Conspectus Peace and Power in Central America

Nations, like the living organisms that in a sense they are, must adapt to the changing environment around them if they are to survive and flourish. Attitudes and policies appropriate to one historical period more often than not prove entirely irrelevant to the next. To hold rigidly to them is to court obsolescence and decline. Americans should ponder this law of history, for while the world around us has changed enormously since World War II, our attitudes and assumptions about that world and our place in it have not.

We came out of the war with the most powerful economic machine the world had ever known. It had no rivals, and somehow we expected that it never would. We, not others, set the pace.

We also emerged from that war locked in a global struggle with the other superpower. There was nothing imaginary about the challenge from the Soviet Union. It was real, and we had little choice but to take it up. We did so, however, with an all-consuming passion that blotted out everything else. We The Bear in the Backyard: Moscow’s Caribbean Strategy by Timothy Ashby (Lexington: $22.95; 224 pp.)

At War in Nicaragua: The Reagan Doctrine and the Politics of Nostalgia by E. Bradford Burns (Harper & Row: $6.45, paperback; 211 pp.)

The Soviet Brigade in Cuba: A Study in Political Diplomacy by David D. Newsom, Foreword by Adm. Stansfield Turner, USN (Ret) (Indiana University Press: $25 cloth, $7.95 paper; 122 pp.)

Partners in Conflict: The United States and Latin America by Abraham F. Lowenthal (Johns Hopkins University: $19.95; 235 pp.)

David and Goliath: The U.S. War Against Nicaragua by William I. Robinson and Kent Norsworthy (Monthly Review: $26; 387 pp.)

National Security and United States Policy Toward Latin America by Lars Schoultz (Princeton University: $42.50, hardcover; $12.95, paperback; 365 pp.)

overcame the madness of the McCarthy period, yes, but were left with a distinctly Manichean vision of the world. We saw--and still see--virtually every foreign policy question in starkly East-West terms. And it was not simply a struggle with Moscow in which we believed ourselves to be engaged; rather, it was one with a monolithic movement called “International Communism.” The red hordes became the black death of our day.

Despite this early near-hysteria, we in fact had things pretty much our own way for many years. At first, we were the only nuclear power on the face of the globe--and even long after the Soviet Union developed nuclear weapons, the margin of superiority yawned massively in our favor. Not until the very end of the ‘60s did the Soviets begin to close the gap.

We and our Western European allies, together with the Latin American states whose votes we virtually controlled, had a lock on the United Nations. So much so that it is a wonder the Soviet Union ever joined.

The emerging countries were just that; weak and divided, they had at first little impact on the world scene.

In Latin America, manifest destiny--the idea that the American Flag would fly from one end of the continent to the other--had given way to mere hegemony by the end of the last century. We would not own Latin America, just control it. Basing ourselves on the Monroe Doctrine, which we regarded as sacrosanct, we intervened in the affairs of the Central American and Caribbean countries whenever we wished. In this century alone, we did so no less than 20 times. We shaped events to suit ourselves and took it for granted that such was the way things ought to be.

Suspicious of non-alignment anywhere in the Third World after World War II, we regarded it as outright heresy in Latin America, where the East-West struggle had resulted in a new and more ideological set of reasons to intervene. Nonaligned advocates of radical change were more often than not regarded as agents of “International Communism.” If such people reached the halls of government, the United States felt compelled to take a hand in getting them out. Thus, in 1954, we ousted a government in Guatemala, the Arbenz government, that was not even remotely Communist. Arbenz was a former Army officer. There were no Communists in his cabinet and only four in the National Assembly. But the Arbenz government was progressive. It carried out land reform. It had also legalized the Communist Party, and, when we refused to sell it arms, did not hesitate to buy them from the Eastern bloc. That was enough. The CIA went into action to remove it.

We demanded obedience from the Latin American governments, and, for a time, most of them gave it. They accepted our intervention in Guatemala, as they did our effort at the Bay of Pigs seven years later to deal in the same way with Cuba (which in order to break with U.S. hegemony was indeed on the way to becoming a Communist state). They not only accepted but even participated in the Dominican intervention of 1965.

