A Decisional Theory of U.S. Covert and Overt Intervention During the Cold War

This paper will explain the factors which shaped the United States' decision calculus to destabilize regimes covertly or overtly during the Cold War.This research will build upon existing literature by thoroughly studying the relationship of a number of novel costs and political benefits on America's decision calculus, as well as testing for and ranking each specific cost and benefit in my regression model based on magnitude.Ultimately, I argue that geostrategic prospects to contain communism were the main factor that determined whether the U.S. destabilized countries covertly or overtly.These benefits depend upon three subcategories, including a regime's proximity to the U.S. mainland, their likelihood to reverberate a domino effect, and their political orientation.Within the context of the Cold War, gaining such geostrategic benefits would have advanced the Americans' standing in their conflict vis--vis the Soviet Union through swinging countries into the American sphere and containing the spread of communism.To support my argument, I conducted a statistical analysis of all U.S. covert and overt interventions during the Cold War.I also performed two qualitative case studies of the U.S. overt intervention in Vietnam from 1962-73 and the U.S. covert intervention in Iran from 1952-53 to support my findings.All in all, the domino effect variable and the political orientation subset, "intermediately socialist-aligned" had the largest impact on shaping the U.S.'s decision calculus.If a country was prone to the domino effect, there was a great likelihood the U.S. deployed overt force, and if a country was intermediately socialist-aligned, there was a high probability the U.S. intervened covertly.