Every Country the United States Has Invaded, Bombed, or Staged a Coup In

According to the Military Intervention Project (MIP) at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy - the most comprehensive dataset ever compiled on the subject - the United States has conducted nearly 400 military interventions since 1776. That's roughly one every seven months for 250 years.

Half of those interventions occurred after 1950, and more than a quarter have taken place since the end of the Cold War in 1991. The post-9/11 era ranks as the third most militarily active period in U.S. history, behind only the Cold War (1946-1989) and the era of "gunboat diplomacy" (1868-1917).

The regional breakdown is striking: 34% of all U.S. interventions have been in Latin America and the Caribbean, 23% in East Asia and the Pacific, 14% in the Middle East and North Africa, and 13% in Europe and Central Asia. Latin America alone has been the target of more than one in three U.S. military interventions in American history.

Beyond the two World Wars, the United States has fought several major wars involving hundreds of thousands of troops, sustained combat over years, and enormous casualties. The Korean and Vietnam Wars alone killed over 90,000 Americans and millions of locals. The post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq consumed over $8 trillion and resulted in an estimated 900,000+ deaths.

From the late 1800s through the 1930s, the U.S. military intervened repeatedly in the Caribbean and Central America to protect American business interests - particularly those of the United Fruit Company. These so-called "Banana Wars" saw Marines occupy Haiti (19 years), the Dominican Republic (8 years), Nicaragua (21 years on and off), and Cuba (multiple times). The pattern continued well into the Cold War era and beyond.

Since the end of World War II, the United States has bombed at least 30 countries. These range from massive sustained campaigns (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq) to limited strikes (Libya 1986, Sudan 1998) to ongoing drone operations (Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan). The populations of countries bombed by the U.S. since 1945 represent roughly one-third of humanity.

The CIA has publicly acknowledged involvement in at least seven successful regime changes. But the full list of confirmed and strongly suspected U.S.-backed coups, assassination attempts, and destabilization campaigns is considerably longer. During the Cold War, the CIA toppled democratically elected governments, propped up dictators, trained death squads, and funded insurgencies across Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Several of these operations had catastrophic long-term consequences. The 1953 coup in Iran led directly to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The 1954 Guatemala coup triggered a 36-year civil war. The destabilization of Cambodia helped the Khmer Rouge seize power, leading to the deaths of 1.5-2 million people.

Since September 11, 2001, the United States has conducted military operations in at least 24 countries under the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). This single piece of legislation, passed three days after 9/11, has been used to justify operations in countries the original authors never imagined, from Niger to the Philippines to Cameroon.

The drone program, operated by both the CIA and the U.S. military, has launched strikes in at least seven countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Iraq, and Syria. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that U.S. drone strikes have killed between 8,858 and 16,901 people across Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan alone, including 910-2,200 civilians and 283-454 children.

Meanwhile, U.S. Special Operations forces are deployed in approximately three-quarters of the world's countries at any given time - roughly 150 nations. As researchers Kushi and Toft noted: "While U.S. ambassadors are operating in one-third of the world's countries, U.S. special operators and forces are active in three-fourths."

Below is the most comprehensive list we can compile of every country where the U.S. has conducted a military intervention - defined as an invasion, bombing, occupation, naval engagement, coup, covert destabilization campaign, proxy war, or drone strike. Countries are listed alphabetically with the type(s) of intervention and time period.

Some presidents dramatically escalated U.S. military interventionism, while others pulled back. The post-WWII pattern shows a ratchet effect - each era tends to be more interventionist than the last, with "peacetime" presidents still maintaining operations started by their predecessors.

One of the most striking patterns in U.S. foreign intervention is "blowback" - the unintended long-term consequences that come back to haunt American interests. The CIA's own analysts coined the term.

The 1953 Iran coup created the conditions for the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the hostage crisis. The CIA's arming of Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s helped create al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The 2003 Iraq invasion created the power vacuum from which ISIS emerged. The 2011 Libya bombing turned a functioning (if authoritarian) state into a failed state that became a gateway for migration to Europe and a haven for extremist groups.

And on February 28, 2026 - 73 years after the CIA overthrew Iran's democratically elected prime minister - the U.S. launched "major combat operations" against Iran in what President Trump explicitly framed as regime change, telling Iranians to "take over your government" once the bombing was finished. As Al Jazeera's Alan Fisher observed: "They've done it before. This time, they're doing it with weapons and bombs rather than covertly through the CIA." Iran retaliated with strikes on U.S. bases across the Gulf, widening the conflict to at least six additional countries.

A 2023 study published in the journal Public Choice found that CIA-sponsored regime changes in Latin America resulted in a 10% reduction in per-capita income within five years and massive declines in democratic governance that persisted for at least six years. The researchers from Berger et al. concluded that these interventions had "serious political, economic, and civil repercussions" that should be counted against any perceived strategic benefits.