Domino Theory Quotes

While guidebooks might tell you that time collapsed here, another theory says that in Latin America, all of history coexists at once.

The common denominator in all these problems is that the world is not a line of dominoes in which each event causes exactly one event and is caused by exactly one event. The world is a tissue of causes and effects that criss and cross in tangled patterns. The embarrassments for Hume's two theories of causation (conjunction and counterfactuals) can be diagrammed as a family of networks in which the lines fan in or out or loop around, as in the diagram on the following page.

Whatever we do makes a difference," Eithnie said. "Doesn't matter how small our efforts might seem to us, it'll still make a difference." "But what about all the people who don't do anything, or who don't do anything positive? Won't their actions, or lack of actions, cancel out the good we're trying to do?" "I guess I'm thinking that it's also like dominoes. You know how when you knock one over, more and more fall, one after the other, until they all come down? (Edward) Lorenz's theory assures me that what I do Will make a difference, I can't tell how, I can't predict when or where, but it will effect a change. I just have to concentrate on maintaining that effort so that one day all the dominoes will come down in the right way.

Acheson then jumped into action with a dramatic and deliberately florid statement of what was later to be known as the "domino theory" of foreign interconnection. "We are met at Armageddon," he began: Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the East. It would also carry infection to spread through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy and France. . . . The Soviet Union was playing one of the greatest gambles in history at minimal cost. . . . We and we alone were in a position to break up this play.44

It’s funny how when bad things start happening in a series, it almost seems as if they’re all related somehow, as if each one is causing the next. I remember you talking about that one time, about what you called your Domino Catastrophe Theory. You said the universe is filled to the brim with bad things waiting to happen, not only the universe of everything but also each one of our own personal universes too. “There’s a 50–50 chance that one fuckup, no matter how small, is going to trigger another one,” you said. “And if that happens, there’s a 70–30 chance that the second one will trigger a total clusterfuck.

The second answer bypasses all the physics of gravity and domino chains and makes reference only to concepts that belong to a completely different domain of discourse. The domain of prime numbers is as remote from the physics of toppling dominos as is the physics of quarks and gluons from the Cold War’s “domino theory” of how communism would inevitably topple country after neighboring country in Southeast Asia. In both cases, the two domains of discourse are many levels apart, and one is purely local and physical, while the other is global and organizational.

He asked, "which war?" A pause. "Between the North and the South." "He says there is always war, but why are the Westerners fighting Vietnamese war?" "To give freedom." The monk shook his head, rubbed his hands over his stubbed scalp. He talked rapidly to Linh, gesturing then laughing. "That makes no sense. Sense. Why die for Vietnamese?" " Tell him.. It's complicated. Tell him it's geopolitics, the movement of communism, the Domino theory of the fall of Southeast Asia...

Whatever we do makes a difference," Eithnie said. "Doesn't matter how small our efforts might seem to us, it'll still make a difference." "But what about all the people who don't do anything, or who don't do anything positive? Won't their actions, or lack of actions, cancel out the good we're trying to do?" "I guess I'm thinking that it's also like dominoes. You know how when you knock one over, more and more fall, one after the other, until they all come down? (Edward) Lorenz's theory assures me that what I do Will make a difference, I can't tell how, I can't predict when or where, but it will effect a change. I just have to concentrate on maintaining that effort so that one day all the dominoes will come down in the right way." "To save the world," Sharleen said.

The term domino theory very simply describes what happens to our allies of we back down and let one ally be taken over by the communists because we don't want to be bothered. The enemy decides it's safe to go after others - that we represent no threat to his aggression. But even worse, our allies, no longer able to trust us, start making deals.

But military pressure was only one part of the new strategy. Global diplomacy, too, had an important role to play, as Nixon and Kissinger turned first to Russia and later to China for assistance in helping them out of the quagmire. Secret channels to the Kremlin that sidestepped the State Department, followed by a spectacular trip to Beijing and a widely celebrated Moscow summit, were employed alongside the American air force. “The objective of all these things,” Nixon said, “is to get out.” In the heyday of the Domino Theory, such moves would have been unthinkable, since all of North Vietnam’s actions were understood as being directed from Moscow, and one Communist was no different from any other Communist. But by the time Nixon and Kissinger entered the White House, with the theory, in Morgenthau’s words, “intellectually untenable,” Nixon had his own, Nixonian way of refuting the notion of monolithic Communism. In the privacy of the Oval Office he said, “No Communist trusts another Communist.” He had moved far from dominoes and the body-snatcher image of brain-dead totalitarian automatons.

All of the self-justifying explanations by the supporters of the war—selfishness, cowardice, decadence, ignorance, Communist sympathies—were excuses that failed to confront the basic challenge that the protesters (and Morgenthau too) were raising about the war, namely that the very reasons the United States had become involved in Vietnam, the Domino Theory and the doctrine of a monolithic Communism, were fundamentally false and had no application to the world as it actually existed. The real question to be answered is how “the kids” could have been right about this and the country’s political leaders and opinion makers so very wrong.

lesson is simple. Currency regimes matter. The simple crowding-out story was built for a world that no longer exists. Yet conventional economic theory treats the sequence of falling dominoes as an inevitable consequence of deficit spending. The truth is the story has limited applicability. As Timothy Sharpe put it, “financial crowding-out theory was initially proposed and analysed in the context of a convertible currency system, that is, the gold standard and the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate agreement (1946–1971).” Taking into account different currency regimes changes everything. That’s what Sharpe discovered in a sweeping empirical investigation, where he separated countries that fit the MMT model—that is, those with monetary sovereignty—from those that fix their exchange rates or borrow in a foreign currency. Consistent with MMT, he concluded that “the empirical evidence reveals crowding-out effects in nonsovereign economies, but not within sovereign economies.” In other words, it’s a mistake to apply the crowding-out story to monetary sovereigns like the US, Japan, the UK, or Australia.