The Chinese Communist victory aided the United States’ adoption of the “domino theory,” which argued that the growth of communism in one country would spread to adjacent ones, encouraging military involvement in Korea and Southeast Asia.
This thesis, crucial to US foreign policy during the Cold War, proposed that if one country fell to communism, adjacent countries would most likely follow, much like a row of dominoes falling one after the other. When Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party established the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the West, particularly the United States, became more concerned that communism would expand throughout Asia.