US Covert Operations during the Cold War: Origins and Theoretical Relevance

The previous section, following Doyle's prospective, has briefly introduced a liberal interpretation of the American behavior in the post World War period. Now, before looking at the constructivist approach, it is useful to consider another widely acknowledged framework for the explanation of the American actions, that is neorealism.

According to neorealists the structure of the international system is determined by the distribution of material capabilities under anarchy. As Mearsheimer (2001) asserts, great powers fear each other mainly because of the absence of an international authority capable of regulating the interactions among states on a supranational level. In this context every state is constantly unsure and the only way it has to enhance its security is by increasing its relative power at the cost of other nations. States, therefore, face a security dilemma in which the only way to ensure their own security is to achieve hegemony (Mearsheimer 2001: 35). According to Mearsheimer (2001: 355), the Cold War represents the only modern historical example of bipolarity, it follows that all American and Soviet operations related to the conflict need to be analyzed in a logic of balance of power.

Basing his opinion on a neorealist prospective, Rosato (2003) criticizes the liberal approach and its assumption that democracies do not fight other democracies, but only non-liberal states that, as already observed, pull them back to a security dilemma that they do not face in the relations with other democracies (Czempiel 1996: 94).

According to Rosato (2003: 590-591), democracies do lose their “inclination to treat each other with trust and respect when their interests clash”. He recognizes at least seven cases of American intervention against other “democracies”16, where the US acted violently in order to oppose and overthrow freely elected regimes during the Cold War. In all of these cases, says Rosato, the US administration did not undertake the path of negotiation (as the liberal theory would claim17), but rather it tried to destabilize the foreign governments by force.