Domino theory

• 1. Introduction

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  The domino theory began as a casual image offered at a news conference on the 7th of April 1954. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had been asked about communism in Indochina. He answered by describing a row of dominoes set on end. Knock over the first, he said, and the last is certain to go over very quickly. He called this the "falling domino" principle and warned that it could set off a disintegration with enormous consequences.

  From the 1950s to the 1980s, the picture proved easy to hold in the mind. A country that came under communist influence, it suggested, would pull its neighbors along. Successive American administrations used that logic to justify intervention around the world.

  Where did the idea come from before Eisenhower gave it a shape? Why did later presidents treat it as settled fact? What did its defenders point to as proof, and why did one of its strongest champions decide he had been wrong? And did a theory built for one corner of Asia ever stay there?

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• 2. Containment Before the Dominoes

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  In 1946, Winston Churchill stood at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, and gave Europe's new division a name. "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an 'Iron Curtain' has descended across the Continent." The year before, the Soviet Union had drawn most of eastern and central Europe into its influence. Churchill listed Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia among the capitals now behind that line.

  Harry S. Truman answered in 1947 with what became the Truman Doctrine. Following the Iran crisis of 1946, he promised financial aid to the Greek government, then fighting a civil war, and to Turkey. The hope was to block communism's advance into Western Europe. Truman is the first figure credited with proposing the domino theory, which he used to justify sending aid to those two countries.

  Later in 1947, the diplomat George Kennan published an article in Foreign Affairs magazine that became known as the "X Article". It laid out the policy of containment. Kennan held that communism spreading beyond a buffer zone around the USSR was unacceptable, even if voters chose it. He also helped shape the Marshall Plan, which began that year and sent aid to Western Europe, Greece and Turkey.

  In 1949, Mao Zedong's Communist-backed government overthrew the earlier government of China. The People's Liberation Army had defeated the Nationalist Republican Government in the Chinese Civil War, which ran from 1927 to 1949. Two Chinas now existed: the mainland People's Republic and the Republic of China on Taiwan. In the West, losing the world's most populous nation prompted the question "Who lost China?" The United States ended diplomatic relations and did not restore them until President Nixon's visit in 1972.

  Korea delivered the next jolt. At the end of World War II it had split at the 38th parallel. The north fell under Soviet domination, and American forces moved into the south. By 1948 two governments each claimed to be the legitimate Korea. Fighting broke out in 1950, drawing in Chinese troops on the Communist side and the United States plus 15 allied countries on the other. An armistice in 1953 left two nations, though the conflict has never officially ended. Mao's choice to fight was a direct challenge to the strongest anti-Communist power, as the Communist bloc saw it. His own regime was still consolidating.

  One analysis of Eisenhower's thinking stresses how these shocks piled up. It cites the 1949 victory, the June 1950 North Korean invasion, the 1954 Quemoy offshore island crisis and the conflict in Indochina. Together they looked like a challenge to the whole Asian continent and the Pacific. That raised the perceived cost to the United States of pursuing multilateralism. General Douglas MacArthur had put the mood in a phrase: "victory is a strong magnet in the East."

  Indochina, the last item on that list, was about to produce a battlefield result that redrew the map.

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• 3. Vietnam and the Presidents

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  In May 1954, the Viet Minh, a Communist and nationalist army, defeated French troops at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. The victory gave it control of what became North Vietnam. France, which had already begun pulling out, now withdrew fully from French Indochina. A truce brokered at the 1954 Geneva Conference ended the First Indochina War. The region was divided into four independent countries: North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

  Eisenhower popularized the domino theory by applying it to Indochina as the key to Southeast Asia during that war. His version was narrow. It described one region at one moment, and he did not propose the generalized theory that others built afterward. The fear was economic as well as military. Losing areas within Japan's traditional trading zone would push Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand, the front-line states, toward compromise with communism.

  When John Kennedy took office in 1961, the Pathet Lao in Laos and the Viet Cong in South Vietnam were gaining ground. His administration feared that if either country fell, it would be the first in a string of dominoes. In September 1963 a reporter asked whether he had any reason to doubt the theory. His answer began, "No, I believe it. I believe it." He explained that China "is so large, looms so high just beyond the frontiers". A collapse in South Vietnam would improve its position for a guerrilla assault on Malaya. It would also suggest that China and the Communists were the future of the region.

