The Sound of a Domino Falling

When, in January of 1974, Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho signed the Paris “Peace” Accords, I was a young professor on leave from Harvard Business School, working in Tehran at the newly formed Iran Center for Management Studies. Most of my American colleagues and friends were relieved—the war in Vietnam had torn American society apart and it had been clear for some time that, although a majority of Americans “supported” the war, there was not a majority in favor of the violence required to defeat North Vietnam militarily.

What surprised me were the attitudes of many of my Iranian students. These men (and a few women) averaged about 28 years old and held the U.S. in very high regard—almost awe. Americans had landed on the moon, we were the world’s leading economic and military power. They did not understand why the U.S. was withdrawing from Vietnam. One expressed it in words I still clearly recall: “How can the most powerful country in the world be driven out by a bunch of poor peasants?” Another wanted to know why the U.S. politicians and media were spinning the Paris Accords as “peace.” It seemed clear to them that North Vietnam, supported by the Soviet Union, would re-equip and invade the South.

I attempted to explain that large segments of the U.S. public had become disenchanted with the war in Vietnam, seeing the death and destruction as pointless. These Iranian students were oddly disinterested in geopolitics or the morality of violence. They were, however, greatly impressed by how a supposedly great power was being defeated by a supposedly backward country. I tried to explain that if the U.S. were the imperialist power it was caricatured to be, it would have unleashed hell in Vietnam and made it a colony. The U.S. makes mistakes, I said, but it genuinely stands for freedom. Mahmoud, one of my best students, said “All of us want freedom and better lives. But if you do not know how to make it happen, or if you cannot hold back the men with guns, then your ideals are just empty words. I came to this school to learn the `magic’ of the Americans. Perhaps there is no magic after all.”

Mahmoud’s words were the soft sound of a domino falling. The theory, first articulated by President Eisenhower in 1954, was that if one country in a region fell into the Communist sphere of influence, then others would follow, like a row of dominoes. The inglorious end of the Vietnam War did not produce a cascade of takeovers or regime changes in Asia. But, in Iran, and many other lands, there came a still ongoing shift in belief about U.S. power, competence, values, and behavior. And one center of that shift has been the Islamic world, where a primary virtue is constancy of purpose, and the efficacy of force is seldom questioned.

Today, no one talks about dominoes anymore. But I hear one softly fall each time one more element of America’s special luster and charisma is lost. The formula for their continued fall is simple: blustering commitments to goals the nation has neither the patience nor competence to attain; buying and abandoning allies based on the vagaries of beltway politics, growing chaos and crime on the domestic front, the incompetent withdrawal from Kabul, and generally unleashing violence around the world without being honest about the amount of force necessary to produce a decisive result.