The scramble to get on the last helicopter out of the US embassy in Saigon at the end of April 1975 was desperate and unseemly for a great power. As the regime in South Vietnam came tumbling down, Congress had refused additional funding. American lawmakers and the public had had enough of a war which had cost nearly 60,000 dead. An East German pop band later recalled how the news of the adversary’s collapse in this emotionally laden theatre of war reached the ears of the Eastern Bloc. One of its songs called on people to flood the streets in celebration. Rot ist der Mai, Saigon ist Frei!, they triumphantly intoned in a catchy tune: ‘May [Day] is red, Saigon is free!’ The whole Communist world was flushed with victory. Yet only a few months later its leadership made one of its most fatal errors. In Helsinki, in August, it committed the Soviet Bloc to uphold human rights as the West defined them, a definition inherently inimical to the habits of authoritarian states. Soon after this, East and West faced off in yet another theatre of action: the Angolan Civil War, which broke out in the wake of independence from Portugal. All three events are crucial for understanding China’s strategy and superpower competition today.

The fall of Saigon was a bitter blow for the United States. For more than 20 years, it had backed the South Vietnamese state against the Communist north with funds, advisers and, from 1961, with troops. President Lyndon Johnson escalated the war on the US side by deploying troops and planes in large numbers from 1965. Yet what is often forgotten in the historical discussion of the war is that, for Johnson, the social transformation of Vietnam was as important as the credibility gained around the world from actively backing allies. Johnson was personally invested in his grand domestic project, the ‘Great Society’, an ambitious programme of state expansion and social reform he had announced to great fanfare in May 1964. In his meetings with South Vietnamese leaders Thieu and Ky in 1966, even during the gruelling military effort, he emphasised the opportunity and need for social reform in Vietnam, meaning the economic empowerment and enfranchisement of the civilian population. One of Johnson’s most hawkish advisers, Walt Rostow, was also a theorist and promoter of economic modernisation. Intervention was laced with confident idealism.

For the US, then, the Vietnam War was a composite model of Cold War action: a military intervention designed to stop the march of Communism, shore up alliances worldwide by showing that the US could follow through on commitments, but also a bid to export the Great Society. That last goal was swept away in the tide of military developments but, just like its domestic counterpart, it was never abandoned altogether. Defeat in Vietnam thus meant the repudiation of that composite model, the heir of muscular Wilsonian internationalism. No longer would idealist grand designs at home and abroad count on the full-hearted application of hard power and all available resources. Vietnam broke that synthesis and the trauma it engendered has precluded the articulation of a new one of comparable ambition and universality. American policymakers are scrambling for a new formula, but the legacy of Vietnam, compounded by Iraq and Afghanistan, has made this axis of superpower competition an asymmetrical one. China is brimming with confidence about its global initiatives and its idealistic bid to remake the world order. In terms of vaulting idealism, the ‘rules-based order’ promoted by the US in its competition with China does not quite cut it.

In August 2021 the US and its allies withdrew chaotically from Afghanistan in scenes openly compared to the 1975 debacle in Saigon, only more harrowing still. Choosing the moment strategically, the following month China launched its ‘Global Development Initiative’, which it touted as a model of peace, stability and an assured path to modernisation. In March 2023 it followed this with the more comprehensive and ambitious ‘Global Civilisation Initiative’. It argued that the western-led rules-based order, always poised for military intervention and hampered by the colonial legacies of the West, had failed and that global governance was in dire need of reform. It promoted ‘cultural exchange’ between civilisations over formal rules, a key plank of Chinese strategy to undermine the western-led international order. China now promotes itself not only as a model to emulate but also as the leader in the recasting of the world order. It offers the kind of holistic confidence in one’s own social model, political and military might and cultural pull that came crashing down for the United States in April 1975. This asymmetry between a superpower projecting a composite vision grounded in its own history and the West’s inability to do so is a key feature of superpower competition today.

