Domino theory12/31/2023 ![]() A corollary to containment was the domino theory. Had Turkey fallen, then the Soviets would be able to influence the MIDDLE EAST, with Asia next. That was containment.Īccording to the theorists, containment of communism outside of Greece kept neighboring TURKEY from falling into the Soviet sphere. American involvement halted the collapse, saving Greece for the West. ![]() In 1947, GREECE was at risk, with communists in position to take another country into the opposing camp. The successful prevention of the Greek domino's fall was validation. Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower both subscribed to the idea that the only way to confront Russia was to keep it penned where it was. The only alternative was to contain communism where it existed and keep it from entering any other territory, be it free or nonaligned (a shaky category of potential candidates for coming under the American umbrella). RUSSIA had been toppling dominoes from the first day after the gunfire of World War II stopped. 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.īecause the Soviets had managed to acquire territorial control in East GERMANY, POLAND, CZECHOSLOVAKIA, ROMANIA, and BULGARIA and because communists were in power in Yugoslavia and CHINA, the United States perceived the other side as a monolith united into a single bullet aimed at the Western heart. consensus was that all communist movements were part of the communist international, puppets of the Kremlin. 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 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. Battling monoliths faced each other across the Iron Curtain in a Cold War where none was allowed to be neutral. 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). 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.Īfter 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. 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.
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