Hello and welcome to the GZero World podcast.

This is where you can find extended versions of my conversations on public television.

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we are looking back at the Vietnam War

as the world marks 50 years since the last American helicopters left Saigon.

For the Vietnamese people who sided with the communist north,

it represents a long and bloody struggle for national reunification and independence and victory

over foreign imperialism. 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 power

and guerrilla warfare. But this is also a tale of economic rebirth

that rivals the success stories post-World War II Europe.

Today, Vietnam is one of the strongest and most stable economies

in all of Asia, and it is a close American trading partner too.

That's quite a transformation, and I want to get to all of that and more with my two guests

today.

Vietan Wyn is a Vietnamese American professor and author whose best-selling novel, The Sympathizer,

won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a TV series.

My Elliott is a Vietnamese author and researcher

whose memoir The Sacred Willow

tells the story of one Vietnamese family

across four generations.

...