The domino theory is a geopolitical theory which posits that changes in the political structure of one country tend to spread to neighboring countries in a domino effect. It was prominent in the United States from the 1950s to the 1980s in the context of the Cold War, suggesting that if one country in a region came under the influence of communism, then the surrounding countries would follow. It was used by successive United States administrations during the Cold War as justification for American intervention around the world. US President Dwight D. Eisenhower described the theory during a news conference on April 7, 1954, when referring to communism in Indochina as follows:
Moreover, Eisenhower's deep belief in the domino theory in Asia heightened the "perceived costs for the United States of pursuing multilateralism" because of multifaceted events including 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 constituted a broad-based challenge not only for one or two countries, but for the entire Asian continent and Pacific." This connotes a strong magnetic force to give in to communist control, and aligns with the comment by General Douglas MacArthur that "victory is a strong magnet in the East."Extracts of Memorandum of Conversation by Mr. W. Averell Harriman, Special Assistant to the President, with General MacArthur in Tokyo, August 6 and 8, 1950, Top Secret, August 20, 1950, in FRUS, 1950, Vol. 7: Korea, p. 544.
History During 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, prompting Winston Churchill to declare in a speech in 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri that:
Following the Iran crisis of 1946, Harry S. Truman declared what became known as the Truman Doctrine in 1947, promising to contribute financial aid to the Greek government during its Civil War and to Turkey following World War II, in the hope 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", which first articulated the policy of containment, arguing that the further spread of Communism to countries outside a "buffer zone" around the USSR, even if it happened via democratic elections, was unacceptable and a threat to US national security. Kennan was also involved, along with others in the Truman administration, in creating the Marshall Plan, which also began in 1947, to give aid to the countries of Western Europe (along with Greece and Turkey), in large part with the hope of keeping them from falling under Soviet domination.
In 1949, a Communist-backed government, led by Mao Zedong, overthrew the earlier government of China (officially Mao's regime was called the People's Republic of China). The new government was established after the People's Liberation Army defeated the Nationalist Republican Government of China in the aftermath of the Chinese Civil War (1927-1949). Two Chinas were formed – mainland "Communist China" (People's Republic of China) and 'Nationalist China' Taiwan (Republic of China). The takeover by Communists of the world's most populous nation was seen in the West as a great strategic loss, prompting the popular question at the time, "Who lost China?"Rogue Regimes: Terrorism and Proliferation, pg. 230, Raymond Tanter, Macmillan, 1999 The United States subsequently ended diplomatic relations with the newly founded People's Republic of China in response to the communist takeover in 1949. The United States and communist China did not re-instate diplomatic relations again until under president Nixon's visit in 1972.
Korea had also partially fallen under Soviet domination at the end of World War II, split from the south of the 38th parallel where US forces subsequently moved into. By 1948, as a result of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the US, Korea was split into two regions, with separate governments, each claiming to be the legitimate government of Korea, and neither side accepting the border as permanent. In 1950, fighting broke out between Communists and Republicans that soon involved troops from China (on the Communists' side), and the United States and 15 allied countries (on the Republicans' side). Though the Korean conflict has not officially ended, the Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice that left Korea divided into two nations, North Korea and South Korea. Mao Zedong's decision to take on the US in the Korean War was a direct attempt to confront what the Communist Bloc viewed as the strongest anti-Communist power in the world, undertaken at a time when the Chinese Communist regime was still consolidating its own power after winning the Chinese Civil War.
The first figure to propose the domino theory was President Harry S. Truman in the 1940s, where he introduced the theory in order to "justify sending military aid to Greece and Turkey." However, the domino theory was popularized by President Dwight D. Eisenhower when he applied it to Indochina as the key to Southeast Asia during the First Indochina War. Moreover, the domino theory was utilized as one of the key arguments in the "Kennedy and Johnson administrations during the 1960s to justify increasing American military involvement in the Vietnam War."