Still, you win some, you lose some. In the summer of 1975, it was the Soviet Union’s turn to be wrongfooted. They sat around the table with the US and European states on both sides of the Cold War divide and signed the Helsinki Accords, committing them to respect human rights defined as freedom of thought and religious belief. Despite KGB chief Yuri Andropov’s warnings, the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev did not do so reluctantly. He was enthusiastic. It was the crowning achievement of his ambition to be recognised as a respectable European power, especially in the wake of the bitter dispute between the USSR and China, which had erupted publicly in 1960 and brought the two states to blows on their common border in 1969. Brezhnev wanted to come closer to the West for these reasons, but also because he needed access to western technology to kickstart his stagnant economy. The West Germans, for their part, had been pushing hard for an understanding on rights that transcended the Iron Curtain because it alleviated the plight of their fellow Germans beyond the Wall and because they believed that the Soviet bloc might be reformed little by little.

Seeing them as a capitulation because of clauses respecting the territorial integrity of the USSR, the US press savaged the Accords but it was not long before the Soviet Union stepped into the mud. It imprisoned dissidents in mental institutions and was soon widely denounced for violating the agreement it had signed. As the last great wave of decolonisation came to an end, adding new voices to old assemblies, and as West German Ostpolitik shone the spotlight on the treatment of citizens in the eastern bloc, legitimacy was a precious currency. The USSR began to haemorrhage it. In the 1980s, dissidents of all kinds, from intellectuals and ministers of religion to dockworkers, began to crowd the spotlight and to hollow out the Communist regimes from within. The Soviet leadership watched helplessly as their dream of respectability within the European community of nations, which had seemed assured, now melted away. Dissidence at home was encouraged by the spectacle and, together with continued economic stagnation, gave rise to a will to reform that culminated in Gorbachev’s assumption of leadership in 1985. The impetus of reform was so strong that Gorbachev brought down the entire apparatus of Soviet rule, half-heartedly backtracking when it was too late.

This spectacle horrified the Chinese Communist leadership. As once proud Communist regimes, Poland and the USSR, presided over free elections in the spring and summer of 1989, the Chinese government cracked down brutally on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square. Hardliners in the East German Communist leadership dreamed of a ‘Chinese option’, but Gorbachev vetoed it, both privately and publicly. In July 1989 Gorbachev told the European Parliament in Strasbourg that he too wanted a peaceful and democratic Europe and effectively renounced the ‘Brezhnev doctrine’ of 1968, which held that countries would be prevented by force from leaving the Soviet orbit. In October the East German leader Erich Honecker, who had fought Gorbachev-style reforms tooth and nail, was deposed by his own party and the following month, as his successors stumbled over their own policy decisions and announcements, the Berlin Wall fell.

This sequence of events still haunts Xi Jinping. He famously said that the Soviet Union fell because ‘nobody was man enough to resist’. As well as learning the strictures and slogans of Xi Jinping Thought, Chinese officials are required to watch a multi-part documentary on the end of the USSR. For Xi and the current Chinese leadership, there is a direct line from the Helsinki Accords of 1975 to the fall of the USSR. This is why another key plank of Chinese world order strategy is to redefine human rights. Instead of the liberal understanding of rights as procedural and permissive – such as guarantees against arbitrary arrest, due process of law with an impartial judiciary and freedom of speech and assembly – China wants human rights defined in terms of material welfare and economic advancement. This has been a goal of Chinese policy since the Bandung Conference of 1955, but it has recently redoubled its efforts, pushing hard for this at the UN and it is a notion at the heart of all its programmatic documents. In this sense the security of the regime in Beijing and its vision for world order converge neatly.

This quest to redefine human rights links to another plank of Chinese world order strategy, the one which is most ambitious and yet least understood in the West. It, too, is rooted in the events of 1975. When I was growing up in Mexico, my Communist grandfather, Carlos, regaled me with stories about the Cold War. One of the most animated I remember was about the Angolan Civil War. After a long struggle for independence from Portugal, several pugnacious factions lined up to take over the government of the newly independent state. One such group, the MPLA, was led by Agostinho Neto and backed by Cuba and the Soviet Union. The other groups, UNITA, led by Jonas Savimbi, and the FNLA, were backed by the United States and South Africa. My grandfather enthusiastically recounted how he was listening to the radio soon after the Angolan Civil War broke out in November 1975 and that, accustomed to hearing the Portuguese command ‘fogo!’, meaning ‘fire!’, he suddenly heard the Spanish command ‘fuego!’, meaning that the Cubans had arrived. The Angolan war had acquired a global dimension. The Cubans backed Neto to the hilt, even against the doubts and grumbles of the Soviets, and made a serious military contribution to the war effort of the MPLA.

