REMEMBER NICARAGUA?

And why should you? Neither the American press, nor the Clinton administration, nor the Republican-led Congress has paid much attention to Nicaragua hese past few years. After more than a decade of revolution and counterrevolution, aided and abetted by the United States both indirectly and directly, Nicaragua has fallen victim to a new kind of conspiracy in Washington: a conspiracy of indifference.

Only a decade ago, Nicaragua was such a central concern in the United States that the names of its government’s leaders and those of its political and military opposition were more familiar to many people than the names of congressmen and senators — names like Daniel and Humberto Ortega, Tomas Borge, and Ernesto Cardenal (in the Communist corner) and Arturo Cruz (Jr. and Sr.), Eden Pastora, and Alfonso Robelo (in the contra corner). The foreign policy of the United States came to center around the Central American nation of 3 million people, approximately the size of Massachusetts. High-ranking offcials went to jail because of it. And six years ago, all the toil and agony seemed to reach an unexpectedly triumphant conclusion when the democratic forces led by presidential candidate Violeta Chamorro defeated the Communist Sandinista government in a landslide.

Now, six years later, Nicaragua’s shaky experiment in democracy is at risk from a political habit that far predates the nation’s brushes with democracy and This article has been adapted kott ContdbttiEditor Robert Kazan’s A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-199(), just publistted by the Free Press. communism: assassination as a pragmatic tool of governance. But there is a way of preventing the country from falling back into its long- standing cycle of tyranny intermingled with revolution and anarchy. It is simple, costs very little, and would be crowned with success. All it requires is that American policy-makers pay Nicaragua some attention between now and the elections to be held in October.

In recent months, the Chamorro government has become more the problem than the solution to Nicaragua’s lingering ills. The deformities of a political culture don’t vanish overnight, and its one free election has not proved a panacea for Nicaragua. Following a long tradition of continuismo, honed to perfection by the Somoza family from the 1930s to the 1970s, the Chamorro government has begun trying to perpetuate itself by engineering the election of Antonio Lacayo, Chamorro’s son and the current power behind the throne.

But continuismo is not so easy to pull off if you have to play by democratic rules, and so the Chamorro government has been bending those rules a bit. Lacayo has had to finagle to get around a wise provision in the Nicaraguan constitution prohibiting relatives of the sitting president from running for the office. He seems to have succeeded, and now his hopes rest on the chance that Aleman and former revolutionary dictator Daniel Ortega will cancel each other out in a first round of voting and leave Lacayo as the ” centrist” choice in a second round.

Unfortunately for Lacayo, his popularity among the Nicaraguan people is at Morry Taylor levels, and so some other nefarious sleights-of-hand have been required to tilt the electoral system. Odd new voter registration rules threaten to make it hard for Aleman’s main constituency — the hundreds of thousands of peasants and small farmers, including former contras and their supporters — to get to the polls in November. Even Ortega, the second most popular candidate, has complained of mistreatment and persecution at the hands of the government, a fitting irony for someone who, at one time or another, jailed or repressed almost every major political figure on the Nicaraguan scene. And then there’s the question of whether Aleman can survive long enough to participate in the October elections. The January assassination attempt may not be the last.

All this is taking place in international darkness — a striking contrast to February 1990, when the Sandinistas held their ill-fated elections. The whole world was watching then. Former President Jimmy Carter led an effort to monitor the elections that included hundreds of observers from both the United Nations and the Organization of American States. Monitoring began months before the actual vote. Registration laws made it possible for approximately 1.7 million out of 1.9 million eligible voters to cast a ballot. Every action of the Sandinista-controlled electoral commission was observed and commented upon by powerful figures like Carter, Elliot Richardson, Costa Rica’s Nobel-Prize-winning former president Oscar Arias, and an intensely interested Bush administration.

On election day, 700 official observers traveled throughout the country by jeep, helicopter, on horseback, and on foot, visiting more than half of the 4, 000- plus polling stations. In addition to these offcial observers, there were more than 1,000 unofficial observers from many countries and as many as 1,000 foreign journalists present. Most came to watch the Sandinistas win, but their presence wound up ensuring a landslide defeat. A large majority of Nicaraguan voters, finally confident that their vote would be counted, turned the Sandinistas out of power.

