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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.”
US President Donald Trump returns to the White House from his New Jersey golf club to Washington, DC, on April 27, 2024.
Viewpoint: How strong is Trump’s support 100 days in?
President Donald Trump has claimed a broad mandate to pursue sweeping changes to US institutions and policies since he took office on Jan. 20. He has sought to overhaul the federal government by closing agencies and cutting thousands of jobs, restructure the economy by throwing up a tariff wall to force companies to base more of their operations in the US, reconfigure decades-old foreign alliances, and assert expansive powers in an illegal immigration crackdown.
With a cohesive team in the White House, Republican control of Congress, and a disoriented Democratic opposition, Trump has pushed ahead rapidly on many fronts. But opinion polls in recent weeks have shown a sharp decline in public support for the president, and the courts, financial markets, and other institutions have started curbing his actions. Eurasia Group’s Clayton Allen and Noah Daponte-Smith explain their shared insights on where things are likely to go from here.
What is your assessment of the strength of Trump’s starting position? Was it a “historic mandate,” as he has said? And where does he stand today?
Trump’s popular vote win last November gave him a mandate — not the historic romp that he claimed, but a clear signal from voters that they wanted to buy what he was selling. A hundred days in, a lot of voters are suffering buyer’s remorse. It’s been a rough 100 days, almost all self-imposed: The US economy is headed for much lower growth, if not contraction; negotiations are moving slower than the expectations Trump set for the Ukraine war and Gaza; and national polling shows Trump underwater in overall approval, his handling of the economy, management of foreign policy, inflation, even immigration in some polling.
In the Silver Bulletin polling average, Trump had a 52% approval rating (with +12 net approval) on Jan. 21. His approval has since declined to 44%, with a -9 net approval.
The big question for Trump is if, or when, the negative views on the economy and general exhaustion with volatility begin to weigh on his GOP support. His approval among GOP voters is still robust in the mid-80s, but it is showing signs of weakening on the issues. A Gallup poll over the weekend, for example, found that 36% of Republicans believe that tariffs — one of the administration’s headline policies — will “end up costing the US more money than they bring in.”
What signs of Trump’s support will you be focusing on in the months ahead?
Two things – Trump’s approval ratings on the economy and his approval ratings among Republicans. Economic performance polling is a traditional source of strength for Trump, but the economy is where he has shown his sharpest and most notable decline, largely stemming from the tariff rollout. According to the Economist/YouGov survey, Trump’s net approval on the economy was -5.8% as of last week. That is lower than at any point in his first term when he reached a nadir of a net -2%. If Trump is losing support on one of his traditionally strongest issues, that suggests he will be somewhat politically weakened in the latter half of 2025 and beyond.
Trump’s approval ratings among Republicans will be another key sign to watch. The president’s ability to command an unruly Republican conference in Congress depends in large part on his unquestioned popularity within the party. So far, that has held up: He’s still above in the mid-80s% approval among Republicans. But if that dips below 80%, Trump may no longer appear the invincible figure in the party that he does today.
What do you see as the biggest risks for Trump and his ability to advance his agenda?
Recession, market blowback, and the courts. After a big sell-off in early April, markets have stabilized somewhat following Trump’s decision to pause some of his most expansive tariff measures. But with no imminent trade deals on the horizon to clarify tariff levels, one wonders how long that confidence can hold. Similarly, a recession – beginning in the second half of the year, or potentially backdated to the first – would severely disrupt his tax cuts-and-tariffs agenda.
The courts are the biggest source of procedural risk for Trump, especially on the deportation of illegal immigrants and the spending cuts made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. We have already seen strong pushback from the courts in both areas. That pushback may extend to tariffs as well, with court cases in the pipeline over the legality of the emergency authorities claimed to enact them. In all these areas, the courts’ skeptical postures toward the Trump administration’s more disruptive actions will be a major source of conflict between the branches of government over the next year.
How do you think Trump will react if some of these risks materialize? Change approach? Lash out against institutional checks on his power?
