domino

often when there's a local crisis in the world, someone comes along and predicts it will spread into a larger regional conflict. in the vietnam war, hawks warned against a u.s. pullout citing the domino theory and predicting all of southeast asia falling to communism. the u.s. pullout in 1973 but the dominoes fell. in the 1990s, during the wars in the former yugoslavia, i many predicted that the conflicts would drag in turkey and greece. but again, that prediction never came true.

before the iraq war, war critics (myself included) predicted a larger regional war over kurdistan, dragging in turkey and also potentially syria and iran. that hasn't happened yet, though i suppose it's not quite off the table yet either. still, i think i would have expected it to happen by now. and now i can see that while it remains a danger, it might never happen either.

anyway, it seems like dominoes don't fall over quite as easily as we fear they will from the outset. each domino, a state or region, is always itself made up of different individuals with different interests. those competing interests can't be reduced to the simple stimulus-response reaction a classic domino theory requires.

but dominoes do sometime fall. small conflicts have spread into regional (or larger) wars. that's how world war one started. the regional wars in DR congo (formerly zaire)--which involved most of the country's neighbors--was arguably the result of the domino of the rwandan genocide. and the conflict in congo still isn't completely over yet.

those were the conflicting thoughts i had as i read this article about the spread of nuclear weapons in the wake of the alleged north korean nuclear test this week. as the article pointed out:

Worry about proliferation is hardly new. In March 1963, President John F. Kennedy said, "“I am haunted by the feeling that by 1970, unless we are successful, there may be 10 nuclear powers instead of 4, and by 1975, 15 or 20." That timetable proved to be inaccurate. But in recent years there has been a sense around the globe that President Kennedy's prediction is about to come true, three decades late.

maybe it will, maybe it won't. (and i hope it won't). even if north korea's test is confirmed, that doesn't mean the next domino will necessarily fall. any time there is a new nuclear power, it increases the incentive of non-nuclear powers to get their own bomb. but that doesn't make it a certainty that they will.

UPDATE: who's next? (mp3) (thanks hydro!)