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April 29, 1975: Vietnamese refugees line up on the deck of USS Hancock for processing following evacuation from Saigon.
Saigon’s Last Day: The fall, the flight, and the aftermath of the Vietnam War
April 30 marks 50 years since North Vietnamese troops overran the capital of US-aligned South Vietnam, ending what is known locally as the Resistance War against America. Despite strong US-Vietnam reconciliation in recent decades, US President Donald Trump has forbidden American diplomats to observe the anniversary of this transformative moment — but those who survived the chaos that followed will never forget the trauma echoing down through the generations.
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Saigon, April 29, 1975. For six weeks, South Vietnamese forces have been falling back in the face of a determined communist offensive. American troops have been gone for two years. The feeble government is in disarray. The people are traumatized by three decades of war and three million deaths.
Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” begins playing on radios across the capital.
Some Saigonese know it’s a sign: It is time to run.
Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, now a Columbia University history professor, was just five months old, the youngest of nine children. After a failed first escape attempt by helicopter, her family heard about an uncle with access to an oil transport boat. More than 100 refugees crammed aboard the small vessel, where they waited for hours to set sail. Nguyen’s father nearly became separated when he dashed back into the city in a futile attempt to find more relatives.
At nightfall, they finally departed, crossing enemy-controlled territory under cover of darkness before being ordered onto an ammunition barge floating off the coast, bursting with over 1,000 refugees.
“When the sun rose the next day, April 30, we realized Saigon had fallen,” says Nguyen.
They were far from safety. The cable anchoring the barge in place severed, and they came under mortar fire as it drifted helplessly. Somehow, no one was killed in the shelling, but the refugees had no water and scant food, and they were baking under the unrelenting sun of the Mekong Delta.
Later that day, after dark, a US ship arrived to take on refugees, but as hundreds of bodies crowded toward their rescuers, they tipped the barge.
“People fell off, and it was in the middle of the night. Many drowned,” says Nguyen. “My brother watched a child fall in the water and then the father dive in after – they were never seen again.”
Baby Lien-Hang and her siblings all made it onto the second ship that arrived and transited through camps in Guam, Wake Island, and Hawaii, then a series of military bases on the US mainland. Months later, the family finally settled permanently in Pennsylvania. But for those who could not find a way out of Saigon that day, the odyssey is just beginning.
The revolution arrives
Americans often think of April 30, 1975, as the end of the Vietnam War. But for Vietnamese, “the fall of Saigon signals not just the victory of North Vietnam, but the peak of their revolution,” says Tuong Vu, a political science professor at the University of Oregon.
The Communist Party of Vietnam rapidly began purging society of threats to their regime, including former South Vietnamese officials and soldiers, capitalists, religious clergy, intellectuals, and ethnic Chinese and Khmer. The new government also seized property, collectivized agriculture, and removed hundreds of thousands of urban residents to the countryside for farming.
Erin Phuong Steinhauer, now the head of the Vietnam Society, was five years old when she watched North Vietnamese tanks roll down Nguyen Hue Boulevard and crash through the gates of the presidential palace. Her family were wealthy proprietors of camera shops, and her father was a former soldier for South Vietnam.
Shortly after the fall of Saigon, troops arrived at their home to take him away. He would spend the next four years in a re-education camp – a prison meant to indoctrinate and punish perceived enemies of the state – suffering extreme deprivations, forced labor, and brainwashing. The family’s property was confiscated, and Erin and nine of her siblings went to live with their grandparents.
“Then they arrested my mother, and interrogated her,” says Steinhauer. For a week, she slept in a corrugated panel box. “They kept her there and asked her over and over: ‘Where is your money? Where did you hide everything? What are your plans?’”
She returned deeply traumatized – but the family had a lifeline. Erin’s mother had hidden gold with relatives in the countryside, and over the next four years, the family used it to make risky escapes in small groups to Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, where Erin arrived with her mother and sisters in 1979.
