Domino Theory

THE DOMINO THEORY states that if one vital country in a region falls to an expansionist negative philosophy, then other countries in the region similarly situated and similarly structured would fall victim to the same philosophy, either through force or through influence of example. In its pure form, the negative philosophy is communism but in variants it can be socialism or theocratic Islam, The theory was used as a rationale for American interventions, including most disastrously the intervention in the Vietnam War. After World War II, the geopolitical situation of an already shaky alliance between the Western capitalist democracies and the communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics fell apart as the Soviets sought to establish a buffer zone of satellite states and the UNITED STATES asserted the rights of all nations to independence in a postcolonial world. Each side accused the other of starting the Cold War, and the world quickly polarized as each camp took an “either against us or with us” attitude and enforced it through alliances, such as the Soviet bloc Warsaw Pact and the U.S.-led NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION (NATO). Battling monoliths faced each other across the Iron Curtain in a Cold War where none was allowed to be neutral.

The West definitely feared communism, as it had since the Russian Revolution had generated Red Berlin and America’s red scare back in the aftermath of World War I. The communists had been active in the intervening years, notably in SPAIN, and there were examples where briefly democratic countries became communist as the map of Europe turned “red” after World War II. The U.S. consensus was that all communist movements were part of the communist international, puppets of the Kremlin. Communism was a monolith, not a an idea, like democracy, that might arise in a nation independently of either the United States or the Soviet Union.