- The Vietnamese like to say that "Vietnam is a country, not a war."

I think for Americans, the obsession is still the history of the war, its impact on the United States and all of this.

But Vietnam is a country.

It has its own unique history.

It's gonna determine its own path.

(mellow music) - Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we are looking back at the Vietnam War, five decades after the last helicopters left Saigon.

What do you say about a conflict that took the lives of 60,000 American troops and over 3 million Vietnamese, reshaping the world in the process?

It was a proxy battle between the United States and the Soviet Union.

It was also the culmination of decades of imperialism in Southeast Asia.

And for many here at home, it was the conflict that brought the most powerful nation in the world to its knees.

To get into all that and more, I am joined by two people who have experienced the war's repercussions in deeply personal ways.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American professor and author, whose best-selling novel, "The Sympathizer," won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a TV series.

- [Narrator] Saigon, 1975.

(lively music) - Mai Elliott is a Vietnamese-born author whose memoir, "The Sacred Willow," tells the story of one Vietnamese family across four generations.

And they both join me on the show.

But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

- [Narrator] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Narrator] Every day all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Narrator] And by... Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO."

Cox is working to create an impact in areas like sustainable agriculture, clean tech, healthcare, and more.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York and... (gentle music) (apprehensive music) - It's been half a century since the last American helicopters left Saigon.

For the Vietnamese people who sided with the Communist North, the Vietnam War represents a long and bloody struggle for national reunification and independence and victory over foreign imperialism.

It began long before American troops landed in Saigon, and it concluded long after their helicopters departed.

For those in the South, it symbolizes a lost homeland, a shattered republic that launched a mass exodus and the making of a resilient diaspora, especially in the United States.

For American leadership, the Vietnam War is a cautionary tale of unclear objectives, political interference, and the limits of American conventional power in guerrilla warfare.

(people chanting) For the American people, it brought about a national reckoning that fractured faith in leadership and ignited widespread protests, trauma, and cultural upheaval.

(people shouting) But this is also a tale of economic rebirth that rivals the success stories of post-World War II Europe.

By the time that North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon back on April 30th, 1975, the conflict's body count was staggering.

Nearly 60,000 American troops had died, a horror in its own right.

As many as 2 million Vietnamese civilians perished, along with 1.3 million Vietnamese soldiers.

The majority hailing from the North Vietnamese side.

The country was united.

It was also, of course, in ruins.

Over the next two decades, things stayed dark.

The communist government implemented a Soviet-style centrally planned economy.

Vietnam suffered mightily from economic mismanagement, food shortages, international isolation.

Costly occupation of Cambodia from 1978 to 1989 deepened Vietnam's pariah status.

Then the Berlin Wall fell, and with it, Vietnam's main backer.

And that's where things got interesting because it had long been communist Soviet Union much more than communist China that supported Vietnam.

In fact, Vietnam had been resisting Chinese domination for over a thousand years, even briefly clashed with their northern neighbor back in 1979.

So with the fall of the Soviets, Vietnam had little choice but to turn to its not-so-old enemy, the United States, for economic and political support.

And long story short, once President Clinton authorized the opening of trade and tourism with Vietnam in 1997, the country experienced an economic boom that continues to this day.

In the past 20 years, Vietnam has fully integrated into the global economy, signing bilateral trade deals with the United States back in 2001 and the World Trade Organization in 2007.

Vietnam's become one of the fastest growing markets in Asia, one of the most stable governments in the region.

Check the tag on your shirt.

Chances are decent you'll see "Made in Vietnam" instead of "Made in China."

And that brings us to President Trump's "Liberation Day" on April 2nd where he announced a staggering 46% reciprocal tariffs on Vietnam, though now he has paused it by 90 days.

China's president, Xi Jinping, wasted no time to step in where President Trump stepped back, visiting Vietnam just a couple of weeks later and urging the Vietnamese to, quote, "resist unilateral bullying."

Trump's response to that was as sober and measured as ever.

- I don't blame China.

I don't blame Vietnam.

I see the meeting today.

That's wonderful and that's a lovely meeting, the meeting like trying to figure out, "How do we screw the United States of America?"

- So now we see if Trump's unprecedented economic warfare will turn Vietnam to China for the first time in millennia.

It would be one of many firsts in this brave new MAGA world.

Here to help me take stock of the 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize winning author of "The Sympathizer," and Vietnamese researcher and author, Mai Elliott.

Mai Elliott, Viet Thanh Nguyen, welcome to "GZERO World."

