The Domino Theory
7 APRIL 1954
THE DOMINO THEORY
In March 1938, (then) LCOL Dwight D. Eisenhower watched Hitler convince the Austrians to join an Anschluss (alliance) with Nazi Germany. Seven months later Hitler annexed the Sudetenland (eastern Czechoslovakia). The whole of Czechoslovakia fell in March 1939. Poland was invaded six months later, triggering WWII. The year of 1940 saw the consecutive falls of Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Norway, France, Romania, and Hungary. All this transpired while the other Axis power, Italy, took Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Egypt then invaded Greece. The result, by the time the United States entered the war, was that much of Europe languished under dictatorial fascism.
After WWII, concern over Russian Communism in eastern Europe prompted the influential American diplomat George Kennan to coin the term “containment” to describe the need to limit the spread of world Communism. Americans tended to view Communism as a monolithic threat to democracy, made no less dire with the subsequent Communist revolutions that divided China and Korea. And in 1954, during the Viet Minh’s siege of French forces at Dien Bien Phu, a Communist takeover of French Indochina (Vietnam) seemed imminent.
No doubt reminiscent of the sequential fall of nations in Europe before the war, now our 34th President, Dwight Eisenhower, called for US backing of the French in Indochina. In a press conference this day he justified the effort stating, “You have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the ‘falling domino’ principle…You have a row of dominos set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is a certainty that will go over very quickly.” He implied that should the Communists take Indochina, next to fall would be Burma, Thailand, Malaya, and Indonesia, extending perhaps even to a Communist takeover in Japan! The French did ultimately lose Indochina, while Eisenhower’s “domino theory” came to drive our involvement in Vietnam, and our foreign policy in general, for the next two decades.
Today the domino theory is suspected by some to have been an anxious exaggeration. As was shown after the US embarrassment in Vietnam, and subsequent Communist pushes in Laos, Malaya, the Philippines, Indonesia, and several African and Central American nations, Communism proved to be non-monolithic. Russian, Chinese, and other versions of Communism are disparate, even competitive at times. A world takeover by “monolithic” Communism seems a delusion today as competition between versions of Communism limit its spread. Indeed, the rise of Communism in third-world nations was likely driven more by local desires to improve economic depression than by an overarching plot for world domination.
Watch for more “Today in Naval History” 11 APR 25
CAPT James Bloom, Ret.
Eisenhower, Dwight D. “The President’s News Conference, April 7, 1954.” The American Presidency Project website. AT: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=10202, retrieved 23 February 2018.
Kennan, George. “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” Foreign Affairs, 01 July 1947, AT: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/1947-07-01/sources-soviet-conduct, retrieved 23 February 2018.
Leeson, Peter T. and Andrea M. Dean. “The Democratic Domino Theory: An Empirical Investigation.” AT: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2009.00385.x/abstract:jsessionid=28BD26109195D99094FN7E9732F8861E.f03t02, retrieved 23 February 2018.
Ward, Geoffrey C. and Ken Burns. The Vietnam War: An Intimate History. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017, p. 27.
ADDITIONAL NOTES: The word fascism comes from the Roman fasces,
a type of battle axe. The fasces became the symbol of the Roman Republic, much like the eagle is a symbol of the United States. Modern fascism got its start in WWI-era Italy with a (failed) political movement to recreate the former Roman Empire.
