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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.”
Mikhail Gorbachev outlived his legacy
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Mikhail Gorbachev, the final general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has died at 91. He's an extraordinary and truly world changing leader, ultimately, and tragically a failed one as well. Arguably, Gorbachev was the leader that made the greatest impact on my professional life. My first trip outside the United States was to the former Soviet Union back in 1986. Gorbachev had just gotten into power the year before, and actually it wasn't at all clear when I went there that he was going to be this great reformer. In his early days, he was focused on anti-alcohol campaign, anti-corruption campaign, sort of trying to improve Soviet society, but also working to concentrate, more power in the hands of the politburo, where there was a serious power struggle going on. In fact, the early days you could argue that Gorbachev and Xi Jinping actually had a lot in common, but that's really where the comparisons end.
The Chernobyl disaster hit just a couple months before I showed up in the Soviet Union. And therefore at the beginning of Gorbachev's rule. I remember meeting a bunch of Cuban students that were traveling to Leningrad, had just been in Ukraine, and had literally no idea what had happened until they got into the Russian Republic. And they were pretty scared by what exposure they might, might not have had. But of course, this was an enormous tragedy inside the former Soviet Union, and also one that the leaders got bad information on, and kind of proved to Gorbachev that the political system was increasingly sclerotic and bankrupt, and the economic trajectory of the country was failing, and he really wanted to change it. And he attempted to do that through three unprecedented structural reforms, in what had been an authoritarian state, capitalist society.
First glasnost, political openness. In other words, free speech. Secondly, perestroika, economic opening. Capitalism, and third khozraschyot, self accounting, federalism. In other words, let people say what they want about the government. Let them make money as they can. And let local officials have more accountability for the decision making processes that are underneath them.
So opposite from what we see in Russia today, and under Putin today in pretty much every way. And Gorbachev also very much an anti-imperialist, recognized that Soviets were overspending massively on the military, and wanted to stop that too. And so he ended the disastrous Soviet war in Afghanistan. Americans did not of course learn great lessons from that. But in short order, the internal response in Soviet empire from all of this reform, was a large number of rested populations that wanted out, because Soviet empire was of course massively repressive. And when the tools of repression were no longer there, the attraction of the freedoms, the economic, the human liberties that existed in the West, were suddenly greatly appealing to those that had been behind the iron curtain. And so in short order, with these reforms, you saw a massive political uprising to end Soviet power, first in Eastern bloc countries and Gorbachev chose not to intervene militarily to try to prevent them from leaving. And that of course, led to the Wall coming down, and the independence of all of these Eastern European countries that are now, of course, in NATO, that are now in the European Union.
And then, when 15 Soviet republics themselves started demanding independence, first in the Baltic states, Ukraine, and then eventually in Central Asia, and again, across all of the former Soviet republics, finally leading to a failed military coup against Gorbachev in August of 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev accepted the end of Soviet empire peacefully on Christmas Day, four months later.
Perhaps the truest tragedy of a statesman is when you outlive your legacy, and perhaps nothing could be more true of Gorbachev. President, and now indeed dictator, of Russia, Vladimir Putin has said that he views Soviet collapse as the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. And he has devoted his time in office, first and foremost, to reviving a Russian empire. And Russia today in 2022 is precisely the opposite of everything Gorbachev had hoped it would be. We're all the worst for that. And most of all, the Russians themselves.
Mikhail Gorbachev, rest in peace.
Putin miscalculated on Ukraine, misled by post-Cold War worldview, says Ivan Krastev
For political scientist Ivan Krastev, Vladimir Putin miscalculated in Ukraine — but in a much deeper way than how the invasion is playing out so far.
Why? Krastev offers three explanations in an interview with Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
First, Putin never accepted that the Soviet Union collapsed because communism did.
Second, he thought the West is in such decline that he'd get away with it.
Third, Putin wants to fix all Russia's problems in his lifetime.
So, how does the Russian leader feel about the war so far? Krastev believes he's definitely not happy with what's going on on the ground, but views himself fighting a longer and more consequential battle with the West.
Watch the GZERO World episode: How Putin created Ukraine’s determination to resist
No end in sight as Philippines communist revolt marks 50th year
MANILA (AFP) - Philippine policewoman Ruby Buena's introduction to one of the oldest communist insurgencies in the world was a roadside bomb blast followed seconds later by an eruption of gunfire.