Dominos are a wonderful, simple game, played across the globe for centuries. You simply match up the dotted tiles from end-to-end. Then someone realized they could be stood upright and arrayed in endless numbers. Tilt one and they begin to fall…how fun!
But in the turmoil following the end of the Second World War, a British historian, Arnold Toynbee, used it as a reference to his perceived view of what was happening in Southeast Asia.
The United States and European allies accepted it as Gospel. The result was the killing of more than a million Vietnamese and 70,000 America’s finest youth.
In 1945, a Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, declared they deserved their national freedom. It was time for their French colonial masters to go. Time for Vietnam to take its place among the nations of the world. French Indochina was no more. France said no. Ho turned to the U.S. for aid, but we said no. Then he turned to China and Russia. They were eager to help, and a bloody war ensued.
It ended in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu, when 20,000 French troops were surrounded and forced to surrender. A treaty divided the country into North and South. South Vietnam became a Republic supported by France and the United States. It would be a bulwark against the spread of Communism…i.e., the domino theory!
Truman sent weapons…Eisenhower sent more weapons and 700 military advisors. Kennedy sent more aid and more advisors, now nearly 11,000. Nothing helped! The South Vietnam government was both corrupt and inefficient, a terrible combination. The North was determined. They wanted their country reunified and foreign powers gone.
It was the depth of the Cold War. Competing superpowers…competing ideologies. Communism vs. Democracy! And, we were the United States, the most powerful country in the world. We needed to put these, still primitive, people in their place.
Enter Lyndon Johnson and his military guru, General William Westmoreland. By 1968 we had sent a ½ million men and women to live and die in the swamps and villages of a 3rd world country of questionable strategic value. And we were losing. We poisoned their fields and rivers with Agent Orange. We dropped more bombs, committed more men, and we spent nearly $1 trillion dollars that didn’t go for schools or infrastructure or health care.
Americans were outraged. 70,000 of their friends and families were dead, another 150,000 had been wounded. Four students at Kent State University were shot by National Guardsmen, demonstrating against the war.
It all ended in 1975 with the fall of Saigon and the reunification of Vietnam. America had not been invincible. It was an ignominious defeat not only on the battlefield but in the trust that Americans had in their government.
In the half-century since then, that trust continues to waver, the domino theory proved to be a cold war fiction and our penchant for foreign wars was not abated…ask the folks in Iraq and Afghanistan.