America’s Case for Conflict: The Phantom of Communism

Throughout the Cold War, the spectre of communism was as much a political ritual as it was a perceived reality, summoned whenever Washington needed its wars to look like necessities rather than choices. The narrative of creeping communist influence could transform local politics into the front line of a global struggle against its spread. The dogma of Domino Theory and its antidote of Containment gave that story its urgency. They were hardened by fears from China’s revolution and sharpened by the Korean War, further amplified at home by the Red Scare and McCarthyism. It offered a single premise: if one nation succumbed to communism its neighbours would inevitably follow, until the red tide had swallowed the globe. It did not need to be accurate; it only needed to be persuasive – a hollow claim that would shape decades of action.  

Domestic disputes were recast as signs of imminent collapse and reformist leaders portrayed as agents of the Kremlin. The genius of the narrative was its adaptability: it could be deployed in any region against any leader, whether the intervention was open or carried out in the shadows. The point was not always to prepare a population for invasion; sometimes it was to shape a worldview so that even a coup, if exposed, could be rationalised as a defensive necessity. A coup cannot exist in a political vacuum; it needs a story that makes opposition costly, and render support a moral duty. The same pattern emerged from Central America to Southeast Asia: threats inflated, motives simplified, regimes toppled under the banner of containment, even when accusations were exaggerated or at times fabricated.  

1953: Iran  

The 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was a covert operation planned by the CIA and MI6. It was executed not by soldiers but through bribed officials, planted propaganda and orchestrated street unrest. The government fell not because Soviet power had arrived in Tehran, but because Washington and London engineered its demise.  

Yet for all its secrecy, Operation Ajax could not be left without a public story. Mossadegh was accused of being under communist influence before his real offence was revealed: nationalising the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a move that threatened British profits and challenged Western control of Iranian resources.  

Framed through containment, the accusation did crucial work. It ensured that if Iran publicly accused Washington of interference, its warnings could be dismissed as communist propaganda. It persuaded allies in Europe, wary of Moscow’s reach, to see Mossadegh’s removal as an act of containment rather than imperial opportunism. And if the coup leaked, Washington had pre-empted its defence it could point to months of warnings, legitimising its actions after the fact.  

The restoration of the Shah’s monarchy, would govern with authoritarian control for the next quarter century, was framed as a democratic safeguard rather that a product of foreign subversion. Yet the coup sowed a bitterness that outlasted the Shah himself finding full voice in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the rise of the Islamic Republic, a state characterised by hostility to America.  

1954: Guatemala 

In Guatemala, the overthrow of President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was no spontaneous uprising. Codenamed Operation PBSucess, the CIA conducted a carefully engineered cover campaign to protect US economic and strategic interests. Yet for all the secrecy surrounding its execution, the coup needed a public narrative. The official line was deliberate: Árbenz was a communist threat, a willing pawn of the Soviet Union, and Guatemala stood on the brink of becoming Moscow’s foothold in the Americas.  

The accusation was entirely unfounded. Árbenz’s true crime was land reform: redistributing unused estates, many of which were owned by the United Fruit Company. Interestingly, brothers John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, and Allen Dulles, CIA director, had both conducted legal work for the company, a stunning conflict of interest that placed private gain at the heart of public policy. By recasting Árbenz reforms as an ideological danger, Washington justified its intervention as a necessary defence of American interests in the region.  

The lies were not merely about winning domestic support, they were political insurance. If Guatemala accused the United States of interference, the charge could be dismissed as Soviet propaganda. If details of the coup leaked, Washington could point to its warnings of communist infiltration as having been vindicated. The coup succeeded and the United Fruit Company’s position was secure. Meanwhile, Guatemala fell into decades of military rule, with its democratically elected leader erased.  

1964: Brazil

In Brazil, the same logic unfolded on a continental scale. President João Goulart was no revolutionary, but his programme of land redistribution, expanded labour rights and restrictions on foreign profit remittances challenged entrenched elites and US corporations. These policies, threatening to investors but rooted in Brazil’s own sovereignty, were reframed as evidence of communist drift. Through the prism of the Domino Theory, Brazil was not a reforming democracy but the largest domino in Latin America, poised to topple and drag the region leftward.  

