Domino theory
[2]Moreover, Eisenhower's deep belief in the domino theory in Asia heightened the "perceived costs for the United States of pursuing multilateralism"[3] 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.
[10] Kennan was also involved, along with others in the Truman administration, in creating the Marshall Plan,[11] which also began in 1947, to give aid to the countries of Western Europe (along with Greece and Turkey),[12] in large part with the hope of keeping them from falling under Soviet domination.
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?
"[16] The United States subsequently ended diplomatic relations with the newly founded People's Republic of China in response to the communist takeover in 1949.
[17] Korea had also partially fallen under Soviet domination at the end of World War II, split from the south of the 38th parallel where U.S. forces subsequently moved into.
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.
"[18] 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.
[21] 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.
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.
[26] Walt Whitman Rostow and the then Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew have argued that the U.S. intervention in Indochina, by giving the nations of ASEAN time to consolidate and engage in economic growth, prevented a wider domino effect.
[29] 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.
For this reason, he wrote, the U.S. put so much effort into suppressing so-called "people's movements" in Chile, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Laos, Grenada, El Salvador, Guatemala, etc.
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.
"[34] Professor Tran Chung Ngoc, an overseas Vietnamese living in the US, said: "The US does not have any plausible reason to intervene in Vietnam, a small, poor, undeveloped country that does not have any ability to do anything that could harm America.
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 Benin, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Angola, Afghanistan, Grenada, and Nicaragua during the 1970s.
In the 1977 Frost/Nixon interviews, Richard Nixon defended the United States' destabilization of the Salvador Allende regime in Chile on domino theory grounds.
In his memoirs, former Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith described the successive rise of authoritarian left-wing governments in Sub-Saharan Africa during decolonization as "the communists' domino tactic".
[44] 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.
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".