These days, you certainly wouldn’t know from listening to the Clinton administration that anything was amiss in Nicaragua. Neither President Clinton nor Secretary of State Warren Christopher nor National Security Adviser Anthony Lake has spoken publicly about Nicaragua — despite the fact that Christopher once played a significant part in the Carter administration’s bungled effort to steer Nicaragua toward democracy in the late 1970s, and Lake wrote a much-esteemed book about that fiasco. When Christopher made his first-ever trip to Latin America last month, he didn’t even mention the coming elections in Nicaragua. The theme of his trip was the environment, not democracy. And at his one Central American stop, in E1 Salvador, Christopher boldly declared that “the buildups of heat-trapping or greenhouse gases are among the most significant long-term environmental and diplomatic challenges facing the world.” The besieged and beleaguered campesinos of northern Nicaragua will be glad to hear it.

But, truth to tell, Democrats don’t feel a proprietary interest in Nicaragua’s fate today. We can send 10,000 troops to try to establish democracy in Haiti, but we cannot spend 10 minutes thinking about how to support the democracy we helped establish in Nicaragua. Some of this is simply partisan American politics. In the 1980s and 90s, Nicaragua was a Republican party problem, and the democracy born there was more a Republican than a Democratic success.

But today’s Republican leaders (with the notable exception of Jesse Helms) have either forgotten what they once claimed was their enormous concern for the peaceful democratization of Nicaragua or are too new to Washington to have participated in those raucous 1980s debates over communism and contras. ” Reagan Doctrine”? “Freedom fighters”? “Democratic revolution”? Six years ago these phrases stirred Republican souls. Today they are forgotten and incomprehensible relics of a bygone era, the modern version of Browning’s “I am Ozymandias/Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

It would not be surprising if Nicaragua, once the showcase of Republican foreign policy successes, became the first victim of the Republicans” abandonment of the principles which made those successes possible. That would be a tragedy, but it would not be novel. Nicaragua has served as a strange kind of barometer of America’s shifting foreign policy moods throughout the 20th century.

When Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson extended the umbrella of American hegemony over the Western Hemisphere at the beginning of this century, proclaiming the desire to lift its troubled peoples “upward toward peace and order” and to teach them “to elect good men,” Nicaragua was the site of a 21-year Marine occupation that ended in 1933 with the first free elections in its tumultuous history.

When the United States turned toward isolationism in the early 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt’s see-no-evil “Good Neighbor” policy eased the way for General Anastasio Somoza to overthrow Nicaragua’s nascent democratic system and impose a family dynasty that survived the next four decades. When Jimmy Carter took office in 1977, traumatized by Vietnam and guilt-ridden by a history of American support for Latin dictators, he rattled the Somoza dynasty until it collapsed but then stood by while a 16-year-old Marxist- Leninist “liberation” movement — the Sandinistas — won a stunning revolutionary triumph.

The election of Ronald Reagan opened a new chapter in the remarkably intertwined history of the two countries. Under Reagan, the United States embarked on an unprecedented effort to spread democratic institutions in the Western Hemisphere and around the world as part of a global ideological offensive against communism. The triumph of 1990 was a product of this broad shift in American policy in the 1980s. And that same foreign policy, dubbed the “Reagan Doctrine” in 1985 by Charles Krauthammer, ultimately proved a catalyst in bringing about America’s peaceful victory in the Cold War.

The Reagan Doctrine was born in Central America. Three months after the successful U.S.-backed elections in El Salvador in 1982, Reagan gave a speech to the British Parliament, where for the first time in his presidency he proclaimed America’s support for democratic change everywhere in the world — the socalled “Westminster Speech.” Emboldened by the results in El Salvador, where “suffering people were offered a chance to vote,” Reagan declared it the right of all human beings to struggle for freedom and democracy and the obligation of the United States to support that struggle. “If the rest of this century is to witness the gradual growth of freedom and democratic ideals,” he said, “we must take actions to assist the campaign for democracy.” Those actions included support for those struggling for freedom in Communist countries like Sandinista Nicaragua.

