America Fought Vietnam Over Dominoes That Never Fell

America spent a decade and 58,000 lives in Vietnam to stop a chain reaction that never happened.

The reason was called the Domino Theory. In 1954, President Eisenhower warned that if one Southeast Asian country fell to communism, its neighbors would topple one by one, like a row of dominoes.

It became the bedrock argument for the entire war. Stop the communists in Vietnam, leaders insisted, or watch all of Asia fall: Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, maybe even Japan. Four US presidents committed to the fight on that logic.

In 1975, Saigon fell. Vietnam went communist, and so did its neighbors Laos and Cambodia. But the wider collapse never came. Thailand, Indonesia, and the rest of the region held. Within years, Vietnam was even at war with communist China.

The dominoes that justified the whole war mostly refused to fall.

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