Democratic Dominoes
September 3, 2008, 3:19 pm Democratic Dominoes: A Guest Post
By Peter Leeson
Peter Leeson, the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at George Mason University and author of the forthcoming book “The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates”
Since the dawn of the cold war, a “democratic domino theory” has helped motivate important U.S. foreign policy decisions. Dwight D. Eisenhower summarized this theory, which he called “the falling domino principle,” in 1954:
You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.
Eisenhower was talking about communist dominoes. Since him, however, other U.S. policymakers have invoked the same basic logic - only with democratic instead of communist dominoes - and thus virtuous effects where a “first domino” falls.
--MORE--