I’m a Contra . . . No Longer

I distinctly remember when Ronald Regan declared, “I’m a Contra!” Reagan’s moral clarity contrasted sharply with the Democratic Party’s morally obtuse policy of de-funding the Contras to avoid “another Vietnam.” Reagan’s declaration also contrasts sharply with the results of this week’s election in Nicaragua

During the Cold War, there was something of a foreign policy consensus on the right. Business interests, libertarians, traditionalists, realists, and neoconservatives agreed that the Soviet Union was a threat that needed to be contained and, where prudent, rolled back. The stars never aligned more perfectly than in the case of Soviet adventures in Central America. The Western Hemisphere is the historical American sphere of influence, and, since President Monroe, US policy has endeavored to keep it free of European meddling and colonial designs.

As an extension of this historical policy the US rightly supported the Contras in the 1980s. The Sandinista regime, like all Communist regimes, suppressed property rights, freedom of religion, economic progress, freedom of conscience, political freedom, and the independent development of Nicaragua. Many thousands were murdered and imprisoned by the Sandinista regime for the “crimes” of preaching that man’s first duty is to God or that individuals should be allowed to keep their family’s ancestral homes.

More important for the US, Nicaragua functioned as a satellite state of the Soviet Union, acting as a staging area for similar attempted revolutions in El Salvador and Guatemala and destabilizing activities aimed at Mexico. While containment should arguably be applied differently in far-flung locales like Vietnam or Africa, there could be little doubt that a Soviet-dominated Latin America would have threatened America.

Daniel Ortega was the Sandinista leader.

He was elected President of Nicaragua again. He was first defeated by Violetta Chamorro in 1990, after an election following the downfall of the Sandinistas’ Soviet sponsor. This marked the return of normalcy to Nicaragua and the end of a decade-long civil war with the anti-Sandinista freedom fighters, the Contras.

It is regrettable that the US intervened so openly and clumsily in the recent Nicaraguan election. Even Ollie North took a trip down there to meet with old friends. This kind of intervention undermines US credibility and feeds the anti-American resentment on which leftist Latin American politics thrive. While the rise of leftist demagogues in Latin America is worrisome–Chavez in Venezuela, Morales in Bolivia–the best way to deal with this development is not to return to the traditional US role of intervening in Latin American affairs, often militarily, to support US business interests and stability-at-all-costs. This kind of intervention feeds leftist movements, while displays of respect serve to defang them. There is such a thing as purposeful nonintervention, and that is exactly what should be employed today in countries ranging from Mexico to Chile.

The re-emergence of Ortega is not nearly so worrisome as the failure of certain conservatives to adjust to the fact that the Cold War is over. If the Democratic Congress’s attempts to de-fund the Contras shows a failure to appreciate the continuing Soviet threat in spite of the Vietnam debacle, the habit among some conservative to support the same kinds of heavy-handed interventions employed during the Cold War shows a similar failure to adjust to changed circumstances. It is the kind of folly responsible for dubious US interventions in Kosovo, Somalia, and Haiti.

If Nicaragua or Venezuela wants to sell its future down the river, it is really not a major concern of the US. Communism mattered during the Cold War because it was an enterprise of our major international foreign policy rival. No ordinary rival, the Soviet Union was animated by a revolutionary ideology that explicitly threatened not only our interests, but also our sovereignty and our civilization.

Today, much of what happens in the world is not a major threat to America, because most conflicts do not involve a net gain or loss to a signle, self-concious international foreign policy rival. Today, conflicts are often parochial, regional, and containable. This is as true in Nicaragua as it is Asia, Lebanon, Israel, or any number of other locales. If our chief foreign policy threat comes from stateless Islamic terrorists, it is particularly important that the US husbands its resources and considers more carefully where it devotes foreign policy resources.