I have so much I want to discuss with you.

And Mai, I wanted to start...

If you could talk to me a little bit, since you were a grown woman in Vietnam when the war broke out, tell us a little bit for those of us that weren't there, what it felt like, what your experiences were.

- Well, the war was fought mainly in the countryside.

So people living in the big cities like Saigon, we were somewhat insulated.

But I experienced the war through my interviews with the insurgents and the North Vietnamese fighters for the RAND Corporation for a research project for the Defense Department.

So I was living the war in real time through their eyes.

And my most immediate experience with the war was when I visited a ward full of war victims.

And that was the closest I came to what the war was doing to the people of Vietnam.

And of course, in Saigon, there were a lot of beggars who were maimed by the war or orphans who were living in the street and refugees who were pouring into Saigon and living in horrible conditions.

So I experienced the war through them more than through direct experience.

- Viet, you were four years old when Saigon fell.

So I mean, you know, I don't mean to cast aspersions, but you're a little generationally different here.

Your first memories would've been in a refugee camp in the United States, but obviously, you knew your family.

Maybe start a little bit with the dynamics there, about the conversations you were having that you remember from your earliest life with the people that you trusted the most, that raised you, and what that made you think about the war that they had just gone through.

- We fled along with the 130,000 other South Vietnamese refugees in 1975.

And I'm pretty sure almost all of them were deeply anti-communist because many of them came from the political and military classes.

My parents were actually merchants, so they were not a part of the politics or the military.

But they were still very anti-communist because they were Catholic.

And so I grew up steeped in anti-communism and in Catholicism in Vietnamese refugee communities.

And I felt that we were a community that had lost so much.

People felt they had lost a country.

Many people, including my own, had left family members behind.

There was a lot of melancholy, rage, anger, bitterness, sadness, the whole gamut of emotions.

And out of that, people were still trying to rebuild their lives, their shattered lives.

So I just remember growing up with an awareness of how much was at stake here.

Because we had lost so much and we were trying to rebuild, I was watching my parents work 12 to 14 hour days almost every day of the year in their grocery store.

And that experience was very similar to what everybody else was undergoing at the same time.

And we also, for many of us, had to worry about the relatives we had left behind.

So my parents were also sending money back as early as they possibly could.

And there was this sense that we were still tied to Vietnam even though we'd been cut off from it as well.

- And I mean, what sort of connection?

What brought you together with the members, the relatives that were back in Vietnam, and what drove you apart?

When did you see points of, you know, sort of engagement and tension?

- I think it was a very tragic situation.

I was too young to remember this, but my mother, soon after she came to the United States, her own mother died.

Can you imagine your mother dying and you're separated by thousands of miles and you're not there, you know, to mourn her?

It was devastating for her, and she ended up, you know, in a psychiatric facility because of that.

And she did recover eventually.

But stories like that I think were not unusual at all.

Life went on back in Vietnam and that meant life and death and everything had to be experienced vicariously, and it would take time before people could start communicating with each other because communications were cut off.

- How would you say the average American misunderstood what you were going through, misunderstood the impact of the war?

- You have to understand that in 1975, I believe that surveys revealed that the majority of Americans did not want to accept refugees from Southeast Asia.

So that's Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos.

I think there were a lot of misperceptions of who Southeast Asians were because the exposure that Americans had to these countries were purely through the ideas of war.

They were seeing the country through, you know, photos, television reportage, movies, and so on.

And Vietnamese people did not appear, I think, in a very complicated fashion in these representations.

We were victims or we were the Viet Cong and so on.

And all of these things were saturated with a whole legacy of racism and Orientalism that Americans were already bringing to their idea of Asia in general.

So there was a lot of obstacles to overcome for Americans to really understand the new Southeast Asian refugees among them as human beings.

And so I think there was a lot of misunderstanding, a lot of incomprehension.

Just as Americans were unaware of the complexities of the cultures of the countries of Southeast Asia that they were getting involved in, Southeast Asian refugees coming into New American communities would also find similar levels of incomprehension.

It was one thing to end up in California, which we were lucky to do, but imagine ending up in Minnesota or Wisconsin or other parts of the country that had very little exposure to Asians.

It was a challenging experience all around.

- 50 years on, the average American policymaker today doesn't have a lot of personal experience with Vietnam.

What's a lesson, Mai, that you would like Americans in power today to understand and take away from the experience of the Vietnam War?

- Think very, very hard before intervening militarily in another country.

