ABSTRACT
The beginnings of domino theory can be traced to William Bullit (1947), a former US ambassador to Moscow, who voiced the fear of monolithic communism emanating from its Russian power source and engulfing the world via China and Southeast Asia. Wiens (1954), a geographer, produced a more scholarly version of this justification for American intervention in Southeast Asia. The 3000 years of Han expansion southwards from the banks of the Yang-tze was compounded with the machinations of Soviet strategists, using this inexorable process as the basis for political and military assaults on the colonial powers and building a new communist empire. In the end Wiens maintained an academic ambivalence as to whether the pressure on South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma and Malaya represented the historical momentum of the Han or a new force fuelled by Soviet Russia. Asprey (1975, page 708) identifies Admiral Arthur Radford as coining the domino analogy in 1953 when he was urging a carrier based bombing strike to relieve Dien Bien Phu in a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Eisenhower took up the catchword immediately, suggesting that ‘the loss of Indochina will cause the fall of Southeast Asia like a set of dominoes’ (quoted in Asprey, 1975, page 711). The next month, when direct military intervention no longer looked attractive, Eisenhower and Dulles both denied the veracity of this picture, claiming that the rest of Asia could be held even if Indochina fell (Buttinger, 1967). So, from the outset there was doubt. The seed had,
however, been planted in the rhetoric of US officialdom, along with the impression of South Vietnam as a strategic necessity. It is around this time that the domino model made the transition from simile to theory.
