Cold War strategy isn't very hard: clear the corners so you can free up units to overpower Europe. Done. Tactics are a bit harder but one should try to use a minimum amount of units to keep a maximum amount of your opponent's units busy, so you have some fleets left to hunt for neutrals or clear those damn corners. Easy. Unless your opponent tries the same and/or is tactically superior to you. Then it's hard. You’ll have to find something different to win:

gamble.
But not just gamble. Gamble in a way you know you’ll win. You need to rig the game. Load the dice. Put cards in your sleeve. Set traps. Be the Charlatan. But first: know your opponent!

I could write an essay about how to get to know your opponent reading only movesets. But I won’t. Because frankly… I didn’t do a lot of that. One doesn’t get a lot of time to do kitchen-table-psychology in this Cold War variant. The first years are usually pretty predictable and I was too lazy to do much research on my opponents. Besides, there will probably be seasoned gunboat players willing to use their champions corner to write about how great they are in profiling their enemies from reading only movesets. I’ll leave it to them.
Instead I should write about what I did better than anyone else in this tournament:
gamble.
To gamble successfully it helps if you have the chance to set the stage. You need a really comfortable sofa, a table and a bottle of wine. Take the wooden chair yourself and invite your opponent to the sofa. Than take out your loaded dice. They will defend their seat while you stand up and walk across the room to take their wallet.

In other words: try to give your opponent a false sense of security.Give them a feeling it is a safe bet. I’ll give you a couple of examples that worked (or didn’t work) for me. And make up some theories about why it worked.