The Dangers of Exaggerating the Stakes in War

The idea that the fate of world order rides on the outcome of any particular conflict is not supported by the evidence, so it is worth considering why it keeps reappearing.

Paul Poast counters claims that a Ukrainian defeat would have far-reaching implications around the world:

A second reason the broader impact of a Russian victory has been exaggerated has to do with two words that should be forever banished from the U.S. foreign policy lexicon: domino theory. That Cold War-era argument held that allowing any country to fall to communism would embolden revolutionary groups—and their external sponsors—in other countries, thereby facilitating the spread of communism the way one falling domino tips over the next in line. To keep the communist domino from falling in Vietnam, the U.S. expended enormous military and financial resources there for over a decade. Washington ultimately failed to prevent the country from “going communist,” but besides neighboring Laos, the subsequent dominos were never toppled as feared. The fall of Saigon had no real impact on any of the U.S.-Soviet proxy conflicts that followed, and before the Cold War had even ended, the domino theory was largely considered to be discredited.

Poast does a good job spelling out why a war in one part of the world doesn’t have profound implications everywhere else. The idea that the fate of world order rides on the outcome of any particular conflict is not supported by the evidence, so it is worth considering why it keeps reappearing. One reason that this idea keeps cropping up in our foreign policy debates is that the U.S. usually doesn’t have vital interests at stake in a given conflict, so in order to justify U.S. involvement in the conflict or U.S. support for another state our political leaders inflate the stakes so that it becomes easier to sell the policy.