A Faustian Bargain: U.S. Intervention in the Nicaragua Elections and American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era. - book reviews

Progressive, The, March, 1993 by Saul Landau

True enough, agrees Robinson, but insufficient. "U.S. intervention radically altered the political system in Nicaragua and was crucial in determining the conditions as well as the constraints under which the electoral process unfolded." Bendana offers the insight that the United States generated the "conditions that force difficult decisions, or the choice between lesser evils," which he sees as "an objective of low-intensity warfare."

The book's strength is in the persuasive way it presents the data on intervention. Robinson uses the argument with Pastor to show the difference between his viewpoint and that of the liberal establishment. In Pastor's gentle but paternalistic rebuke of Robinson's thesis, he offers the reader an exercise in temporal polemics, that form of discourse bereft of historical perspective, yet full of specific historic data. "Although I disagree with much of Robinson's book, I believe it reflects an idealism similar to that which motivated many Sandinistas." Such commentary is beyond condescending.

Pastor downplays the larger historical facts - i.e., that the U.S. Government installed and supported the Somozas uncritically for more than four decades. That's the kind of history that makes the eyes of policy mavens glaze over, while for the Sandinistas it is the very context from which flows their analysis and action.

Robinson's book is marked less by naive idealism, which would be hard to justify in the post-revolutionary era, than by anger and frustration, appropriate responses to U.S. criminal activity and to the hypocrisy used to rationalize it.

"Between September 1978 and July 1979," Pastor reports, "the National Security Council met twenty-five times to develop a strategy for dealing with a country struggling to rid itself of the oppressive Somoza dynasty." Why should the NSC have convened twenty-five times over Nicaraguan transition? Because, Pastor explains, the Carter Administration "viewed the key [Sandinista] leaders as Marxists, who saw Cuba and the Soviet Union as allies and the United States as an enemy. Caught between a dictator it refused to defend and a guerrilla movement that it would not support, the Administration tried to facilitate a democratic transition for Nicaragua, but it failed."

Did Pastor suggest allowing the Nicaraguans to determine their own destiny?

Pastor disingenuously argues that the portrait Robinson paints of the U.S. Government as efficient and coordinated subversive agent is much too conspiratorial. The point is that even bumblers and clowns with major power and money behind them can defeat a weak and beleaguered opponent. For Pastor and most aspirants to Government posts, historical and moral factors are subsumed in the heady cloud of imperial hubris that hangs in the policy rooms.

Historians may ponder why the United States expended so much time, energy, and resources to defeat the fledgling revolutionary government of Nicaragua. Fred Halliday, in The Second Cold War, argues credibly that Managua and Kabul were perceived by Reagan ideologues as vulnerable Soviet flanks, strategic roads to Moscow. Roy Gutman offers a less ideological case in Banana Diplomacy, in which a bunch of irresponsible, second-rate players found a bureaucratic turf game to play with each other at the expense of the Nicaraguan people - and the U.S. taxpayer.