U.S. FOREIGN POLICY Christopher Hitchens examines
the reasoning behind Reagan's hostility to Nicaragua
SELF-DEFENCE OR MORAL DUTY?
Washington THIS HAS not been a week for the observance of fine distinctions. First we were told that His Holiness the Pope supported the President's Central America policy; a statement which provoked the first Vatican denial of a White House claim that anybody can remember. Then we were told that the dead Nazi soldiers ;interred at Bitburg were victims of the Third Reich 'just as surely' as those who 'perished in the Final Solution. Finally, we were assured that American aid to the Somozista mercenaries would be 'human- itarian' rather than military — the famous distinction first drawn by the World Coun- cil of Churches, which stipulates that if you iconfine yourself to the donation of blank- ets, bandages, contraceptives and video cassettes you can plausibly distance your- self from what the lads do with the money they no longer have to spend on such ;necessities.
Behind the whole Nicaragua argument is a very important distinction; one which is more often acknowledged than observed. This distinction has become clearer since the Administration dropped its risible claim that the Sandinistas were behind the revolution in El Salvador and openly de- clared for their overthrow as a regime. Asked bluntly, the question is this. Does the United States claim the right to change the government of Nicaragua because it is Marxist-Leninist? Or does it claim this right because it poses a threat to the United States?
In sober and private discussions, there are many members and supporters of the Administration who recognise that one needs to prove that the second of these two questions — answered in the affirmative is the crucial one. Yet, when the President speaks to Congress and asks it in effect for a declaration of war without the formali- ties, he gives the impression that the enemy is atheism. If there is going to be a war (and it looks as if there is going to be one) then it would be as well to know in advance what its justification will be.
Recently, a round table was convened by the Heritage Foundation, which is Ronald Reagan's favourite think-tank. The assem- bled conservatives were asked to consider the question: 'What is the nature of our conflict with the Soviet Union?' Responses ranged from the traditional, through the Manichean, and all the way over to the candidly pragmatic. Donald Rumsfeld, the former Republican secretary of defence, stated plainly: 'Our differences are rooted in a fundamental conflict of values.' Richard Allen, on the right, and Richard Pipes, on the unclassifiable end of the spectrum, spoke of an inevitable Kultur- kampf and of the resort to self-deception and appeasement among liberals. Jeane Kirkpatrick, rather perversely, took the view that things were manageable if one was not too obsessed with ideology. She said: There is an ideological dimension, but it is not primarily a contest of ideas. There are other communist states, for example Yugos- lavia, China and Albania, with which we have important disagreements about the nature of the good society, about what works, about what is important, but with which the United States is not in conflict.
Indeed, it has been frequently admitted lately that the United States positively hopes for the continuance, under stable successors, of Enver Hoxha's dungeon Stalinism in Albania. If the regime became as liberal as, say, Hungary, it might rejoin the Warsaw Pact. So the game of nations does not follow any very strict or principled rules.
Why, then, in calling for an armed assault on their government and their
economy, does the President accuse the
Sandinistas of harassing La Prensa and publishing postage stamps commemorating Karl Marx? As far as its internal regime goes, Nicaragua can easily stand compari- son with Haiti, Chile or El Salvador, and should hardly be mentioned in the same breath as Guatemala. And it poses no threat to Honduras which could not be contained by a mutual assistance treaty between that country and the US. Yet this is deemed insufficient. The Sandinistas must not be contained, they must be overthrown. And so it doesn't matter, for example, that the Marx memorial stamp was in a series which included George Washington. We have moved into the area of dispute where the non-sequitur is king. There are three reasons why the Reagan Administration prefers, in fact needs, to concentrate on the internal stupidities of the Sandinista regime. The first is that it needs to recruit liberal opinion, or at least to neutralise it. And liberal opinion is stirred by nothing so much as a persecuted newspaper editor (a commodity in which the isthmus is unusually wealthy). The second is that the contras are only in- terested in the internal affairs of Nicar- agua, and in regaining their lost control over them. The third is that no hard, or even soft, evidence of a Sandinista expan- sionist threat can be conjured into exist- ence. This week the White House tried to show a drug-smuggling connection which, if proven, would still put Managua way behind La Paz, San Salvador, Mexico City, Bogota and Nassau — on none of which capitals does the United States levy war. The threat of economic sanctions is the farthest the Administration has ever taken a narcotics dispute with far more flagrant offenders.
It does, in the end, come down to the historically embarrassing business of the 'back yard'. American 'Marines were land- ed in Nicaragua more than half a century ago to insure against what was then called 'Bolshevism'. The very name of the new threat is taken from the man who opposed that colonial undertaking. If Reagan is going to convince Congress, he will have to show that this intervention is different from the previous ones; that it is, in short, not just bullying Monrovian imperialism. He has produced no sort of manifesto for the sort of government which he would like in Nicaragua. He can, of course, keep on insisting that anything — which means anything — is better than any kind of communism. But that would bring him closer to the occupants of the Bitburg cemetery than I would judge he would find comfortable.
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