“It was a strange feeling when we escaped Vietnam. I remember my dreams before 1975 were in bright color,” says Steinhauer. “Afterward, they were in dull grey overtones.”
Overextension and reform
The Communist Party’s policies strangled economic growth, and Vietnam’s situation was further complicated by China’s split with the USSR. Hanoi sided with Moscow, which had provided advanced weapons and advisors during the war with the US.
Meanwhile, the Khmer Rouge regime in neighboring Cambodia leaned on Beijing for support. Vietnam invaded its neighbor in 1978 to remove Pol Pot’s regime after over a year of border conflicts and failed peace talks, leading to an 11-year-long occupation and a brief punitive war with China in 1979.
“The Soviet Union, with its weak economy, became totally exhausted because of overreach,” says Vu. Straining under the weight of the war in Afghanistan and the arms race with the US, Moscow “was forced to consider economic reform, and in turn, encouraged the Vietnamese to reform as well.”
In 1986, the death of Party Secretary Le Duan allowed new leadership to initiate the Doi Moi reforms, gradually opening Vietnam’s market and sending out political feelers to former enemies.
“After 1986, Vietnam engaged with the global community again, moving away from the Soviet orbit,” says Nguyen. “It is the end of the international marginalization that came about with its war against Cambodia and China.”
Reconciliation with Washington
Repairing relations with the United States remained a slow process, in large part due to an American embargo, and formal diplomatic ties were not fully reestablished until 1995. The relationship strengthened rapidly in the following years, including defense and diplomatic cooperation, but most crucially through trade. Access to US markets helped the Vietnamese economy grow at an astounding pace, with per-capita GDP in 2023 more than 14 times higher than it was in 1995, and total US trade volume over 248 times larger.
That close relationship is part of why many Vietnam observers were shocked when the Trump administration ordered its diplomats in Hanoi to avoid any ceremonies recognizing the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.
“It’s a smack in the face,” says Steinhauer. Though a symbolic gesture, “It invalidates everything we have gone through – not just Vietnamese-Americans, but US veterans, and the people of Vietnam, and the hundreds of diplomats who worked to broker reconciliation over the past 30 years. All of that seems like it is meaningless to this administration.”
Opinion: After 25 years, has Putin "won"?
An aging, visibly infirm president is about to hand off power to an authoritarian-minded successor with a mandate to restore “order” and “sovereignty.”
Sound familiar? Da. It’s New Year’s Eve 1999, and a bloated, barely intelligible Boris Yeltsin is handing the Kremlin over to a shifty young spook named Vladimir Putin. “Take care of Russia,” he famously said before staggering out of the room.
When Vladimir Vladimirovich first took power 25 years ago, the world was a different place. Cell phones weren’t smart yet. Lou Bega was burning up the charts with “Mambo Number Five.” The most feared hacking group in the world wasn’t called “Fancy Bear” or “Salt Typhoon” but “Napster.”
It was also a world in which the US was at the pinnacle of its post-Cold War triumphalism. The disputed elections, disastrous wars, and crippling financial crises of the 21st century were still – just barely – in the future.
History had ended, or at least been paused. Uncle Sam had won the Cold War. Free markets, free trade, and liberal democracy were on the march globally, gloriously, and inevitably. So too, it seemed, was NATO, which began expanding eastward in the 1990s.
Putin did not like this world. From his perspective it was a world that treated Russia either as an afterthought or as a charity case. He resented the high-handed moralizing from the West about “democracy.” He dreamed of a “multipolar” world where the US couldn’t boss Russia around or humiliate the Kremlin and its friends.
Now, five US presidents, three Russian invasions, and countless predictions of his demise later, Putin is still standing. And as a result, he has lasted long enough to witness the return of Donald Trump to the White House – this time not with an asterisk but with a mandate.
In a way, Trump’s return means Putin has finally won. Not because of the silly notion that Trump is a “Russian agent” – but because it closes the door, finally and fully, on the post-Cold War era that Putin confronted when he first came to power.
