Domino theory

• 1. Origins And Early History

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  In 1945, the Soviet Union brought most of the countries of eastern Europe and Central Europe into its influence as part of the post-World War II new settlement. This shift prompted Winston Churchill to declare in a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri that an iron curtain had descended across the continent. Following the Iran crisis of 1946, Harry S. Truman declared what became known as the Truman Doctrine in 1947. He promised to contribute financial aid to the Greek government during its Civil War and to Turkey following World War II. The hope was that this would impede the advancement of Communism into Western Europe. Later that year, diplomat George Kennan wrote an article in Foreign Affairs magazine that became known as the X Article. It first articulated the policy of containment, arguing that the further spread of Communism to countries outside a buffer zone around the USSR was unacceptable. Kennan also helped create the Marshall Plan, which began in 1947 to give aid to the countries of Western Europe. The plan aimed to keep them from falling under Soviet domination. In 1949, a Communist-backed government led by Mao Zedong overthrew the earlier government of China. The People's Liberation Army defeated the Nationalist Republican Government of China after the Chinese Civil War ended. Two Chinas were formed: mainland Communist China and Nationalist China Taiwan. The takeover by Communists of the world's most populous nation was seen in the West as a great strategic loss. This prompted the popular question at the time, Who lost China? Korea had also partially fallen under Soviet domination at the end of World War II. It split from the south of the 38th parallel where U.S. forces subsequently moved into. By 1948, Korea was split into two regions with separate governments. Neither side accepted the border as permanent. Fighting broke out between Communists and Republicans in 1950. Troops from China joined on the Communists' side while United States and 15 allied countries joined on the Republicans' side. The Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice that left Korea divided into two nations.

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• 2. Eisenhower And Indochina

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  U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower described the theory during a news conference on the 7th of April 1954 when referring to communism in Indochina. He stated that if one country fell, neighboring countries would follow like dominoes. In May 1954, the Viet Minh, a Communist and nationalist army, defeated French troops in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. They took control of what became North Vietnam. This caused the French to fully withdraw from the region then known as French Indochina. The regions were then divided into four independent countries: North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos after a deal brokered at the 1954 Geneva Conference. This would give them a geographical and economic strategic advantage. It would make Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand the front-line defensive states. The loss of regions traditionally within the vital regional trading area of countries like Japan would encourage the front-line countries to compromise politically with communism. Eisenhower's deep belief in the domino theory in Asia heightened the perceived costs for the United States of pursuing multilateralism. Multifaceted events included the 1949 victory of the Chinese Communist Party, the June 1950 North Korean invasion, the 1954 Quemoy offshore island crisis, and the conflict in Indochina. These constituted a broad-based challenge not only for one or two countries but for the entire Asian continent and Pacific. General Douglas MacArthur commented that victory is a strong magnet in the East. Eisenhower did not suggest a generalized domino theory as others did afterward. He focused on the specific situation and conditions within Southeast Asia at the time.

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• 3. Vietnam War Justification

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  When John Kennedy came into office as president in 1961, communist-led movements were gaining ground in those countries. The Pathet Lao in Laos and the Viet Cong in South Vietnam were active threats. The Kennedy administration feared that if either Laos or South Vietnam were to fall to communism, this would be the first in a string of dominoes. In September 1963, Kennedy was asked if he had any reason to doubt the so-called domino theory. He replied that he believed it because China loomed so high just beyond the frontiers. If South Vietnam went, it would give them an improved geographic position for a guerrilla assault on Malaya. It would also give the impression that the wave of the future in southeast Asia was China and the Communists. During the summer of 1963, Buddhists protested about the harsh treatment they were receiving under the Diem government of South Vietnam. Such actions made it difficult for the Kennedy administration's strong support for President Diem. President Kennedy was in a tenuous position trying to contain Communism in Southeast Asia while supporting an anti-Communist government not popular with its domestic citizens. In February 1965, President Johnson made a strong statement of the domino theory. He said if they take South Vietnam, they take Thailand, they take Indonesia, they take Burma, they come right on back to the Philippines. This connotes a strong magnetic force to give in to communist control.