For example, like in Vietnam, it was a civil war between the communists and the non-communists, of course with foreign backing, you know, the Soviet Union and China on the one hand, and France and then the United States on the other hand.

But basically it was a civil war between two groups of people in Vietnam, the communists and the non-communists who had very different vision for what their country should be in the end.

And so the United States intervened in a civil war and it paid a heavy price.

And I think we should think very, very carefully before getting involved in any situation, especially in a ground war, because a ground war, when you send troops into a foreign country, the people there immediately think of you as foreign occupiers, you know, and then they resist.

And eventually it just becomes impossible to get out.

Easy to get in, but very difficult to extricate yourself.

So I think that I wish that the American policymakers would think very, very carefully before sending ground troops anywhere.

- So, Viet, I've been to Vietnam and I've been impressed and even a little surprised by how incredibly welcoming the Vietnamese people are to Americans, you know, sort individually and broadly, frankly, and, you know, also of President Trump when he went there during his first term.

Wondering, you know, given the staggering mistakes that have been made and the recency of the war, how do you think that's come to be?

- Relative to Vietnamese history, the period of American involvement in Vietnam was kind of short.

- Compared to China, for example.

- Yeah, compared to China.

I mean, long for Americans, obviously.

You know, the war in Vietnam officially for the United States was about eight years in terms of having ground troops in there, which is again, long for the United States, but very brief for the Vietnamese.

And so the Vietnamese will always say, obviously, that, you know, "China colonized us for a thousand years."

It's always been the refrain.

And of course, China is the vast presence to the north of Vietnam that continues to determine so many of Vietnam's economic and political and military concerns.

So I think that Vietnamese are pragmatic when it comes to the United States.

Yes, there was an awful war, and if you go visit the military and the history museums in Vietnam, there is quite an accounting of what the United States did.

But that's all framed within this other narrative of, "Well, we have the need to develop the country economically.

We have the need to develop allyships and partnerships that will allow us to survive in this environment with China," and so on.

And then the other thing I think to remember is that as much as the Vietnamese have been willing to reconcile with the United States at the level of foreign policy and economic policy and with tourists and veterans who are returning, the tensions with their diaspora are significant.

So there's a Vietnamese diaspora of around 4 million people compared to a population of about 95 or a hundred million Vietnamese people in the homeland.

The diaspora exists mostly because of the war and its consequences.

And for a long time, there has been many significant tensions between Vietnam and these diasporic populations.

Some in the diaspora remain anti-communist, would like to see political change in Vietnam.

Obviously, the government does not like that kind of a stance.

The government does not like to bring up difficult histories of things like re-education camps or the so-called boat people, that there was an exodus of refugees.

There are interpersonal emotional tensions sometimes within Vietnamese families.

So that terrain, as you would imagine after a revolutionary war and a civil war, even if we look at the United States as an example, that terrain between Vietnamese people can be, not always, but can be a fraught terrain.

- I think most Vietnamese in the United States remain very strongly anti-communist.

At the beginning, it was very, very difficult for anybody to express any sympathy for Vietnam or to advocate, you know, better relationships between the United States and Vietnam.

Things have changed now.

The ties have strengthened.

A lot of Vietnamese, the younger generations in particular, have returned to Vietnam to do business, to visit, to, you know, renew ties with the old motherland.

But things have changed a bit, but not completely.

I think a lot of Vietnamese in the United States would like to see the communist regime fall, but, you know, there's nothing they can do about it.

But I think there's still a lot of antagonism.

- Vietnam's been in the news of late, of course, with not only the United States putting significant tariffs on the country and then most of that with a 90-day reprieve.

But then, of course, Chinese President Xi Jinping heading to Vietnam, greeted at the airport by the president, signed some 45 significant economic deals.

And Vietnam's principle trade partner is China, not the United States.

Viet, how do you feel about the dynamic, the tensions today between the United States and China over Vietnam?

Do you think it's gonna likely change the trajectory that Vietnam is on?

- Well, as I mentioned earlier, you know, Vietnam has always had to contend with China, and that was true even during the Vietnam War period and afterwards.

You know, was China an ally?

Or was China an antagonist?

Things switched.

So China supported Vietnam during the war against the United States, but immediately afterwards, China invaded Vietnam in 1979 due to other issues with Cambodia.

So it's always been a complex terrain.

Vietnam has always tried to negotiate its stance relative to China.

So in this instance, obviously, I think where the United States has at least proven itself to be temporarily antagonistic with Vietnam around the tariff issue, it makes sense for Vietnam to have an alliance with China.