  In the summer of 1963, Buddhists in South Vietnam protested the harsh treatment they received under the Diem government. The protests left Kennedy in a tenuous position. He wanted to contain communism, yet he was backing an anti-Communist government that was unpopular with its own citizens. Some of its acts were objectionable to the American public.

  In February 1965, President Johnson made the strongest statement of the idea. "If they take South Vietnam, they take Thailand, they take Indonesia, they take Burma, they come right on back to the Philippines." The Kennedy and Johnson administrations both leaned on the theory as a key argument for deepening American involvement in the Vietnam War. Not one of the four countries on Johnson's list was where supporters later looked for proof.

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• 4. Evidence for the Theory

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  The year 1975 supplies the main evidence cited by supporters. After the communist takeover of Vietnam, communist rule spread to three Southeast Asian countries. South Vietnam fell to the Viet Cong, Laos to the Pathet Lao, and Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge. Supporters add that these movements were linked. The Pathet Lao and Khmer Rouge both began as parts of the Vietminh, and Hanoi backed both alongside the Viet Cong. Outside help flowed too. China supplied the Viet Minh and later the North Vietnamese army with troops and supplies, while the Soviet Union sent tanks and heavy weapons.

  Before that, the communist record elsewhere in the region was one of failure. Supporters point to the Malayan Emergency and the Hukbalahap Rebellion in the Philippines. They also cite Sukarno of Indonesia, who grew closer to Communists from the late 1950s until he was deposed in 1967. All of these efforts stalled while communist forces stayed focused on Vietnam. The Soviet Union had heavily supplied Sukarno with military equipment and advisors from the time of Guided Democracy. That aid peaked during and after the 1958 civil war in Sumatra. Robert Grainger Thompson argued that American involvement even turned people inside communist nations toward the West.

  Walt Whitman Rostow and Lee Kuan Yew, then Prime Minister of Singapore, argued that American intervention in Indochina bought time. It let the nations of ASEAN consolidate and grow economically, which prevented a wider domino effect. Lee made a practical case when he met President Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger in 1975. Congress, he said, was reluctant to export jobs, but the region needed jobs to stop communism. He urged them: "Don't cut off imports from Southeast Asia."

  Noam Chomsky, a linguist and political theorist, wrote that the theory was roughly accurate, but for a different reason. In his view, communist and socialist movements were popular in poor countries because they brought economic improvements. That is why, he wrote, the United States worked so hard to suppress "people's movements". He named Chile, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Laos, Grenada, El Salvador and Guatemala. "The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example." He called this the "threat of a good example."

  McGeorge Bundy argued that the odds of a domino effect, high in the 1950s and early 1960s, dropped in 1965. That year the Indonesian Communist Party was destroyed by death squads in what is called the Indonesian genocide. Proponents go further. They believe the containment effort of that period led to the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

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• 5. Doubts From Inside

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  On the 9th of June 1964, the Board of National Estimates sent a memorandum to CIA Director John McCone. It largely discounted the theory for Vietnam and weighed the possible loss of South Vietnam and Laos. The board said it did not believe that loss would be followed by "the rapid, successive communization of the other states of the Far East." The board expected no shock wave passing from one nation to the next. It expected a simultaneous, direct effect on every Far Eastern country. Cambodia aside, it judged that no nation in the area would quickly succumb. Any further spread would take time, and the situation might change in ways unfavorable to the Communist cause.

  In the spring of 1995, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara reversed himself. He had been a strong proponent while in office. Now he said, "I think we were wrong." He added that he did not believe Vietnam had been that important to the communists. Its loss, he said, did not lead to Communist control of Asia.

  Professor Tran Chung Ngoc, an overseas Vietnamese living in the United States, attacked the premise from another side. He argued that America had no plausible reason to intervene in Vietnam, a small, poor, undeveloped country unable to harm it. In his view, intervening regardless of public opinion and international law was "using power over justice". It gave America the right, as he put it, to intervene anywhere it wanted.

