s taying the c ourse 209cause of national liberation movements that opposed colonial or
American-leaning governments. Of course, the split between Moscow
and Beijing had not escaped notice. But the fracturing of the erst-
while communist monolith and the friction between the two com-
munist giants merely aggravated the danger. Now the Soviet Union
and China competed to demonstrate greater support for radical
insurgencies. Whether Moscow or Beijing directed them remained
a matter of dispute in Washington policy circles, but either way the
United States could not permit communist powers to capitalize on
revolutionary fervor and upheaval. Failure to respond, moreover,
would merely embolden them. Johnson took to heart the “lesson” of
Munich in 1938: dictators must be confronted early, lest they gather
strength. Th at meant Washington, which alone had the military and
economic wherewithal to stem the communist advance, needed to
backstop government resistance to insurgencies wherever these
erupted.
To make transparent the connection between communism, liber-
ation movements, and American interests, American leaders beginning
with Eisenhower used the metaphor of falling dominos. A particular
country might be of little or no strategic importance in itself, but its
collapse and absorption into the communist orbit would undermine its
neighbors, and their defeat would in turn trigger a sequence of failures.
Th us communist victory in South Vietnam would precipitate the sur-
render of neutral Cambodia and Laos, eventually lead Th ailand and
Malaysia to submit to communist dominance (whether Hanoi’s,
Beijing’s, or Moscow’s was never entirely clear), dishearten South Korea
and Taiwan, embolden communist insurgents in the Philippines, and
drive Indonesia into communist arms. Policy makers were not so
simple-minded as to believe communist-dominated liberation move-
ments could easily jump borders, much less oceans. Rather, it was held
that defeat of an American-backed government at any point would
destroy the faith of neighboring states in U.S. security guarantees and
lead them to seek accommodation with the communists. And from
the experience of Eastern Europe after World War II, Washington
policy makers drew the conclusion that any government that included
communists would soon be controlled by them. Th e causal logic behind
the domino theory could be questioned and the historical analogies