Domino Theory

The domino theory was an important component of the U.S. Cold War geopolitical model of the world, which divided the world into three parts: the First World (the West), the Second World (communist states), and the Third World (colonies and newly independent states). Proponents of the domino theory argued that the loss of one [Page 787]country in the First or Third World to communist control would trigger the loss of its neighboring countries to communism.

While the origins of the concept have been traced to early in the 20th century, the domino theory emerged in full force in U.S. foreign policy circles in the aftermath of World War II. The concept was advanced in 1947 both by the former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, William Bullitt, who warned of communism advancing out of the USSR and sweeping over the world, and President Truman's Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, who warned that a communist victory in Greece would lead to communism sweeping through Africa and Western Europe.

The domino analogy was first used in 1954 by U.S. Admiral Arthur Radford to justify his call for using nuclear weapons in support of French attempts to hold Indochina. President Eisenhower used the term domino that year to argue for U.S. intervention, arguing that “the loss of Indochina will cause the fall of southeast Asia like a set of dominoes” (quoted in O'Sullivan, 1982, p. 58). The domino theory reached its highpoint in U.S. foreign policy circles in the 1960s, when it helped guide the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. That escalation was based on a belief that if South Vietnam fell to the communists, then the rest of southeast Asia would fall in quick succession, with potential consequences beyond.

The domino theory continued to be used to convince the American public of the importance of containing communism into the 1980s. For example, the Reagan administration sold its support of the contra rebels fighting the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua to the American public in part by arguing that the United States had to defeat the Sandinistas because if left unchecked, communism would spread throughout Central America and Mexico, bringing it to the Texas-Mexico border.

Throughout the Cold War, the domino theory suggested that one communist victory in some far-flung part of the world would lead to a series of victories in neighboring countries. Through this metaphor, distant events could be linked back home. Thus, intervention in southeast Asia in the 1960s and in Central America in the 1980s was portrayed as necessary because once countries in southeast Asia and Central America “fell,” then, like a row of falling dominoes, communist forces would ultimately continue until they reached American soil.

However, over time, the domino theory has been discredited, both empirically and theoretically. Attempts to demonstrate the domino theory in action have fallen short, and critics have argued that the domino theory's mechanistic approach to the fall of countries ignores the vast differences and complexities among them. Despite the fact that the domino theory has been thoroughly discredited, it is still invoked by some today, for example, to predict the spread of terrorist activity.

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