Trumpism is, at its core, a rebuke to all the pieties of that era: that globalism would trump nationalism, that free trade and open societies had an inherent appeal, and that there were international “norms” that the US was responsible for policing.
Trump, whether you like him or not, isn’t interested in a high-handed foreign policy based on abstract “values.” He doesn’t care whether Russia is a democracy or an empire. He questions the net benefit of decades-old US alliances like NATO. He has already blown apart what Robert Lighthizer, his first-term trade czar, calls the “free trade theology” that held sway in Washington for decades.
His worldview is a zero-sum, mercantilist, hyper-nationalistic one. Putin, in many ways, can relate. When Trump talks about using force to take over the Panama Canal, Greenland, or Canada because these things would be in America’s national interest as a hemispheric power, for example, he is speaking a political language from before the “end of history.” This is a language Putin speaks fluently. Panama isn’t quite Crimea, but you get the idea.
At his annual marathon press conference a few weeks ago, Putin reflected on the past quarter century, telling BBC’s journalist Steve Rosenberg that he was proud to have “pulled Russia back from the abyss,” after inheriting a deeply indebted, politically fragmented, and listless country from Yeltsin.
Perhaps that’s true, but Russia today is a country locked in a costly conflict of Putin’s choosing, with a shrinking and aging population, a war-warped economy, and a flagging technological base. Shorn of its traditional partners in Europe, Moscow is increasingly dependent either on rogue pariahs like North Korea and Iran, or a superpower China that dwarfs Russia in economic and military capacity.
Over the past 25 years, Putin outlasted the “post-Cold War” world that he resented. But it’s less obvious that he has “taken care of Russia” well enough for it to thrive and prosper over the next quarter century of whatever comes next.
Putin needs Xi to win the war in Ukraine
David Sanger, Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times journalist and author of "New Cold Wars," discusses the evolving relationship between China and Russia, highlighting its asymmetry and significance in today's geopolitical landscape. He points out how much the tables have turned. During the Cold War of the 20th Century, the Soviet Union was the dominant power when it came to its relationship with China. Decades later, it's clear that China holds the upper hand. "China holds more cards than the Russians do," Sanger tells Ian Bremmer. Not only that, Russia's Vladimir Putin needs China's Xi Jinping by his side in order to prevail in his war with Ukraine. "He [Putin] needs that Chinese technology desperately... He does not have a choice except to deal with the Chinese on Chinese terms right now."
And what does that mean for China's interests when it comes to the United States? "If you're Xi," Sanger says, "the two best things that can happen to you is that the US is tied up in Ukraine or ripping itself apart about the aid and consumed again in the Middle East." And at least in that respect, Xi seems to be getting everything he wants.
Watch Ian Bremmer's full interview with David Sanger on GZERO World - Are we on the brink of a new cold war?
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week on US public television (check local listings) and online.
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Are we on the brink of a new cold war?
“We are back in a period of superpower competition that will probably go on for decades. And that, if we're lucky, remains a cold war.” David Sanger, a Pulitzer prize-winning national security correspondent for The New York Times, joins Ian Bremmer on a new episode of GZERO World to offer a clear-eyed take on America’s adversaries. He’s out with a new book called "New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West." The takeaway: we’re entering a new and increasingly unstable era of geopolitics where the US, China, and Russia will be vying for power and influence like never before. China's rise as a world leader and economic powerhouse, along with Russia's nuclear saber-rattling and increasing military cooperation, poses an unprecedented challenge to US dominance.
But unlike the Cold War that dominated the 20th century, where the US and the Soviet Union could operate essentially independently from each other, the world today is far more connected. "It's a cold war that bears almost no resemblance to the one that you and I are old enough to remember, because in that Cold War, we had a single competitor, and we weren't dependent on them, nor they on us for very much."
