A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-1990

National Interest, The, Summer, 1996 by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

The Bush administration assumed that the Sandinistas would win too, writes Robert Kagan in his massive study A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-90. President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker had pushed for the elections as a graceful way to disengage from a nasty dispute that had consumed far too much time and passion in Washington. They hardly expected the motley and chaotic opposition to mount a real challenge. Practically speaking, they had written off Nicaragua.

It was the first election ever held in which a Marxist regime was voted out of power. The whole world was watching, and the whole world got it wrong, especially the pollsters. A month before the vote in February 1990, the American firm of Greenberg-Lake released a poll showing President Daniel Ortega ahead of the benevolent matriarch, Violeta Chamorro, by a margin of 51 to 24 percent. It was surely the biggest fiasco in the history of the polling business, proof alone that Nicaragua had become such a closed society that a large chunk of the population was too frightened to tell strangers the truth. I was in the press room in Managua when the results came through, and I have to admit enjoying the ash-white faces of my colleagues as they began to realize that the Nicaraguan Revolution they so loved had been rejected by a landslide.

By then the Sandinistas had crossed the Rubicon. If they tried to annul the election, the prospects were clear: war, poverty, and isolation. Their defeat changed the world's perceptions of U.S. policy in Nicaragua at a stroke. To their own surprise the Republicans could now make a fair case that they had been right all along about Nicaragua. Bernie Aronson, the assistant secretary of state for Latin America, called reporters into his office to tell them that the Bush administration had "turned lemons into lemonade."

Kagan was a key player in the long Nicaraguan drama. He was a member of the State Department's policy planning staff in the Reagan administration. As a speechwriter for Secretary of State George Shultz he was the first to articulate the "Reagan Doctrine" of communist roll-back in vulnerable outposts of the Soviet client empire. He then served as a lieutenant to Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, helping to turn the Contras into a serious resistance movement - and living through the nightmare of the Iran-Contra scandal when the crusade came perilously close to toppling President Reagan. But he remains scrupulously detached. The name Kagan does not appear in the index. This is history, not apologia.

He has spent five years of his life writing the definitive book, battling all the myths and half truths remaining from the propaganda wars. It is hard to imagine that A Twilight Struggle will ever be surpassed for its scholarship, depth, and good sense. Opening the pages of this colossal study you know at once that this is going to be the book on the subject, and all else is cut-and-paste, or polemics, or mere journalism by comparison.

For Kagan the election was a great moment. The establishment of democracy in Nicaragua was a vindication of U.S. policy, he argues, even if it was a messy business getting there. He credits Reagan for pushing the Contra cause, and he credits Bush for giving the Sandinistas a way out at the end - "an alternative to the grim choice between perpetual war and disastrous surrender."

The meta-theme of his nine-hundred page work is that subtle shifts of policy in Washington have dramatic effects in a country like Nicaragua. Whether it wants to or not, the United States is doomed to play the role of a great power with imperial responsibilities. The Carter administration was slow to understand this. In 1977 the State Department decided to make Nicaragua the first test case of the "new foreign policy", a down-payment on Jimmy Carter's pledge to push for human rights around the world, "particularly in those countries that depend on the United States for their very survival." The choice of Nicaragua for this demarche came easily. Columnist Jack Anderson had been calling President Anastasio Somoza "the world's greediest dictator." Liberal Democrats were exercised about it. So Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher agreed to a de facto suspension of all aid to Nicaragua.

Few people in Washington saw it as anything more than a symbolic statement. "Not only was Nicaragua deemed strategically insignificant, but the possibility of dramatic change in this insignificant country was remote", writes Kagan. "Somoza's opponents were weak. The Sandinista guerrilla forces had been all but wiped out by the National Guard since 1974. The CIA estimated the number of guerrilla fighters at fifty."

It was a serious misjudgment. "These small and rather haphazard decisions in Washington blew down across Nicaragua like a hurricane." The abrupt change of signals from the State Department led to a ferment of activity among the opposition groups. Nicaraguans waited for the Carter administration to indicate what kind of government it wished to put into office. Nothing happened. Somoza calculated that he could hang on to power after all.