In May 1954, the Viet Minh, a Communist and nationalist army, defeated French troops in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and took control of what became North Vietnam. This caused the French to fully withdraw from the region then known as French Indochina, a process they had begun earlier. The regions were then divided into four independent countries (North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) after a deal and truce was brokered at the 1954 Geneva Conference to end the First Indochina War.
This would give them a geographical and economic strategic advantage, and 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 domino theory of 1954 was a specific description of the situation and conditions within Southeast Asia at the time, and he did not suggest a generalized domino theory as others did afterward.
When John Kennedy came into office as president in 1961, communist-led movements, the Pathet Lao in Laos and the Viet Cong in South Vietnam, were gaining ground in those countries. 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, "have you had any reason to doubt this so-called 'domino theory,' that if South Viet-Nam falls, the rest of southeast Asia will go behind it?" He replied, "No, I believe it. I believe it. I think that the struggle is close enough. China is so large, looms so high just beyond the frontiers, that if South Viet-Nam went, it would not only give them an improved geographic position for a guerrilla assault on Malaya, but would also give the impression that the wave of the future in southeast Asia was China and the Communists. So I believe it."Transcript of Broadcast on NBC's "Huntley-Brinkley Report," September 9, 1963 (The American Presidency Project)
During the summer of 1963, Buddhists protested about the harsh treatment they were receiving under the Diem government of South Vietnam. Such actions of the South Vietnamese government 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, but on the other hand, supporting an anti-Communist government that was not popular with its domestic citizens and was guilty of acts objectionable to the American public.
In February 1965, President Johnson made a strong statement of the domino theory: "If they take South Vietnam, they take Thailand, they take Indonesia, they take Burma, they come right on back to the Philippines."Michael R. Beschloss, ed., Reaching for Glory: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1964-1965 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), pp. 181-82.
Arguments in favor of the domino theory 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 (by the Viet Cong), Laos (by the Pathet Lao), and Cambodia (by the Khmer Rouge). It can further be argued that 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, while Robert Grainger Thompson argued that US involvement even turned those within Communist nations toward the West.
Walt Whitman Rostow and the then Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew have argued that the US intervention in Indochina, by giving the nations of ASEAN time to consolidate and engage in economic growth, prevented a wider domino effect. Meeting with President Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger in 1975, Lee Kuan Yew argued that "there is a tendency in the U.S. Congress not to want to export jobs. But we have to have the jobs if we are to stop Communism. We have done that, moving from simple to more complex skilled labor. If we stop this process, it will do more harm than you can every [sic] repair with aid. Don't cut off imports from Southeast Asia."Ford, Kissinger, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew - May 8, 1975 (Gerald Ford Library), pg. 7
McGeorge Bundy argued that the prospects for a domino effect, though high in the 1950s and early 1960s, were weakened in 1965 when the Indonesian Communist Party was destroyed via death squads in the Indonesian genocide. However, proponents believe that the efforts during the containment (i.e., domino theory) period ultimately led to the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
Linguist and political theorist Noam Chomsky wrote that he believes that the domino theory is roughly accurate, writing that communist and socialist movements became popular in poorer countries because they brought economic improvements to those countries in which they took power. For this reason, he wrote, the US put so much effort into suppressing so-called "people's movements" in Chile, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Laos, Grenada, El Salvador, Guatemala, etc. "The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example. If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, 'Why not us? Chomsky refers to this as the "threat of a good example".
Some supporters of the domino theory note the history of communist governments supplying aid to communist revolutionaries in neighboring countries. For instance, China supplied the Viet Minh and later the North Vietnamese army with troops and supplies, while the Soviet Union supplied them with tanks and heavy weapons. The fact that the Pathet Lao and Khmer Rouge were both originally part of the Vietminh, not to mention Hanoi's support for both in conjunction with the Viet Cong, also give credence to the theory. The Soviet Union also heavily supplied Sukarno with military supplies and advisors from the time of the Guided Democracy in Indonesia, especially during and after the 1958 civil war in Sumatra.