The most remarkable thing about the so-called domino theory is that it is apparently taken seriously by so many otherwise intelligent people. To borrow a term popular with many domino-fanciers, the main thrust of this paper is to examine the bite of the theory in the part of the world to which it is currently most often applied, and to offer some alternative hypotheses based on an examination of actual circumstances rather than on imaginary analogy.' In any kind of inquiry, there is no substitute for information and reasoning as the basis for theory or prediction. Problems, simple or perplexing, are not effectively solved by ignoring relevant data and depending instead on abstract formulae divorced from the reality at hand. Briefly stated, the domino theory as it is most commonly asserted for Southeast Asia maintains that unless the allegedly expansionist drive of Communist China is blocked by military means, Chinese and/or Communist power will overwhelm Laos and South Vietnam, and that this will automatically be followed in a cumulative causal chain by the similar overwhelming first of adjacent Thailand and Cambodia, then of the countries adjacent to them, and so on until the whole of Southeast Asia, and perhaps India, Pakistan, Ceylon, the Middle East, and Africa are struck down through the transmission of the first impulse-the first fallen domino of what is seen as an unbroken continuum leading spatially outward from it. Although the foregoing may have a somewhat straw-man quality as a result of its brevity, we are obliged to examine the hypothesis, if only because a great many people, including those in high office, appear to subscribe to it, or at least to consider it among other hypotheses on which policy decisions may be based. Much of the speculation about the future course of events in a conflicttorn Asia is, understandably, influenced by the memory of events in Europe between 1938 and 1946. The past, however, is rarely a reliable guide to the future when its supposed lessons are applied mechanistically and without adequate regard for inevitably altered circumstances. The alteration may be a matter of degree, but the difference between Europe and Asia in this matter and between the 1930's or 1940's and the present are fundamental. They do not, among other things, permit the applicability of a Munich analogy to contemporary Asia, nor do they leave much room for the support of a thesis of territorial conquest patterned on the events which followed Munich and Potsdam.