Lashing out against institutional checks is more likely. A Trump who can no longer marshal the Republican congressional conference at his will probably seek to expand executive power so that he can act without Congress. Key members of the administration have already pointed in that direction. Even with Musk poised to scale back his involvement with DOGE, the administration is claiming broad powers to reshape the federal government under the so-called unitary executive theory. Similarly, pushback from the courts will likely lead Trump to further test the exact bounds of the courts’ power, as in his moves to skirt rulings related to deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s case. And if an economic downturn materializes, Trump will likely blame it on the policies of the Federal Reserve and its Chairman Jerome Powell.
Edited by Jonathan House, senior editor at Eurasia Group.
Graphic Truth: Is Trump’s use of executive orders unprecedented?
All presidents rely on executive orders, but in his second first 100 days in office, Donald Trump has taken it to a whole new level. He has issued 137 executive orders so far — more than triple the 41 Joe Biden signed during the same period, and far surpassing the pace of Trump’s own first term in 2017.
Executive orders are an efficient tool to deliver on “first 100 days” campaign promises (check out this article on where five of Trump’s biggest campaign promises stand). While they offer an immediate way to shape policy, they’re also notoriously fragile — easily reversed by future administrations, as seen on Trump’s first day in office, when he issued 26 executive orders and overturned 78 of Biden’s.
Critics warn that Trump’s flood of orders isn’t just about speed; it’s also raising serious concerns about presidential overreach. Many fear he is using executive actions to bypass Congress altogether and, in some cases, is ignoring Supreme Court rulings instructing him to stop.A Ukrainian rescue worker sits atop the rubble of a destroyed residential building during rescue operations, following a Russian missile strike on a residential apartment building block in Kyiv, Ukraine, on April 24, 2025.
Kyiv under fire, Trump blasts Putin on Truth Social
At least 12 people were killed and 90 others injured in a large-scale Russian assault on Kyiv early Thursday, prompting Donald Trump to post on Truth Social: “I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP!”
This strike was among the most lethal of the conflict and marked the worst attack on the Ukrainian capital since July, when Russian missiles hit a children’s hospital. Reports suggest that Thursday’s assault involved missiles provided by North Korea.
The attack occurred just hours after Trump and his senior advisers urged Ukrainian officials to accept a US-backed peace proposal that would effectively legitimize Russian control over all occupied Ukrainian territory.
Despite pushing for a resolution, with his Truth Social post concluding“Let’s get the Peace Deal DONE,” the Trump administration has recently indicated they might pull out of peace negotiations if progress isn’t made soon. While this could just be a threat to force Ukraine to the negotiating table, a round of high-level peace talks originally planned for London on Wednesday was postponed, primarily due to the US opting not to attend.
President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on April 23, 2025.
White House claims win on border security but stays mum on tariffs
In response to Trump’s tariff threats, Canada presented a security plan that included drones and helicopters for border patrols. The government began to roll the plan out soon after. In February, it expanded the plan, adopting a “Fentanyl Czar” and listing drug cartels as terrorists under the country’s Criminal Code.
Now, the White House is claiming that there have been “successes” at the border. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says “Thanks to President Trump, operational control of the border is becoming a reality, and the administration’s historic measures are yielding huge results,” with apprehensions down 95% from March 2024 levels.
Despite the successes cited by Trump, tariffs on Canada remain in place, including 25% on non-USMCA-compliant goods along with steel and aluminum, and 10% on energy and potash. There’s been no indication from the White House the tariffs are going anywhere, regardless of what happens with the border. That may be a vindication for those who’ve argued that the border was an excuse for tariffs, not a reason. But as the US and Canada face recession risks amid the trade war, it will be of limited comfort at best.
Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas speaks during a press briefing on the World Economic Outlook during the 2025 World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings on April 22, 2025 in Washington, DC.
IMF downgrades growth outlook
“Just since January, we’ve entered into a new era,” IMF’s Chief Economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas told the press Tuesday at the Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. He explained why the IMF had just downgraded global economic growth expectations for 2025, from 3.3% to 2.8%, and global trade growth by more than half, from 3.8% last year to 1.7%.