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• 6. Alliances and Dependency

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  Victor Cha reads the domino theory through the alliances it produced. In his account the United States built asymmetrical bilateral alliances with the Republic of Korea, the Republic of China and Japan. The aim was "not just to contain but also constrain" potential rogue alliances. The worry was that such partners might drag Washington into wider wars or trigger a domino effect. Cha calls the combined danger of rogue alliances and falling dominoes a "dreaded entrapment scenario".

  With Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, Washington fashioned what Cha calls "deep, tight bilateral alliances". Their purpose was to keep those partners' use of force under American control. They also made the partners materially and politically dependent on the United States.

  A related reading ties the theory to path dependency. Read that way, the theory describes how one early collapse narrows the decisions open to others later. A small cause can carry long-term consequences much larger than itself. In the 1970s, a very different map of regimes would test that idea far from Asia.

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• 7. Dominoes Beyond Asia

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  Michael Lind concedes that the domino theory failed in Southeast Asia but argues that a global wave followed anyway. In the 1970s, communist or socialist regimes came to power in Benin, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Angola, Afghanistan, Grenada and Nicaragua. This reading leans on the "prestige" version of the theory. Revolutionary success in one country gave morale and rhetorical support to others, even without material help.

  Che Guevara had already urged this in 1967. The Argentine revolutionary's essay "Message to the Tricontinental" called for "two, three... many Vietnams" across the world. Historian Max Boot later looked back at the late 1970s. America's enemies seized power from Mozambique to Iran to Nicaragua. American hostages were taken aboard the SS Mayaguez off Cambodia and in Tehran, and the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan. Boot saw no obvious link to Vietnam, yet had little doubt that a superpower's defeat emboldened aggressors.

  Proponents add a European chapter. Left-wing terrorist groups grew more active in Western Europe between the 1960s and 1980s, funded in part by communist governments. In Italy the Red Brigades kidnapped and assassinated former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. They also kidnapped US Brigadier General James L. Dozier. West Germany had the Red Army Faction, and in the Far East the Japanese Red Army carried out similar acts. All of them worked with Arab and Palestinian terrorists, backed, like the Red Brigades, by the Soviet Bloc.

  In the 1977 Frost/Nixon interviews, Richard Nixon defended the destabilization of Salvador Allende's Chile on domino grounds. Borrowing a metaphor he had heard, he said a communist Chile and Cuba would make a "red sandwich" trapping Latin America between them. The Reagan administration returned to the theory in the 1980s to justify interventions in Central America and the Caribbean.

  Ian Smith, former prime minister of Rhodesia, saw the same pattern in Africa. His memoirs called the rise of left-wing authoritarian governments during decolonization "the communists' domino tactic". He cited pro-communist governments in Tanzania from 1961 to 1964 and Zambia in 1964. Then came explicitly Marxist-Leninist ones in Angola and Mozambique in 1975. He called it "the insidious encroachment of Soviet imperialism down the continent." In his telling, the chain ended in 1980 with Rhodesia itself.

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• 8. New Dominoes

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  The Iran-Iraq War, which ran from 1980 to 1988, shows the metaphor switching targets. The United States and other Western nations backed Ba'athist Iraq. They feared Iran's radical theocracy would spread through the region. Some American foreign-policy analysts have described the Middle East as holding two domino possibilities: the spread of Islamic theocracy and the spread of liberal democracy.

  The second possibility drove arguments around the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Some neoconservatives argued that once a democratic government took hold there, it would help spread democracy and liberalism across the Middle East. It has been called a "reverse domino theory" or a "democratic domino theory", because Western democracies regard its effects as positive.

  Russia has its own version. Analysts describe a perceived pattern of pro-democratic movements in the post-Soviet era that led Vladimir Putin to a "domino theory of colour revolutions". Other members of the siloviki, Russia's security establishment, have repeated it, and it appears in military and national security doctrines. Some read Russian interventions in Georgia in 2008, Ukraine from 2014 onwards and Kazakhstan in 2022 as following domino logic. On that view, Putin might expand Russian influence across eastern and central Europe. Ukraine, where intervention is dated from 2014 onwards, keeps that list open.

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