So I think that terrain is unpredictable, what's going to happen, and it depends on how China and the United States negotiate and what kind of conflicts happen and occur between them.

I really cannot predict what will happen if we go beyond trade war into actual war between China and the United States.

I mean, that is just a nightmare scenario for all the countries around that region.

And so I think people in Vietnam are understandably nervous about how these power plays will occur between these two superpowers.

- But a level of, "Hey, we've got problems with the US, so let's make sure we have a little more stability with China, irrespective of what we think of them," is that what I'm hearing you say, Viet?

- I think there's a degree of pragmatism that's involved, and it is intention with other issues because periodically, there will be a resurgence of Vietnamese nationalism in regards to China, like, you know, "Is China infringing in our autonomy?"

et cetera, for various kinds of reasons.

So again, it is a difficult terrain that the Vietnamese government and Communist Party has to play between this long history of anti-Chinese sentiment and Vietnamese nationalism along with the need to again, position China and the United States against each other.

- I think that Vietnam has a bifurcated relationship with China and the United States for its own national interests and security concerns.

So as a Vietnamese analyst put it beautifully, he said that, "If Vietnam gets too close to China, it risks being dominated by China and it will lose its country.

If it gets too close to the United States and exposes itself more to the liberal democracy viewpoints that the United States advocates, it would lose its regime."

So it wants to be close to the United States to counter Chinese expansion, especially in the South China seas.

But on the other hand, it wants to stay very close to China because China is a communist country with a socialist system dominated by the Communist Party, which Vietnam is and would like to remain.

So I think that Vietnam will follow this kind of policy for a long time because of these two overriding concerns for its existence and survival.

- So this is the first show we've ever done on Vietnam.

It's 50 years after the war.

It felt like an appropriate time.

What's the thing that you would like viewers to truly understand, to keep with them, not forget, that is relevant going forward?

Lesson learned, an importance, a line in the sand, I mean, where would you like to go with that, Viet?

- The Vietnamese like to say that, "Vietnam is a country, not a war."

So that's the first lesson.

I think for Americans, the obsession is still the history of the war, its impact on the United States, and all of this.

Obviously, very important, but Vietnam is a country.

It has its own unique history.

It's gonna determine its own path.

But the second thing I'd like to say, and it's affirmed something that Mai said earlier, which is what military and political lessons should the United States have learned from Vietnam?

And I agree.

I mean, the lessons that the United States should have learned is do not get involved in wars of independence and liberation and do not put your troops on the ground in situations you don't understand.

And unfortunately, history has already demonstrated that the United States has not learned those lessons.

From my perspective, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11, these were direct sequels to the war in Vietnam.

And both of them ended disastrously for the United States and for many Iraqis and Afghans as well.

So the recent American history is not positive in terms of whether the military and political establishments of the United States have learned the appropriate lessons, which is I think the major reason why we need to keep on revisiting this history.

- Vietnam is where the United States would have wished it to be, a friendly country in many ways and a country that is integrated into the world economy and a country that is stable.

And so that's the irony of the war, is that we intervene to create a country that is now where it is without American intervention.

You asked the question why Vietnamese are so friendly with the Americans.

I think that that's because we've always made the distinction between the American people on the one hand and what the government was doing in Vietnam.

And I think that, you know, Americans go to Vietnam now and it's just like, you know, any other country.

Actually, you know, I saw an ad many years ago, which tickled me, which said that Vietnam is now one of the most secure country in the world to visit for Americans.

And so, you know, I think it's helpful for the United States to help make Vietnam stay independent and yet not expect it to be an ally in the sense that of Korea or South Korea, or Japan, because Vietnam has its own balancing act versus China.

It will always have to be afraid of what China will do and try not to provoke it.

And so I think that the lesson is, you know, to treat Vietnam as a friendly country, but don't expect it to be openly your strong ally in Asia.

- Mai Elliot, Viet Thanh Nguyen, thanks so much for joining.

- Thank you for having me.

(gentle music) - That's our show this week.

Come back next week if you like what you've seen or even if you don't, but you have your own seismic long-term conflict that you need to put into geopolitical context, why don't you check this out?

GZEROmedia.com.

(lively music) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (gentle music) - [Narrator] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Narrator] Every day all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Narrator] And by... Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO."

Cox is working to create an impact in areas like sustainable agriculture, clean tech, healthcare, and more.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... (gentle music) (lively music)