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 U.S. 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?" The United States subsequently ended diplomatic relations with the newly founded People's Republic of China in response to the communist takeover in 1949.
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. By 1948, as a result of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the U.S., 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 U.S. 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." 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." 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."
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 U.S. 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."
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. 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.
Criticism of the domino theory In a memorandum sent to
CIA Director John McCone on 9 June 1964, the Board of National Estimates generally discounted the idea of the domino theory as applied to Vietnam: In the spring of 1995, despite having been a strong proponent of it during his time in office, former US
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said he believed the domino theory to have been a mistake. "I think we were wrong. I do not believe that Vietnam was that important to the communists. I don't believe that its loss would have led – it didn't lead – to Communist control of Asia." 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. Therefore, the US intervention in Vietnam regardless of public opinion and international law is "using power over justice", giving itself the right to intervene anywhere that America wants." == Significance of the domino theory==