Sanger also talks about America’s missed opportunities and misjudgments in dealing with Russia and China. There were early hopes of engagement with Russia under Yeltsin's presidency, which quickly eroded when Putin came to power. Similarly, there was a belief that integrating China into the global economy would lead to political reform. However, this bet did not play out as expected, with the Communist Party using digital forces for explicit repression techniques. "It became pretty evident, pretty clearly that the Communist party had learned how to take these same digital forces and use them for the most explicitly designed repression techniques we have ever seen.”
But one area where both Russia and China have a shared interest? Pitting Americans against each other. “They have every incentive, both Russia and China, to be subtle actors in the background of this coming presidential election,” Sanger tells Bremmer. “And that's one area where if they are not cooperating, it would pay them off considerably to coordinate.”
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week on US public television (check local listings) and online.
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The next era of global superpower competition: a conversation with the New York Times' David Sanger
Listen: In 2019, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin met at a summit and described their “friendship without limits.” But how close is that friendship, really? Should the US be worried about their growing military and economic cooperation? On the GZERO World Podcast, Ian Bremmer sits down with Pulitzer prize-winning national security correspondent for The New York Times David Sanger to talk about China, Russia, the US, and the 21st-century struggle for global dominance. Sanger’s newest book, “New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West,” looks at the new and increasingly unstable era of geopolitics where the US, China, and Russia are vying for power and influence like never before. Bremmer and Sanger discuss the US intelligence failures that led to the current geopolitical reality, what the US needs to do to combat the growing cooperation between our two biggest adversaries, and why semiconductor factories are more important to national security than aircraft carriers.
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Soldiers of the seven newest NATO members parade during a ceremony marking the expansion of NATO's membership from 19 countries to 26 at the alliance headquarters in Brussels April 2, 2004. NATO foreign ministers participated in an event marking the formal accession of the seven newest members, Bulgaria, Estonia Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slonevia.
NATO turns 75. Will it make it to 80?
Seventy-five years ago today, 12 leaders from the US, Canada, and Western Europe signed the North Atlantic Treaty, creating the world’s most powerful military alliance: NATO
Where it’s been: As World War II drew to a close in 1945, Europe faced the overwhelming challenge of reconstruction. Over 11 million displaced people were wandering the bombed-out cities and scorched countryside, including hundreds of thousands of war orphans. And on the east bank of the Elbe River stood the massive, battle-hardened Soviet Red Army, a worrying prospect as the USSR came increasingly into conflict with its erstwhile allies.
Just 18 months later, Britain and France signed the Treaty of Dunkirk, pledging mutual defense as world powers rapidly coalesced into ideological blocs. Following a Soviet-backed communist coup in Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands joined to create the Western Union in March 1948, but within months, the Soviet blockade of West Berlin would make clear only US involvement could deter Moscow.
Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States signed the North Atlantic Treaty just over a year hence, binding one another to mutual defense.
Five months later, the USSR tested its first nuclear bomb.
Identity crisis: Through the Cold War, NATO had a clear mission to deter the Soviet Bloc. But as the Warsaw Pact and then the Soviet Union itself collapsed in 1991, what would become of the alliance?
Instead of guarding against Eastern Europe, NATO began absorbing former Soviet bloc countries and protecting the liberal democratic order more generally. In March 1999, the alliance welcomed Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary — and initiated a bombing campaign that ended the Serbian invasion of Kosovo.
Then, in 2001, the alliance’s mutual defense clause was invoked for the first time in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the US, leading to the multilateral International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. By 2004, another seven former Soviet and Warsaw Pact countries had joined.
But Moscow’s sudden invasion of Georgia in 2008, just months after the small Caucasian nation voted overwhelmingly to start NATO accession talks, raised the specter of a renewed Cold War. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014 restored focus on the old enemy.
Future peril. Today, NATO has expanded to 32 countries with over 3.3 million active troops, 1 million armored vehicles, 20,000 aircraft, and 2,100 warships, all backed by the US, French, and British nuclear arsenals — without question the most powerful military force ever assembled.