This was not the result of some instilled sense of discipline. Rather, so long as their perception was of a bipolar world, most Latin Americans preferred the U.S. pole, with all its faults, to that of Stalin, Khrushchev or Brezhnev. And so long as that was the case, we tended to take them for granted. Only when Cuba broke the mold and opted for a relationship with Moscow did we respond with the Alliance for Progress. Based on the premise that positive change was our best means of assuring stability and preventing new targets of opportunity for Soviet penetration, the Alliance sought to encourage economic development and social reforms. Paternalistic it was, and its aim was to assure continued U.S. dominance. Still, it was a far more enlightened and sensible approach than landing Marines. Unfortunately, for all practical purposes the Alliance died with Kennedy. The United States then returned to more traditional means of dealing with Latin America. Twenty years later, we have budged little from that rut. President Carter made some initial effort to shift gears, but ended up with a foreign policy little different from those of past administrations. The Reagan Administration, in returning to a rigid form of unilateralism, has even tried to turn the clock back.

Three distinguished professors (Abraham Lowenthal of USC, E. Bradford Burns of UCLA, and Lars Schoultz of the University of North Carolina) argue in their respective books (“Partners in Conflict,” “At War in Nicaragua,” and “National Security and United States Policy Toward Latin America”) that this is folly, that the politics of the past will no longer work either in Latin America or anywhere else, for the world they address no longer exists; it has been transformed. For one thing, the U.S. economic machine no longer sets the pace. It faces fierce competition from, and in some cases has been outstripped by, Japan and Western Europe. Indeed, President Reagan’s economic policies have in less than seven years more than doubled the total national debt accumulated by all past Presidents and turned us into the greatest debtor nation in the world.

For another, the struggle between the two superpowers long ago lapsed into a sterile nuclear stalemate which has less and less relevance to the real problems facing mankind today. Mutual deterrence must of course be maintained, but that could be done at a level 50 times below the present one. Meanwhile, in pursuit of an illusion, both sides bankrupt themselves by building still more weapons.

The East-West equation has turned out to be far more complex than we originally believed it could be. We now have excellent relations with a number of Marxist/Leninist countries, including the People’s Republic of China. And the Marxist/Leninist camp has turned out not to be so monolithic after all. Having poured blood and treasure into the effort to save Indochina from absorption by the Communist monolith and to prevent the rest of the dominoes from falling in Southeast Asia, we found instead that once the countries of Indochina were under the Marxist/Leninist banner, they began to fight among themselves and, in the case of Vietnam, against the People’s Republic of China. So locked were they in internecine strife that the domino theory proved almost amusingly invalid. Not a single other country fell to Marxism/Leninism. The Indochinese countries could spare no bullets for such efforts.

As suggested by both Burns and Lowenthal, however, perhaps the single most remarkable change during the last half of the 20th Century has been the rise of the Third World. Though still economically weak compared to the industrialized countries, the countries of the Third World, as they increasingly coordinate their votes and policies through such organizations as the United Nations and the Non-Aligned Movement, have unbalanced the international scales. We no longer control the United Nations; they do.

Further, given their new sense of identity, and the ability of charismatic leaders in the Third World to galvanize the forces of their nationalism, the day is gone when the great powers could impose their will simply by landing a marine detachment off a light cruiser or dispatching a troop of dragoons. The cost of such adventures has become too high, as the British and French learned at Suez in 1956, as the Soviets are learning in Afghanistan today, and as we ought to have learned at the Bay of Pigs and in Vietnam, though given what we are doing in Nicaragua, we appear to have learned nothing at all.

Third World changes are particularly sharp in Latin America. Lowenthal notes, for example, that while a few short years ago our population was equal to that of all the Latin American countries combined, theirs, at 400 million, is now 65% larger than ours and by the end of the century will be more than double ours. Latin American economies, moreover, were among the fastest growing in the Third World until 1981. The financial crisis encountered by most developing countries at that time also hit Latin America. Growth has thus been held back. Despite these present difficulties, however, Lowenthal argues, “. . . Latin America’s economies have come of age during the past generation. The issues Latin America poses for the United States, and the potential for conflict or cooperation in the Hemisphere, flow directly from this economic transformation.”

The Latin American nations of the 1980s are also far more integrated and more outward-looking than was the case 30 years ago. Modern nations have emerged, determined to seek their own way. No longer will they unquestionly follow the lead of the United States. Many now have diplomatic and trade relations with the Eastern bloc. Through various international forums, they articulate their own distinct world views. Several--Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and, in a different way, Cuba--are playing increasingly important roles on the world stage.