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• 4. Proponents And Evidence

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  The primary evidence for the domino theory is the spread of communist rule in three Southeast Asian countries in 1975 following the communist takeover of Vietnam. South Vietnam fell to the Viet Cong, Laos to the Pathet Lao, and Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge. Before they finished taking Vietnam prior to the 1950s, the communist campaigns did not succeed in Southeast Asia. Note the Malayan Emergency, the Hukbalahap Rebellion in the Philippines, and the increasing involvement with Communists by Sukarno of Indonesia from the late 1950s until he was deposed in 1967. All of these were unsuccessful Communist attempts to take over Southeast Asian countries which stalled when communist forces were still focused in Vietnam. Walt Whitman Rostow and then Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew argued that U.S. intervention prevented a wider domino effect. Meeting with President Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger in 1975, Lee Kuan Yew argued there is a tendency in the U.S. Congress not to want to export jobs. He stated we have to have the jobs if we are to stop Communism. If we stop this process, it will do more harm than you can every repair with aid. McGeorge Bundy argued that prospects for a domino effect were weakened in 1965 when the Indonesian Communist Party was destroyed via death squads in the Indonesian genocide. Linguist and political theorist Noam Chomsky wrote that he believes the domino theory is roughly accurate. He noted that communist and socialist movements became popular in poorer countries because they brought economic improvements to those countries in which they took power.

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• 5. Critics And Retrospective Analysis

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  In a memorandum sent to CIA Director John McCone on the 9th of June 1964, the Board of National Estimates generally discounted the idea of the domino theory as applied to Vietnam. In the spring of 1995, despite having been a strong proponent during his time in office, former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said he believed the domino theory to have been a mistake. He stated I think we were wrong. He did not believe that Vietnam was that important to the communists. He also did not believe that its loss would have led to Communist control of Asia. Professor Tran Chung Ngoc, an overseas Vietnamese living in the US, said the US does not have any plausible reason to intervene in Vietnam. She described it as using power over justice giving itself the right to intervene anywhere that America wants. The United States intervention in Vietnam regardless of public opinion and international law was seen by critics as unjustified aggression against a small poor undeveloped country that does not have any ability to do anything that could harm America. Critics argued that the theory failed regionally but created a global wave where communist or socialist regimes came to power in Benin Ethiopia Guinea-Bissau Madagascar Cape Verde Mozambique Angola Afghanistan Grenada and Nicaragua during the 1970s.

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• 6. Global Applications Beyond Asia

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  Michael Lind has argued that though the domino theory failed regionally there was a global wave as communist or socialist regimes came to power in countries from Mozambique to Iran to Nicaragua during the 1970s. The global interpretation of the domino effect relies heavily upon the prestige interpretation of the theory. Success of Communist revolutions in some countries contributed morale and rhetorical support even if they did not provide material support to revolutionary forces in other countries. In this vein Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara wrote an essay the Message to the Tricontinental in 1967 calling for two three many Vietnams across the world. Historian Max Boot wrote that in the late 1970s America's enemies seized power in countries from Mozambique to Iran to Nicaragua. American hostages were seized aboard the SS Mayaguez off Cambodia and in Tehran. The Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan. There is no obvious connection with the Vietnam War but there is little doubt that the defeat of a superpower encouraged our enemies to undertake acts of aggression that they might otherwise have shied away from. In addition this theory can be further bolstered by the rise in terrorist incidents by left-wing terrorist groups in Western Europe funded in part by Communist governments between the 1960s and 1980s. In Italy this includes the kidnapping and assassination of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro and the kidnapping of former US Brigadier General James L. Dozier by the Red Brigades.

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• 7. Modern Political Parallels

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  Some foreign-policy analysts in the United States have referred to the potential spread both of Islamic theocracy and of liberal democracy in the Middle East as two different possibilities for a domino-theory scenario. During the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 to 1988 the United States and other western nations supported Ba'athist Iraq fearing the spread of Iran's radical theocracy throughout the region. In the 2003 invasion of Iraq some neoconservatives argued that when a democratic government is implemented it would then help spread democracy and liberalism across the Middle East. This has been referred to as a reverse domino theory or a democratic domino theory so called because its effects are considered positive not negative by Western democratic states. Russian analysis of a perceived pattern of pro-democratic movements in the post-Soviet era resulted in Vladimir Putin's domino theory of colour revolutions reiterated by other siloviki and found in military and national security doctrines. Some views of successive Russian military interventions in Georgia in 2008 in Kazakhstan 2022 and in Ukraine 2014 onwards postulate a domino theory whereby Putin might expand Russian influence in eastern and central Europe. A 2011 political cartoon by Carlos Latuff applied domino theory imagery to the Arab Spring depicting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak as the next to fall after the Tunisian revolution forced President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to flee the country.

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