The military coup that removed Goulart was driven by domestic generals, but American hands steadied the process. US warships positioned themselves just offshore, logistical support was offered, and diplomatic recognition came swiftly once the generals seized control. Aboard, the takeover was presented as salvation – the protection of democracy from communist subversion. In reality, democracy had been dismantled. A dictatorship, repressive but reliable, then ruled Brazil for two decades, its legitimacy underpinned by the fiction of containment.  

1965: Dominican Republic

On the shores of the Dominican Republic, the script shifts from covert whispers to open force. In 1961, the assassination of Rafael Trujillo ended decades of dictatorship, and four year later a revolt sough to restore democratically elected president Juan Bosch. Washington intervened with 20,000 troops, declaring its purpose was to protect American citizens and prevent a communist revolution.  

President Lyndon Johnson warned of a “Second Cuba” just 800 miles from Florida. The charge was tenuous. Bosch was a social reformer, not a Marxist revolutionary, but the spectre of communist contagion was too useful to abandon. The intervention was sold as a reluctant act of defence, an urgent moment of containment. What it achieved was the suppression of constitutionalism, and the installation of a government acceptable to US interests. Democracy was suspended, not saved.  

1965-66: Indonesia

Across the globe, the formula worked again. President Sukarno steered Indonesia along a path of non-alignment, balancing ties with both the West and Soviet bloc while tolerating the rise of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). To Washington, this balance looked like a drift. When a failed coup in 1965 was blamed on the PKI, the rationale was already pre-written: Indonesia stood on the verge of a communist capture and decisive action would prevent a regional collapse.  

With American encouragement and covert assistance, General Suharto moved to seize control. What followed was one of the darkest chapters of the Cold War. Between half a million and a million people were killed in massacres that targeted communists, suspected sympathisers and innumerable innocents. Publicly, Washington hailed Indonesia’s turn to the West as a triumph for freedom and containment. Privately, it celebrated the removal of a leader unwilling to be drawn fully into orbit. The claim that such killing was necessary to prevent the fall of this domino, became the cover under which one of the century’s largest slaughters unfolded.  

Conclusion 

The story that bound these episodes together was not a precise forecast but a persuasive simplification. The Domino Theory offered a language of inevitability, suggesting that the fall of one state to communism would drag down its neighbours in sequence. In practice those links were often tenuous and the threat frequently more imagined than real. Leaders like Mossadegh, Lumumba, Bosch, Goulart and Allende were less agents of Moscow than reformed who unsettled Western interests. Yet in Washington’s telling, their policies would be reacted to as steps towards a larger collapse, and the urgency of containment supplied the rationale.  

What emerges is not a record of deliberate falsehoods, but an embellishment and exaggeration in every case, each serving a strategic purpose. By framing diverse local struggles as chapters in the same global drama, US officials found a way to justify coups that might otherwise have seemed opportunistic. The dominoes did not fall as predicted, but the belief that they might was enough. In those years, the story itself became a kind of instrument. One that could shape perception, secure consent, and turn contested interventions into apparent necessities.  

Bibliography 

Cullather, Nick, and Center For The Study Of Intelligence (U.S.). History Staff. 1994. Operation PBSUCCESS : The United States and Guatemala, 1952-1954 (Washington, Dc: History Staff, Center For The Study Of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency).

Keefer, Edward C., Charles S. Sampson, and John P. Glennon (eds.). 1964. ‘Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume I, Vietnam, 1964 - Office of the Historian’, History.state.gov https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v01/d209 [Accessed 18th August 2025].

Kennedy, John F. 1961. ‘Statement by the President on the Situation in the Dominican Republic. | the American Presidency Project’, Ucsb.edu https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-the-president-the-situation-the-dominican-republic [Accessed 18th August 2025].

National Security Archive. 2017. ‘1953 Iran Coup: New U.S. Documents Confirm British Approached U.S. In Late 1952 about Ousting Mosaddeq | National Security Archive’, Nsarchive.gwu.edu https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/iran/2017-08-08/1953-iran-coup-new-us-documents-confirm-british-approached-us-late [Accessed 18th August 2025]. 

Rabe, Stephen G. 2006. ‘The Johnson Doctrine’, Presidential Studies Quarterly, 36.1: 48–58 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5705.2006.00286.x 

Robinson, Geoffrey. 2018. The Killing Season : A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66 (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

The National Security Archive. 2013. ‘CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup’, Nsarchive2.Gwu.edu, ed. by Malcolm Byrne https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB435/#_ftn1 [Accessed 18th August 2025].