The Fall of Saigon: The Day Domino Theory Died
Fifty years after the communist victory in Vietnam, the old domino theory seems to have been definitively replaced by a deeper conflict determined by history, power, and geography.
On a cloudy April morning 50 years ago, I watched a North Vietnamese tank crash through the gates of Saigon’s Independence Palace, symbolically toppling what many feared would be the first domino on the path to a communist takeover of Southeast Asia.
Today, from the distance of half a century, it is clear that North Vietnam’s victory in fact shattered the foundations of the United States’ domino theory, blowing open a long hidden intracommunist antagonism and triggering the Third Indochina War. Fifty years later, a truce exists but behind the forced smiles and flowery words of friendship, China and Vietnam continue their shadowboxing.
The much-publicized mid-April visit to Vietnam and Cambodia by Chinese leader Xi Jinping offered new evidence of what Vietnamese diplomat Tran Quang Co once described as China’s “two-faced” policy and the identical Vietnamese response.
Weeks before Xi arrived, the Communist Party of Vietnam’s General Secretary To Lam traveled to the border provinces to commemorate the martyrdom of tens of thousands of Vietnamese who died during China’s punitive invasion in 1979. Lest the world forget the serious contentions between China and Vietnam over the South China Sea – which the Vietnamese call the East Sea – Hanoi announced on the eve of Xi’s visit the creation of special zones incorporating the Paracel and Spratly Islands that China claims. Significantly, one of the special zones covered once disputed Phu Quoc island near the Chinese-refurbished Ream Naval Base in Cambodia.
Those developments were still in the womb of the future when communist tanks crashed into the palace gates in Saigon.
U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson sent the first tranche of U.S. troops to Vietnam in 1965. He believed, like Dwight D. Eisenhower, that South Vietnam was in danger of becoming the first domino to fall.
“You knock over the first one,” Eisenhower had predicted, “what will happen to the last one is that it will go over very quickly.”
Despite fears that the fall of Saigon would prove Eisenhower right, setting off a wider tumble into communism, ultimately only Indochina – the three countries embroiled in the Second Indochina War – succumbed to communist rule. The Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia on April 17, just before Saigon fell, and the Pathet Lao followed, overthrowing the Kingdom of Laos on December 2, 1975. But there the dominoes stopped falling.
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Nayan Chanda is an associate professor of international relations at Ashoka University, India. He was Saigon bureau chief of the Far Eastern Economic Review and later editor of the magazine. He was founding editor of YaleGlobal and director of publications at Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. He is the author of “Brother Enemy: The War After the War” (1986) and “Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warriors Shaped Globalization” (2007). Chanda is the winner of the 2005 Shorenstein Award for Journalism jointly given by Harvard and Stanford Universities.