In short, there are no more banana republics, and today’s Latin American states are determined not to be treated as such. Memories of past U.S. interventions, and of their own passivity, rankle deeply. E. Bradford Burns quotes the great Mexican novelist, Carlos Fuentes, on the point: “Things now are certainly not as they were 30 years ago. . . . If, let’s say, Nicaragua were to be invaded by U.S. troops, for instance, you’d see all of Latin America rising up in anger. . . .”

Given this changed environment, all three authors (Lowenthal, Burns and Schoultz) argue that the Reagan Administration’s policies in Latin America are dangerously unrealistic and counterproductive. Going back to unilateralism, Burns remarks, is to court disaster. “If Washington is to ally itself with the force of history, the thrust toward change rather than preservation of the past would serve it better.”

But Burns has little confidence in the Reagan Administration’s disposition to accept that advice. He observes: “Central America, Latin America and the Third World are changing. U.S. policy toward them remains static. . . . The White House unflaggingly follows its politics of nostalgia, ignoring reality, violating history, and separating knowledge from action.”

Strong words, but they are echoed by Lowenthal, who writes: “The period of U.S. hegemony is over both because Latin American nations are able and determined to forge their own policies and because the objective basis of U.S. predominance has eroded. . . . If the U.S. is to protect its interests in the Western Hemisphere on an enduring basis, it must accept the end of U.S. hegemony . . . (and) move from a stance of dominance to one of co-operation.”

Both Lowenthal and Burns see present U.S. policy toward Nicaragua as embodying all the worst of the Reagan approach. Referring to it as “a quixotic call of the past,” Burns notes that Reagan’s Nicaragua policy isolates the United States internationally and contributes to the decline of U.S. prestige in Latin America. Further, he goes on, our war against Nicaragua is symbolic--to the rest of the Third World--for our attitudes toward all the countries struggling for true independence and development. In their eyes, then, our war challenges their own hopes and aspirations.

How should the United States handle the Nicaragua problem? No one is suggesting that we cut and run. Both Lowenthal and Burns emphasize that the United States has legitimate security concerns in Nicaragua. We want no Soviet bases there, nor do we want Nicaragua exporting its revolution to its neighbors. But, they note, those concerns could be handled through a verifiable diplomatic agreement such as that put forward in the Contadora treaties, which the Nicaraguans have already said they would sign.

Since the solution to the problem is so obvious and so simple, why does the Reagan administration so stubbornly reject it? Lowenthal, Burns and Schoultz are all in accord in answering that question. To paraphrase them: “The administration is convinced that if the U.S. failed to maintain control in an area so close to home, that might be interpreted as a sign of weakness and have damaging consequences for our position in the world at large.”

But as already noted, such absolute control is no longer possible. To pursue it in today’s world is to pursue an illusion and to demonstrate not strength but senility. All through history, great powers that have retained their gift for innovation and adaptation have found an array of policy instruments with which to obtain their objectives. Using diplomacy to attain ours now, would not be a sign of weakness; rather, it would show our continuing vitality. The rigidity with which President Reagan approaches the problem, however, is reminiscent of nothing so much as a man long accustomed to driving nails when suddenly confronted by the principle of the screw.

Schoultz concentrates more closely than do the other two authors on the whole question of U.S. security interests in Latin America--on access to bases and raw materials, protection of sea lanes, etc.--and concludes that we really have none to speak of except to deny the area to our adversaries. We no longer need bases in the area, for example, but neither do we want the Soviets to have any. Even that, he suggests, has more to do with psychological perceptions than with geostrategic concerns, for in the age of intercontinental ballistic missiles, foreign bases are of decreasing importance to both sides.

There is no question for Schoultz of an American renunciation of military force. Clearly he expects and wishes the United States to remain the dominant military power in the region. But he insists on the difference between the use and the abuse of military force, or between the use and the waste of it. It is not the Cold War which needs to be fought in Latin America today, Schoultz argues, but rather the war against poverty and injustice.

All three authors call for a negotiated settlement to end the war in Nicaragua as a first step toward a new, more forward-looking U.S. policy. This to be followed by efforts concentrating on economic development--including solution of the debt crisis--and on the other pressing problems of today, such as protection of the environment, migration and controlling narcotics. What is needed, all three emphasize, is a policy geared to the present rather than to the past, and one which stresses partnership with the Latin American countries rather than continued, and inevitably futile, efforts to impose our will. To adapt--in Latin America and in the world at large--to the reality of a multipolar world would not be the portent of decline; rather, such flexibility would assure the United States a leading role in the world for many decades to come. Failure to adapt, on the other hand, would be a signpost on the road to obsolescence, down which the Soviet Union itself seemed to be traveling, at least until Gorbachev came along.

