the venerable Hotel Majestic overlooking the Saigon River, I came to realize how much the Vietnamese not only counted on their American ally and benefactor but also how they trusted us. Whatever journalists might write on the horrors of the war, the disruption of civilized life and the unlikelihood of a happy ending, millions of South Vietnamese depended on the American forces in their midst.

That’s why it came as such an incredible shock when the Americans cut and ran 50 years ago, leaving the South Vietnamese to fend for themselves against the North Vietnamese.

Who would have thought the Americans — big and rich, arrogant and often ignorant as they were — would not come to their rescue as the North Vietnamese poured southward, taking over town after town, base after base, until the fall of the Saigon regime on April 30, 1975? About 3 million people from South Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia and Laos fled over the next two decades — hundreds of thousands on fishing boats. Tens of thousands of them died.

Likewise, as many as 2.8 million Cambodians were killed during more than three years of Khmer Rouge rule after the U.S. stopped showering the Phnom Penh regime with military aid and stopped the........

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