Why? Global tariff rates are at their highest level since the Great Depression, following Donald Trump’s imposition of a 10% tariff on nearly all imports, along with duties of at least 145% on Chinese goods entering the United States. In a closed-door session with investors at a JP Morgan conference on Tuesday, US Trade Secretary Scott Bessent said that while the US will eventually de-escalate the trade war with China, negotiations with Beijing have yet to begin — and the process, he warned, will be a “slog.”
But an eventual de-escalation won’t alleviate concerns. “Beyond the tariffs themselves, the surge in policy uncertainty — related to trade policy but also more broadly — is a major driver of the economic outlook,” Gourinchas said. As a result, the US saw the sharpest downgrade among wealthy economies, with its expected 2025 growth falling from 2.7% to 1.8%.
Gourinchas notes that the downgrade could be temporary — if tariffs are rolled back and policy stability returns — but the IMF has raised the likelihood of a US recession this year to 40%, up from 25%.
All eyes are now on signals from the White House. Anticipation is building for Wednesday, when the Trump administration is expected to officially weigh in — and potentially upend the conversation. The administration has been hostile to international organizations like USAID and the United Nations, and some fear that the World Bank or the IMF could be next on the chopping block. Bessent is set to address the Institute of International Finance in the morning, followed by a high-stakes dinner with G20 leaders that evening.
GZERO will be watching to see how he responds to the IMF’s downgrade — and whether he offers any guidance to the institution itself. Some expect the Trump administration to urge the IMF to return to its traditional focus on balance of payments and debt crises, moving away from more progressive initiatives like supporting climate adaptation or promoting gender equality.
The Graphic Truth: The foreigners who hold US debt
The US is the world’s biggest debtor, with more than $35 trillion of securities outstanding.
About a quarter of that is held by foreign investors, a detail which has drawn considerable attention since Donald Trump began walloping the world with tariffs to rebalance US trade ties and military alliances. That’s because if countries upset – or merely uneasy – about Trump’s policies sell those securities in response, the debt servicing costs for the US rise. This is no small matter on $35 trillion worth of paper.
In fact, one widely held explanation for Trump’s abrupt suspension of the “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 9 was that wary bond investors had begun to sell US Treasuries: In the week of April 11, yields on 10-year US treasuries saw their biggest leap in a quarter of a century, a sign that creditors were dropping US sovereign debt fast.
Could countries weaponize US debt more directly? China, Trump’s biggest trade war target, is the second largest foreign US creditor, officially holding more than $750 billion.
A selloff could be devastating. But analysts say it would be hard to find enough buyers for a sale that is both swift and large enough to catch the US off guard.
And even if it were possible, a seller would risk their own financial security as well global economic health by kneecapping the US. In other words: It would be, in financial terms, the nuclear option.
The graphic above looks at which countries hold the most US sovereign debt. Note that the last official data precede “Liberation Day” and that they depend on official reporting. Some countries may hold more than what is listed here via third parties.
An employee checks filled capsules inside a Cadila Pharmaceutical company manufacturing unit at Dholka town on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, India, April 12, 2025.
Pharma manufacturers face tariff uncertainty
Donald Trump’s administration announced that it is opening investigations into pharmaceutical and semiconductor supply chains, which will likely result in tariffs that will hurt suppliers in Europe, India, and Canada.
The move shows that, despite stiff political and market resistance, Trump still believes tariffs will benefit his country in the long term by rebalancing trade and boosting manufacturing jobs.
The pharma announcement caused headaches for Canadian producers of generic drugs and pharma ingredients, who are warning of dangerous disruptions to supply chains if the US administration acts erratically.
Trump said last week that pharma tariffs would bring a manufacturing boom to the United States: “They will leave other places because they have to sell — most of their product is sold here, and they’re going to be opening up their plants all over the place.”
But, as with other of Trump’s tariffs, the move could boost prices for consumers while offering uncertain benefits for US industry. Trump’s unpredictability itself is a major liability. Because of strict permitting controls, pharma facilities take years to build, and Trump’s frequent reversals may convince companies it’s unwise to make long-term investments.