Holding Back the Hard-Liners

A fundamental weakness in the Reagan Administration’s efforts to deal with Nicaragua has been captured in the glare of a public dispute between the State and Defense departments over a pending Central American peace treaty.

Pentagon officials leaked an internal study of what they claim will be the negative effects of a peace treaty being drafted by the Contadora Group--Mexico, Panama, Colombia and Venezuela. Those nations, with the support of other major Latin American democracies, have been working for three years to draw up a peace agreement between the revolutionary government in Nicaragua and its fearful and suspicious neighbors in El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras and Guatemala. The Contadora Group has survived many problems, including hostility from the Reagan Administration, and is nearly finished with a draft treaty that Latin diplomats hope can be signed by June 6.

The Pentagon study assumes that Nicaragua’s Sandinista government will cheat on the treaty, which would lead to continued political instability in Central America and, ultimately, to a major U.S. military involvement in the region, requiring 100,000 American troops and costing $9.1 billion in the first year alone. State Department officials, both those who believe that a Contadora treaty can work and those who think that the U.S. government should at least give lip service to efforts to settle Central America’s crisis diplomatically, have responded by downplaying the Pentagon report publicly and lambasting it privately. This bureaucratic infighting reveals a serious division in the Administration that has kept it from formulating a consistent, constructive policy toward Nicaragua from the day President Reagan took office.

The Administration is united in its dislike of the Sandinistas and their effort to make Nicaragua over into a Marxist state, but divided on what to do. Hard-liners want to assert U.S. hegemony over the Caribbean Basin, as this nation has often done in the past, and help overthrow the Nicaraguan government, replacing the Sandinistas with new leaders who would be pro-U.S. and--preferably, but not necessarily--democratic. Moderates, including many professionals in the military and foreign services, believe that the United States can live with the Sandinistas as long as the Nicaraguan government ends its alignment with the Soviet Union. The Pentagon study was leaked by hard-liners who fear that the Sandinistas will sign a Contadora treaty on June 6, forcing Reagan to choose between accepting Sandinista control of Nicaragua and opposing peace in Central America.

This disagreement is more proof that no one should look to the Administration for leadership or guidance in settling the Central American crisis. The Contadora countries and our other Latin American allies must keep working on their own, patiently trying to hammer out an agreement that all Central American countries can live with even if the process extends beyond June 6. In the meantime, Congress must hold back the hard-liners in the Administration and keep them from doing even more damage than they already have done to prospects for peace in Central America.