The conclusions of the three books referred to above are eloquently and powerfully argued. It is to be hope that future policymakers will read them carefully and ponder their lessons well.

The last two books herein treated fail, in their respective ways, to escape the bipolar concepts of past decades. The first, “David and Goliath,” by William Robinson and Kent Norsworthy, two newsmen who proclaim themselves not to be neutral but, rather, to be “part of that historic wave of poor and exploited peoples who are struggling for the avalanche of humanity toward peace and justice . . . “ is an account of the U.S. war of attrition against Nicaragua. It catalogues the aggressions and atrocities, but while one may share some of the authors’ sense of outrage that such things are done in the name of the United States, in suggesting that the sin is representative of the majority, the authors really go too far. Despite poll after poll indicating that most Americans do not support President Reagan’s Central American policies, Robinson and Norsworthy tell us that although it is beyond the scope of their book to analyze the extent to which Reaganism enjoys the support of the U.S. bourgeoisie, “there can be little doubt that its general premises have been accepted by the class as a whole. . . .”

This is to ignore the sharp debates in the Congress and other evidence of growing disenchantment with Reagan’s foreign policies. It is also to ignore the massive body of dissenting opinion expressed in works such as the first three books examined in this essay. If things are sometimes painted in grays on one side of the fence, so are they on the other.

Not so for Timothy Ashby of the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation. In “The Bear in the Back Yard,” Ashby’s vision is starkly Manichean. He sees Russians under every rock in Central American and Caribbean, aggressively pursuing a policy of political and military adventurism with the ultimate aim of tearing away at our soft underbelly.

His evidence for this? Such a hodgepodge of faulty information and quotes from dubious sources that it would take another book to discuss them all. To cite but two:

1. Ashby suggests that Soviet nuclear/missile submarines regularly operate out of Cuban ports. But the fact is that no Soviet nuclear/missile sub has even entered a Cuban port since 1974.

2. Ashby also says that the Soviet brigade in Cuba (of 1979 fame) was transferred there from Eastern Europe in 1976 with the mission of guarding and handling tactical nuclear weapons, which Ashby would have us believe are stored at the Punta Movida facility near Cienfuegos.

This is the sheerest poppycock. The Soviet brigade has in fact been in Cuba since the 1960s, and with U.S. acquiescence. It is a motorized infantry unit, not one for servicing nuclear weapons. It is stationed near Havana, not Cienfuegos. Finally, there is no credible evidence at all that there are nuclear weapons in Cuba. If there were, the United States would have to demand their withdrawal.

The story of the Soviet brigade in Cuba is essentially that of the casual use and misuse of the nation’s intelligence collection activities for political gain. For a full account of the brigade affair and its surprising relationship to, among other things, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, David D. Newsom’s “The Soviet Brigade in Cuba: A Study in Political Diplomacy” is the book of choice.

Ashby of course sees Nicaragua as a dangerous Soviet advance base that must be wiped out. Its loss, he says, would be “the single greatest setback possible to Soviet ambitions in Central America and the Caribbean.” He does not explain why, if Nicaragua is so important to them, the Soviets have balked at providing nearly $200 million in hard-currency aid requested by the Sandinistas.

And what is Ashby’s solution to the Nicaraguan problem? Not diplomacy certainly! Ignoring the fact that the Sandinistas have offered over and over again to negotiate and even to sign finished treaties, Ashby assures us that they “will never succumb to economic or diplomatic pressures.” Hence, there is nothing for it but to give as much aid as the Contras need to overthrow them, and if that doesn’t work, Ashby hints, to bring massive U.S. military fore to bear against both Nicaragua and Cuba. As we got rid of Arbenz in 1954, so would Ashby have us get rid of the Sandinistas today.

Perhaps one can best answer Ashby by quoting (as does E. Bradford Burns) Col. Philip C. Roettinger, a former Marine who played a key role in the coup against Arbenz: “I now consider my involvement in the overthrow of Arbenz a terrible mistake. I am 70 years old now. Done with skulduggery, I devote my time to painting some of the region’s beautiful scenery. It’s painful to me to see my government repeat the mistake in which it engaged 32 years ago. I’ve grown up. I only wish my government would as well.”