Yet despite its strength, the alliance is beset by anxiety over its future. Should Donald Trump win reelection in November, planners from Ottawa to Ankara worry he will hollow out the alliance’s core and expose members to Russian predation while abandoning Ukraine to the cruel fate of partition, or worse.
The upside? Europeans are starting to get more serious about protecting themselves. The invasion of Ukraine spurred a 13% increase in defense spending in Europe 2022, and Sweden and Finland, both of which punch above their weight militarily, to join NATO. Most pressingly, NATO is working on a $100 billion fund to keep Ukraine in the fight — money Trump 2.0 couldn’t touch.Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, seen here in Berlin, in 2015.
Henry Kissinger: Towering (and polarizing) figure in US foreign policy dies at 100
In memoriam: Dr. Henry Kissinger (1923-2023)
From America to China to the social media universe, the world marked the passing of diplomat and presidential adviser Dr. Henry Kissinger, whose realpolitik approach to foreign policy definitively shaped the course of international relations in the 20th century.
Born in Germany in 1923, Henry Alfred Kissinger emigrated to the United States in 1938 and became a citizen in 1943. He served three years in the US Army and later in the Counter Intelligence Corps, earned a Ph.D., and became a professor of international relations at Harvard before embarking on a diplomatic career in the service of three American presidents – John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Gerald R. Ford.
At the time, America was mired in conflict: The Vietnam War seemed intractable, the Cold War raged white hot, and the Middle East was a tinderbox. Kissinger’s realpolitik approach helped the United States navigate all these conflicts. As national security adviser and later as secretary of state, Kissinger was instrumental in opening diplomatic relations with China in 1972 and negotiating the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) with the former Soviet Union. He defined the term “shuttle diplomacy” for his mediation work in the Middle East during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
That year, Kissinger was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in brokering a ceasefire to the Vietnam War, together with Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho (who refused to accept). Admirers lauded him as a skilled tactician in a time of great peril. Nixon’s daughters, Tricia Nixon Cox and Julie Nixon Eisenhower, said their father and Kissinger enjoyed “a partnership that produced a generation of peace for our nation.” Former US President George W. Bush said "America has lost one of the most dependable and distinctive voices on foreign affairs.”
Kissinger was not without controversy, however. Detractors blamed him for the deaths of millions of Cambodians during the Vietnam War and for supporting repressive regimes including that of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Upon his death, Rolling Stone Magazine ran the headline, “Henry Kissinger, war criminal beloved by America’s ruling class, finally dies.” On X, "RIP BOZO," referring to a meme celebrating someone's death, trended in the top 10 together with "IT FINALLY HAPPENED," while "War criminal" reached the top 25.
Kissinger would have likely met these criticisms with the same sangfroid that marked his diplomatic career. Shortly before his 100th birthday, he told CBS that such comments are “… a reflection of their ignorance.”
After leaving the US government, Kissinger continued to provide counsel to world leaders until the last days of his life. In September, he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York; in July, he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing. The Chinese Ambassador to the United States Xie Feng said he was “deeply shocked and saddened” by Kissinger’s death. “He will always remain alive in the hearts of the Chinese people as a most valued old friend.”
Kissinger was also a prolific author, penning 21 books on topics as varied as politics in the nuclear age, the rise of China, the art of diplomacy, and most recently, the promise and perils of artificial intelligence. He leaves behind his wife of nearly 50 years, Nancy Kissinger, his two children from a previous marriage, Elizabeth and David, and five grandchildren.
WATCH: On Henry Kissinger's 100th birthday in May, GZERO's Ian Bremmer reflected on his legacy.
From foes to friends: NATO's history of absorbing its enemies
NATO and Russia have been enemies since the beginning of the Cold War. But could there be a time in the future where Russia is a partner, maybe even an ally? That's not happening any time soon, but if history is any indication, it's not such a crazy idea: alliance has absorbed its enemies before.
GZERO World goes back in time to the height of the Cold War, nuclear paranoia, and the formation of the Warsaw Pact in 1955.
Let's talk a walk down NATO memory lane. Don't forget to duck and cover.