Domino Theory Vietnam War Quotes

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.

While by 1961 many of the early dynamics of the Cold War—Stalinist brutality, Sino-Soviet cooperation, Moscow’s considerable influence on other Communist movements—had begun to fade, American perceptions, assumptions, and political rhetoric remained rooted in an earlier mindset. (The Soviet Union suffered from its own simplistic myopia about the West during this period.) As a result, Kennedy and his advisors made policy on Vietnam by relying on Cold War blueprints that assumed the monolithic nature of Communism, defined Communism and nationalism in mutually exclusive terms, and understood the domino theory as a given, filtering it all through fear of a domestic political firestorm that would follow the loss of a country to Communism. They feared the costs of what they termed a “cut-and-run” policy “too much and too automatically,” said Bundy retrospectively.27 More fundamentally, “we never fully explored each other’s views about Communism and the danger of it in Asia, particularly Southeast Asia,” McNamara later acknowledged.