Search
AI-powered search, human-powered content.
scroll to top arrow or icon

{{ subpage.title }}

Jess Frampton

How Trump fails, nuclearization, geopolitics on AI, and more: Your questions, answered

This is the third and last mailbag of the spring season. Check out the previous two here and here. I will resume the newsletter’s regularly scheduled programming next week, but I hope you’ve found this detour from long-form columns valuable and that I’ve covered some of the things that might have been on your mind.

Here we go (as always, questions lightly edited for clarity).

Gun to your head, what Democrat stands the best chance of becoming president in 2028?

Given how much the country – and the world – will change in the next couple of years, I suspect it'll be someone that nobody has on their shortlist right now. Or did you put money on “The Apprentice” host changing the course of history back in 2013?

Read moreShow less

Vietnam War, 50 years on

Fifty years ago today, North Vietnamese troops seized Saigon, and ended the Vietnam war with a communist victory. GZERO writers and producers have taken a deep dive into the history behind this solemn occasion, exploring life in Saigon during the war, the emotional and chaotic scenes that unfolded as thousands fled, the life Vietnamese-Americans built from scratch in their new homes, and asking whether we have learned the lessons of the war.

50 Years on, have we learned the Vietnam War's lessons?

Fifty years after the fall of Saigon (or its liberation, depending on whom you ask), Vietnam has transformed from a war-torn battleground to one of Asia’s fastest-growing economies — and now finds itself caught between two superpowers. Ian Bremmer breaks down how Vietnam went from devastation in the wake of the Vietnam War to become a regional economic powerhouse.

Saigon’s Last Day: The fall, the flight, and the aftermath of the Vietnam War

Don Shearer, US Defense Department via National Archives

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.

Read more about the amazing stories of survival, and just what happened to Vietnam after the war here.

PODCAST: Revisiting the Vietnam War 50 years later, with authors Viet Thanh Nguyen and Mai Elliott

On the GZERO World Podcast, two authors with personal ties to the Vietnam War reflect on its enduring legacy and Vietnam’s remarkable rise as a modern geopolitical player.

Life in Saigon during the Vietnam War

On GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, author Mai Elliott recalls how witnessing the human toll of the Vietnam War firsthand changed her views — and forced her to keep a life-altering secret from her own family.

Growing up as a Vietnamese refugee in 1980s America

On GZERO World with Ian Bremmer,Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen shares what it was like growing up as a Vietnamese refugee in the US — and how the Americans around him often misunderstood the emotional toll of displacement.

- YouTube

Why Mark Carney’s victory won’t heal the US-Canada rift

Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In :60.

Mark Carney leads the Liberals to victory in Canada. So, what's next for the US-Canada relationship?

I think sometimes you have relationship with somebody, and they do something that shocks you, you can't unsee it, I think US-Canada is like that now. I think the damage is permanent. Of course, the interdependence is immense. The dependence on the Canadian side is higher. They're a much smaller country. Their population is right next to the United States. Just a thin strip there. So, it's not like you can suddenly decouple, but there's going to be a lot of de-risking. So, strong efforts, very tough negotiations coming on trade and on security, but also an effort to build infrastructure and ship Canadian resources away from the United States, towards other countries around the world. Medium-term, that's going to be a pretty significant change in how we think about Canada.

Read moreShow less
- YouTube

Growing up as a Vietnamese refugee in 1980s America

On GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen shares what it was like growing up as a Vietnamese refugee in the US—and how the Americans around him often misunderstood the emotional toll of displacement.

When Nguyen’s family fled Vietnam in 1975, they joined over 130,000 South Vietnamese refugees trying to rebuild their lives in the United States. Nguyen grew up in a tight-knit refugee community steeped in anti-communism and Catholicism, watching his parents work 14-hour days while sending money to relatives they had left behind. “We were a community that had lost so much,” he says, “and we were trying to rebuild our shattered lives.”

Read moreShow less
- YouTube

​Ian Bremmer on Trump's first 100 days

Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: It is a hundred days of President Trump's second administration. How's he doing? And the answer is not so well, certainly not if you look at the polls. Worst numbers for first a hundred days of any president since they've been taking those polls. Markets, of course, down, global economy also down, so much of this self-imposed. And it's not the big-picture policy ideas. The things that Trump says he wants to do are not only popular, but they're also sensible policy: end wars, secure the border, and fair trade. Running on those three planks would work for pretty much anyone in the United States, the things that Trump is committed to, the things that previous administrations, including Biden and the promise of Harris, had not been particularly effective at. But the implementation has been abysmal. The lack of interest in policy specifics, lack of ability to effectively execute, and the dysfunction inside the Trump team/teams, economy, national security has been really challenging.

Read moreShow less
- YouTube

Life in Saigon during the Vietnam War

On GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, Mai Elliott recalls how witnessing the human toll of the Vietnam War firsthand changed her views—and forced her to keep a life-altering secret from her own family.

As a young researcher in Saigon working for the RAND Corporation during the Vietnam War, Mai Elliott had a rare window into the lives of North Vietnamese fighters and rural civilians. What she saw challenged everything she had been raised to believe. “I came from a very anti-communist family... but I began to change my views because I thought it was unjust for the peasants to pay for the cost of the war,” she says.

Read moreShow less
- YouTube

50 years after the Vietnam War

On GZERO World with Ian Bremmer speaks with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen and historian Mai Elliott—two authors whose lives were shaped by the Vietnam War—to understand how one of the 20th century’s most devastating conflicts continues to shape the world today. “We were a community that had lost so much,” Nguyen, author of the bestselling novel "The Sympathizer," says of the Vietnamese refugee experience in the US. Elliott recalls the physical and emotional toll of the war she witnessed firsthand, “I didn’t care who won the war by the end of it—I just wanted it to stop.”

Read moreShow less

Revisiting the Vietnam War 50 years later, with novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen and author Mai Elliott

Listen: It’s been 50 years since the fall of Saigon, but the impact of the Vietnam War still reverberates across generations and continents. On the GZERO World podcast, Ian Bremmer speaks with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen and historian Mai Elliott—two writers whose lives were shaped by the conflict. Nguyen, author of the bestselling book and TV series "The Sympathizer," recounts growing up in a tight-knit refugee community in California, where “melancholy, rage, anger, bitterness, sadness—the whole gamut of emotions” defined the postwar experience. Elliott, who interviewed insurgents during the war, came to see its human cost up close, saying, “I didn’t care who won the war by the end of it—I just wanted it to stop.”

Read moreShow less

Subscribe to our free newsletter, GZERO Daily

Latest