The decision to back the Angolan Marxists was controversial among the Soviet leadership, but the temptation to try out new military hardware and to take advantage of a situation in which the US found itself on the back foot proved too great. The factions in the Soviet Politburo fought it out at a time when Brezhnev was ailing and largely out of action. On the US side, the decision to back UNITA was largely in the hands of Henry Kissinger, who was determined to stop the rot. This relative absence of the top leadership was significant because détente, as the diplomatic system of restraint and management of Cold War tensions was known, was very much centred on summits between the top leaders. While the Angolan opportunity and Cuban exuberance caught them by surprise, this was far from the first Soviet initiative in Africa. Among other moves, in 1960, the Soviets set up the Lumumba University for students from Africa, Asia and Latin America, named in honour of the left-wing Congolese prime minister murdered with the connivance of the Belgians that year.

The Angolan Civil War quickly drew in South African forces. Watching from afar, Mao Zedong and the Chinese leadership saw a need to defeat its bitter rival, the Soviet Union, in Africa. Since Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972, the US and China had reached an understanding regarding their common adversary. All this meant that China found itself on the same side as the US, the Angolan anti-MPLA rebels and Apartheid South Africa. China sent instructors to help the FNLA, which the Cubans defeated. ‘Congratulations on defeating the racist and Maoist forces’, was a message sent to the Cuban leadership by the Soviet Union in early 1976, in reference to the latter’s military effort in Angola. The Soviets basked in the moral authority conferred by such successes and by taking a stand against what many viewed as the neo-colonial stance of the western powers. The International Department of the Central Committee under Boris Ponomarev, opposed to the Soviet Foreign Ministry under Andrei Gromyko, largely called the shots. It was one of the high points of what in Marxist parlance is called ‘internationalism’; that is, helping foreign comrades come to power or stay firmly in the saddle.

For a time, it seemed as if Saigon and Angola heralded a global shift in favour of the Soviet Union. The effects of Helsinki had yet to be felt and Afghanistan had yet to be invaded by the Soviets. A crucial part of that shift was the moral prestige gained in much of what was then known as the ‘Third World’ and even in the West, by the Cuban-Soviet fight for freedom and against Apartheid South Africa. The war, and much of that prestige, simmered on until the late 1980s, with Cubans fighting South Africans at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1987. All the while, China had aided the other side. Yet in one of the most astonishing moves of the present time, China is now recognised as the only external partner of a group known as the ‘Former Southern African Liberation Movements’. That historical somersault is only the beginning. In September of this year, Xi Jinping announced the opening of 25 political schools in Africa, to supplement the Nyerere Leadership School opened in Tanzania in 2022. This is the final plank of China’s historically inflected world order strategy.

Though Xi has often focused on the collapse of the USSR, what western observers have failed to note is that he is also focused on the partial successes of the Soviets. The 25 schools are part of what we might call a ‘cohort strategy’. Xi aims to train the leadership cohorts of multiple African countries in a bid to upgrade the Lumumba University idea. Such training will create emotional and intellectual bonds that transcend material incentives, much as the South African ANC has with Russia to this day. After his release from prison in 1990, one of the first people Nelson Mandela thanked was Cuba’s leader Fidel Castro. China wants to upgrade and upscale the Soviet strategy. Ideological partnerships will make it easier to carry new definitions of human rights and, building on that, to remake the international order. Today, China is fighting for control of the South China Sea. One of the obstacles it faces is an international tribunal ruling in 2016 that awarded key coastal areas to the Philippines. With the aid of new ideological partnerships and the ‘civilisational exchange’ it is promoting in the absence of a western counterpart, it may one day bring enough allies to the table to issue tribunal rulings more to its liking.