Critic of the Sandinistas' Paper

Fausto,
I found your paper to be well researched, well written, and comprehensive. You began with an overview of US policy towards the Sandinistas, and the discrepancy between this policy and US propaganda about itself and about the Sandinistas. You provided relevant historical background about Cesar Augusto Sandino and the Samoza dynasty, the transformation of the Sandinistas from a revolutionary organization into a political party, the evolution of US policy towards the new regime under Carter and Reagan, the US trade embargo of Nicaragua and support for the contras, the Sandinistas’ relations with the Soviet bloc, their initial development successes and democratization of Nicaraguan society and how these were undermined by US support for the contras, opposition to Reagan’s policy in the US Congress and the Iran Contra Affair, the World Court decision in Nicaragua v. United States, and the eventual election of U.S.-backed Violetta Chamorro. At various points, you related all this to larger patterns in U.S. foreign policy including policies of the G.W. Bush Administration. Throughout, you assimilated a large amount of evidence from many sources into a coherent picture that was clearly your own and that was effectively presented in your own words.

I see three ways in which this paper could have been further developed. First, a stricter chronological organization of your material would have enabled you to construct a smoother flowing historical narrative. Secondly, while you correctly pointed out the absurdity of Reagan’s claim that the Sandinistas posed a threat to US national security, you did not adequately address the question of why the Reagan Administration did so strenuously oppose the regime. You gave a partial answer to this question by noting that under the Samozas, Nicaragua served as a base from which the U.S. had deployed military power in the region, specifically in Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1961), Dominican Republic (1965), and El Salvador (1972). However, this begs the question as to why the U.S. wanted to project military power in this region. (Note that the original context of the Monroe Doctrine was the real security threat that European powers posed to the U.S.; this was transformed by Theodore Roosevelt into an active form of U.S. imperialism). You argue that the U.S. projects military power to protect its economic interests (I would say, to be more precise, the interests of U.S.-based corporations). But this argument, though true in general, is more applicable where powerful corporate interests are actually at stake, especially with oil in the Middle East. But do you think that the interests of U.S. fruit and coffee companies, which certainly have played some role in U.S. Central America policy, are a sufficient explanation? For this to be plausible, you would need to provide some evidence that U.S. food interests pressured the Reagan Administration to act. Is there any evidence of that?

I think there is something more going on here, which Noam Chomsky calls the “demonstration effect.” A successful democratic revolution in even a small country (e.g. Cuba, Nicaragua, or even Grenada) resulting in loss of U.S. control has political reverberations in the entire world. In other words, even a small victory for democracy and self-determination demonstrates the limits of U.S. power, and thereby emboldens similar movements elsewhere, leading to a chain reaction that threatens a complete unraveling of the U.S. imperial system. The message to revolutionary movements everywhere is “if the Sandinistas can do it, why can’t we?” During the Cold War, this was related to the “domino effect;” that if one country went communist, others would follow. But your picture of the Sandinistas suggests that the U.S. could have prevented Soviet influence simply by supporting the regime. That the U.S. didn’t do this may have been more than a diplomatic blunder. Rather it may reflect the fact that the Sandinista revolution represented a loss of political power by the U.S., and that hard liners in the U.S. policy elite (who outnumber the progressives, even with a liberal administration in Washington such as Carter’s) felt a need to crush this experiment in autonomy before it empowered other democratic social forces in Latin America and elsewhere.

The military power of the U.S. is formidable, but ultimately cannot achieve political control without the cooperation of the population being controlled. Sandino understood this and may well have instituted democracy in Nicaragua in the 1930s in defiance of the U.S. had he not been killed. This analysis of the nature of political power is the subject of Jonathan Schell’s The Unconquerable World. (For our course, I assigned my review of this book from Political Science Quarterly; you don’t need to read the book, but it might be instructive to re-read my book review in light of my comments here).

Third, it would have been helpful to evaluate the achievements of the Sandinistas in relation to some of the larger historical processes we examined in this course, such as the decline of U.S. hegemony and advances in the rule of international law. For example, I find it significant that although U.S. support for the Samozas and the contras did set back economic and social progress in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas nevertheless instituted democracy in Nicaragua in defiance of the U.S. To be sure, U.S. policy weakened Nicaraguan democracy, but even the U.S. with all its power could not reinstitute a repressive regime because the Sandinistas had irreversibly democratized Nicaraguan society.

Similarly, Nicaragua made an historic contribution to the rule of international law by bringing its grievances against the US to the ICJ and winning. Although “realists” minimize the importance of this legal victory, especially given that the U.S. refused to comply with the ICJ’s judgment and award of damages (as you noted), in my opinion we should not underestimate the role of legitimacy in maintaining any system of power. By establishing democracy in Nicaragua and successfully challenging the legitimacy of U.S. power in the ICJ, the Sandinistas became significant protagonists in the long term decline of U.S. hegemony and the rise of the rule of international law. There is indeed a “demonstration effect” here that needs to be understood and learned from as the struggle continues on new fronts, such as current efforts to create economic alternatives to neoliberalism.

I offer all these comments in the spirit of a collegial exchange of ideas. I learned a lot from your paper and I’m confident your future scholarly inquiries will make important contributions to peace and justice. Your initial grade for this paper is 90 (A-), which comes to 97 (A+) with the extra credit for early submission.

Brian D’Agostino

The City College of New York