April 30: 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War

Tomorrow, April 30, is the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam. The occasion is celebrated by Vietnam as Reunification Day.

Despite the relatively good relations at the moment between Vietnam and the US, the Trump 2.0 regime is making a point of turning down the Vietnamese invitation to be present at the anniversary ceremony this year.

Last week, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration had told its senior diplomats in Vietnam not to take part in events related to the anniversary including a reception on April 29 and the military parade the next day.

While not confirming the report, a State Department spokesperson told NPR that the United States and Vietnam "have a robust bilateral relationship and we are committed to deepening and broadening those ties."

For its part, Vietnam's foreign ministry said that Hanoi and Washington have now formed "a comprehensive strategic partnership for peace, cooperation and sustainable development."

The comprehensive strategic partnership is the highest level of bilateral relations between Vietnam and any other country. [my emphasis] (1)

Par for the course in the chronically chaotic diplomacy of Trump 2.0 so far, it’s not entirely clear why they want to make such a point of the boycott. Paul Pillar notes:

In the five decades since, the United States and Vietnam forged a warm, multifaceted relationship. Diplomatic relations were normalized in 1995. In the words of a State Department fact sheet published this January, “U.S.-Vietnam relations have become increasingly cooperative and comprehensive, evolving into a flourishing partnership that spans political, economic, security, and people-to-people ties.” Bilateral trade grew from $451 million in 1995 to nearly $124 billion in 2023.

In 2023, during a visit to Vietnam by President Joe Biden, the two nations declared a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership that extends to defense and security matters. A key shared interest underlying such cooperation is to limit the expanding influence and power of China.

This later history has demonstrated how badly wrong the major assumptions underlying the U.S. decision to go to war in Vietnam were. The military adversary there was not, as was assumed, part of a communist monolith led by Moscow and Beijing. The subsequent history has shown how the United States can have a mutually beneficial relationship even with a regime that still avows an ideology foreign to America’s own. [my emphasis] (2)

Historian Amanda Demmer also why April 30 is now taken as an official endpoint of the war:

April 30, 1975 is commonly understood to be the dramatic endpoint of the Vietnam War. For the victorious Vietnamese, what they called the liberation of Saigon marked a “total victory after thirty years of grim and bloody sacrifice.”[1] For those Vietnamese who lost, the events of late April evoke the collapse of their country, the erasure of their nation from the geopolitical map, an indescribable loss. Accordingly, for Vietnamese communities in the United States, April 30th is commemorated as a day of grief and mourning, “Black April.” For the U.S. government, the rapid fall of Saigon spurred a hasty, humiliating exit immortalized in Dutch photographer Hubert Van Es’ (in)famous image of a U.S. helicopter frantically evacuating individuals off a rooftop in downtown Saigon. Although the Peace of Paris Accords had brought the last of U.S. combat troops home in March 1973, the inglorious exit in April 1975 was depicted then and has been generally remembered since as a fitting conclusion to the nation’s first military loss, the exclamation point at the end of a long line of failures and embarrassments in which the limits of American power were thrown into sharp relief. Concluding the narrative of the Vietnam War on April 30, 1975 seems obvious (even if for many, painful) insofar as the war was finally over. [my emphasis] (3)

Then she concludes that paragraph with, “Except, it wasn’t.”

In other words, wars don’t end on a single point of time and then everything reverts back to conditions before the conflict. “The dualities, ironies, and paradoxes of the decades after 1975 are only decipherable once we acknowledge that, rather than diametrically opposed, war and peace are often entangled.”

She mentions that mass migration that was often at the time known as the story of the “Boat People.”

The departure of over three million people from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia between 1975 and 1995 marked one of the largest migrations of the late twentieth century. In the twenty years after 1975, over one million Vietnamese ultimately resettled in the United States through journeys that involved clandestine flight or emigration programs that brought individuals directly from Vietnam to the United States. The vast majority were former American allies and their close family members. Despite the tendency to frame refugee migrations as parenthetical to or found in the postscript of the “real” war, the recent conflict in Ukraine serves as a vivid reminder that displacement and dislocation are part and parcel of the wartime experience.

The Austrian migration expert Gerald Knaus (4), who heads the European Stability Initiative (ESI), describes the international response to the Vietnamese refugee crisis organized through a 1979 conference in Geneva as a very successful response to such a crisis, one from which European countries today could still learn a lot. (5)

Knaus provides the following graph indicating the scope of the international cooperation in voluntarily taking in those refugees, with columns showing the number of Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodians, and the total who were taken on by country:

Notes:

(1) Pham, Nga (2025): Despite improving relations, U.S. will be absent from Vietnam's war anniversary parade. NPR 04/29/2025. <https://www.npr.org/2025/04/29/g-s1-63164/despite-improving-relations-u-s-will-be-absent-from-vietnams-war-anniversary-parade> (Accessed: 2025-29-04).

(2) Pillar, Paul (2025): Trump can boycott, but the failure and end of Vietnam War is a fact. Responsible Statecraft 04/28/2025. <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-vietnam-anniversary/> (Accessed: 2025-29-04).

(3) Demmer, Amanda (2023): The Many Ends of the Vietnam War. Organization of American Historians 04/25/2023. <https://www.oah.org/process/demmer-many-ends-of-the-vietnam-war/> (Accessed: 2025-29-04).

(4) Knaus, Gerald (2020): Welche Grenzen brauchen wir? 96-120. München: Piper.

(5) Thea, Jessica (2018): Lessons for Today as Refugees International Marks an Important Anniversary. Refugees International 07/19/2018. <https://www.refugeesinternational.org/lessons-for-today-as-refugees-international-marks-an-important-anniversary/> (Accessed: 2025-29-04).