This would give them a geographical and economic strategic advantage, and it would make Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand the front-line defensive states. If Communists succeeded in taking over the rest of Indochina, Eisenhower argued, local groups would then have the encouragement, material support and momentum to take over Burma, Thailand, Malaya and Indonesia all of these countries had large popular Communist movements and insurgencies within their borders at the time. President Eisenhower was the first to refer to countries in danger of Communist takeover as dominoes, in response to a journalist's question about Indochina in an Apnews conference, though he did not use the term "domino theory". The region now comprised four independent countries: North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. This caused the French to fully withdraw from the region then known as French Indochina, a process they had begun earlier. In March 1954, the Viet Minh, a Communist and nationalist army, defeated French troops and took control of what became North Vietnam. The war has not officially ended to this day but the fighting ended in 1953 with an armistice that left Korea divided into two nations, North Korea and South Korea. Korea had also partially fallen under Soviet domination at the end of World War II, and in 1950 fighting broke out between Communists and Republicans that soon involved troops from China (on the Communists' side), and the United States and 15 allied countries (on the Republicans' side). The takeover by Communists of the world's most populous nation was seen in the West as a great strategic loss, prompting the popular question at the time, "Who lost China?" Two Chinas were formed - mainland 'Communist China' (People's Republic of China) and 'Nationalist China' Taiwan (Republic of China). In 1949, China became a Communist country (officially the People's Republic of China) after Chinese Communist rebels defeated the Nationalist Republican government in the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War (1927~1949). Kennan was also involved, along with others in the Truman administration, in creating the Marshall Plan, which also began in 1947, to give aid to the countries of Western Europe (along with Greece and Turkey), in large part with the hope of keeping them from falling under Soviet domination. Later that year, diplomat George Kennan wrote an article in Foreign Affairs magazine that became known as the " X Article", which first articulated the policy of containment, arguing that the further spread of Communism to countries outside a "buffer zone" around the USSR, even if it happened via democratic elections, was unacceptable and a threat to U.S. Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.įollowing the Iran crisis of 1946, Harry Truman declared what became known as the Truman Doctrine in 1947, promising to contribute financial aid to Greece during the Civil War and to Turkey following World War II, in the hope that this would impede the advancement of Communism into Western Europe. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. In 1945, the Soviet Union brought most of the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Europe under its influence as part of the post- World War II new settlement, while prompting Winston Churchill to declare in a speech in 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri that:įrom Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an " iron curtain" has descended across the Continent. 4 Applications to communism outside Southeast Asia.2 Arguments in favor of the domino theory.
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