International relations

Occurring in the context of the Cold War, the 1958 Lebanese Crisis forced U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and top policymakers to balance a multitude of factors when considering an appropriate response to the crisis. While Eisenhower claimed publicly that Operation Blue Bat was an intervention aimed at containing the every looming threat of communism, meeting records of top U.S. policy makers contradict such explanations and offer insight to the President’s true motivations. Eisenhower instead sought to maintain U.S. influence among a coalition of Middle Eastern conservative governments operating in a U.S. led regional military alliance. The crisis forced the President to reconcile his foreign policy objectives with the political and cultural reality of the region and prompted a major foreign policy reassessment in which Eisenhower turned away from top-down international alliance building and instead, worked to address the obvious need to court public opinion in the Arab world.

A cross-national study examining both intra-and international determinants of collective political violence within nations was conducted in an effort to replicate and extend previous findings: that international factors indirectly (and directly) increase political violence through their effects on income inequality. The robustness of these findings was tested in a panel regression analysis by examining model respecifications and including new variables. The international variables tested indirectly affected political violence through income inequality. Earlier findings of a direct effect of income inequality on political violence were replicated and extended to an intra/international model of domestic political violence.