Will we get an Egyptian domino? The fact that scores of thousands of Egyptian demonstrators turned out against the regime of President Hosni Mubarak was a first for Egypt, not seen since the time of Gamal Abd al-Nasser in the sixties.  The demonstrators' use of the Internet until it was temporarily shut down by the authorities was also precedent-setting.  

The proximity of the events to the Tunisian Jasmine rebellion led to speculation about an Arab Domino theory, a scenario in which one authoritarian Arab regime after another would topple in a chain reaction.

While appealing image-wise, it is important to remember that states are not really dominoes.

The original Domino Theory surfaced in the 1960s and was employed to defend American intervention in Vietnam. The argument was that if South Vietnam would fall to the Communists, all of Southeast Asia would fall.  Vietnam did fall to the Communists in 1975, but the dominoes did not fall all over Asia, although some defenders of American policy would argue that America by its intervention in Vietnam allowed other non-Communist countries to buy time.

A second case of the Domino effect came with the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1988 and 1989.

But this was not a Domino Theory in action, just akin to the removal of the stopper in the sink. What had maintained all the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, with the possible exception of the former Yugoslavia, was the fact demonstrated in the1956 and 1968 rebellions: that if a country proceeded too far towards independence and the jettisoning of the Communist regime, it would provoke Soviet intervention.

When Mikhail Gorbachev announced in 1988 that he was embracing the Frank Sinatra "I did it my way" doctrine, under which the Soviet Union would not intervene to salvage threatened communist regimes, scrapping the Brezhnev doctrine of 1968, the stopper was taken out and the communist regimes went down the drain. Communist rule came to Eastern Europe on Soviet bayonets after World War II, and it departed once these bayonets were removed.

Later, during the presidency of George W. Bush. a series of "color" revolutions in former Soviet republics as well as in Serbia took place, but again not every domino fell, witness Belarus or some of the former republics in Asia.

The same holds true of the Arab world.

The historian Crane Brinton has theorized that revolutions succeed when the ruling elite has fragmented or has lost its will to fight on. Tunisia was a case where the elite fragmented under the pressure, the proof being that many members of the new government are those who held power under the deposed government..

Another factor is the army.  Ben Ali was dependent on the police, but did not command the loyalty of the Army.

As long as the Army remains loyal and is willing to crush dissent in a showdown, a regime brutal enough to employ the Army, or as in the Iranian case special militias, can usually ride out the storm. The classic case was in Hama, Syria where the Hafiz Assad regime was willing to butcher scores of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood rebels even at the cost of bombarding the city center. One can also recall Tianamen square in Beijing, where the world moved on from the students crushed under Chinese tanks.

Yet another factor in falling dominoes has been foreign influence. When dictatorships fell in Western Europe during the 1970s (Portugal, Spain and Greece,) the lure of joining the then European Economic Community and now the European Union was much stronger.  Democratization was a precondition for joining.

Today's brutal dictatorships know, particularly when they have natural resources, that they can turn to China for economic and diplomatic support to prevent their fall.

When the Shah of Iran capitulated to the revolution that morphed into the Islamic Republic in 1979, he was weakened by cancer and was under pressure from the American Carter administration not to use military force. America had greater influence in the region then.  But after the recent US climb-down in Lebanon (where the US basically acquiesced to a Hezbollah takeover), it is unlikely that Mubarak or perhaps a successor from the current establishment will be impressed by American calls to respect the rights of peaceful demonstrators if the regime's survival is at stake.

There is, however, a tendency among scholars to magnify a regime's stability. When Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik wrote a book entitled "Will the Soviet Union Survive till 1984" he was dismissed as a crank, yet he was off by only 6 years. The Mubarak regime may collapse and then we will in retrospect write analyses explaining why that collapse was inevitable.

However, it would be equally mistaken to ascribe the fall to a domino-like determinism where "all fall down".