Bully in a China Shop

President Reagan is just smashing crockery in his frustration with the Sandinistas by imposing a total embargo on U.S. trade with Nicaragua. And by taking yet another futile swing at Nicaragua he is making himself look to much of the rest of the world--and particularly to Latin America--like a bully while the Sandinistas come off as innocent victims.

The United States historically has been the largest market for Nicaragua’s exports, but interchange between the two countries has declined sharply since Reagan took office. Last year only 20% of Nicaragua’s imports came from this country--mostly tractors and their spare parts, fertilizers and pesticides. Only 12% of Nicaragua’s exports--bananas, beef, coffee and other agricultural products--were sold here last year. Business people in both countries should have no trouble finding buyers for those products elsewhere in the world.

The embargo also will make little difference to the overall Nicaraguan economy, which has been a shambles ever since the bloody revolution to overthrow dictator Anastasio Somoza ended in 1979. Nicaragua has never fully recovered from that setback--for a variety of reasons, among them the Sandinistas’ often clumsy efforts to impose socialism, widespread economic sabotage by anti-Sandinista rebel groups, and previous trade and borrowing restrictions imposed on the Nicaraguans by the Reagan Administration. If anything, Reagan’s move will give the Sandinistas another reason to blame the United States for all of their problems rather than admitting their own errors.

Aside from ordering a halt to trade between the two countries, Reagan suspended the U.S. landing rights for Nicaragua’s national airline, barred Nicaraguan ships from U.S. ports and said that he will cancel a U.S.-Nicaraguan friendship treaty.

The decision won support in Congress, even from some critics of his Central American policies, because it coincided with a visit to Moscow by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. Nicaraguan officials said that Ortega traveled to the Soviet Union to drum up trade with, and solicit aid from, the Russians and their allies in anticipation of a possible U.S. embargo. Nicaragua, like any independent nation, is entitled to trade with any other country in the world, but the timing of Ortega’s visit could not have been worse. It came just a week after Congress voted to suspend covert U.S. aid to anti-Sandinista rebels, the contras. And it put congressmen who voted against the contras, arguing that the Sandinistas pose no security threat to the United States, in an embarrassing position.

The President may take some short-term satisfaction from his critics’ discomfort, and he may enjoy striking out at the Sandinistas again. But lashing out in frustration will not make them go away. Eventually he must realize that this country must live with the Nicaraguan revolution and, most likely, with the Sandinistas, as must Nicaragua’s neighbors, who at least are trying to negotiate the terms under which the relationship will exist. Reagan’s displays of pique and ominous rhetoric over Nicaragua only make that inevitable accommodation harder to achieve.