Reagan outlined his broad vision of a democratic revolution that would eventually engulf even the Soviet Union. The Soviets, he said, were “not immune from the reality of what is going on in the world.” And he offered a confident prediction of the Soviet Union’s future that was so optimistic as to be ridiculed at the time. “It has happened in the past,” he insisted, that

a small ruling elite either mistakenly attempts to ease domestic unrest through greater repression and foreign adventure, or it chooses a wiser course. It begins to allow its people a voice in their own destiny. Even if this latter process is not realized soon, I believe the renewed strength of the democratic movement, complemented by a global campaign for freedom, will strengthen the prospects for arms control and a world at peace.

While the Reagan Doctrine is best remembered as support for anti-Communist guerrilla movements in Nicaragua, Angola, Afghanistan, and Cambodia, from the start it had a broader meaning and purpose. By linking together the simultaneous struggles for democracy in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Eastern Europe, and in the Soviet Union itself, Reagan appealed to the enduring idealism of Americans across the political spectrum. The Reagan Doctrine wrapped a conservative Republican president’s aggressive anti-Communist strategy in a broader cloak that attracted moderate Democrats and confounded liberals.

It responded to the political circumstances of post-Vietnam America, in which unabashed support for right-wing dictatorships, even those fighting Communist guerrillas, could not withstand popular scrutiny and distaste, and in which the support of anti-Communist guerrilla groups had to be justified on more than “realist” or anti-Communist grounds. For Reagan, the new doctrine suited his preferred political style. It was a message of optimism, rather than of despair; it pointed to opportunities rather than dangers. The new doctrine offered the possibility of an end to the Cold War that was both peaceful and democratic.

While Reagan’s less idealistic advisers might have seen in this strategy only an effective means of bleeding the Soviet Union’s resources and punishing it for expanding its reach in the 1970s, that was not the way Reagan explained his policies to the American people. The purpose, he proclaimed, was democracy, not aggressive containment waged to the last Afghan or Nicaraguan.

Reagan was venturing onto uncharted ideological terrain, leaving traditional Republican foreign policy behind. Dominated by “realists” for whom such democratic “messianism” was a recipe for endless disillusionment and failure, and by more traditional anti-Communists, highly skeptical that democracy among allied countries in the developing world could be pursued without undermining American interests, the Republican party and the conservative movement were not the natural home for the Reagan Doctrine in its double-edged form.

But the Reagan Doctrine’s effectiveness in uniting the country behind an assertive American foreign policy was undeniable. At the height of the Cold War, with the most fervently anti-Communist president in American history, a Congress half-controlled by Democrats, and a populace moved by conflicting desires for national assertiveness and withdrawal, the Reagan Doctrine came as close as any other international political strategy to answering the contradictory demands of the time. It proved both attractive and frightening to a Democratic party divided between anti-Communists and liberal idealists and seeking a marriage between the two.

The tearing down of the old “double standard” — by which conservatives and liberals accused one another of coddling dictators of the left or right — came as welcome relief to many Democrats, who could better justify their anti- communism when it was explicitly tied to support of democracy. For moderate and conservative Democrats, the attraction of the Reagan Doctrine was that its anti-communism was subsumed in a higher idealism with Democratic roots; it removed some of the stigma that Democrats had long attached to Republican anti-communism.

Over the course of the 1980s, therefore, the Reagan Doctrine evolved from a tactic of political salesmanship into a successful grand strategy for U.S. foreign policy. Its sweeping application of American political philosophy and morality to the conduct of international affairs propelled the United States and its allies safely through the end of the Cold War. The world it helped produce in the post-Cold War era was safer and more conducive to American material interests and ideals than at any time in the nation’s history. The holding of free elections in Nicaragua was only one brick in this great edifice, but it had value as an enduring symbol of the Reagan Doctrine’s achievements.

Such a successful policy ought to have survived the end of the Cold War. Why abandon a strategy that worked so well for the United States? But it was precisely the success of Reagan’s foreign policy that has now led to its unraveling. The Communist danger which was overwhelmed by the Reagan-led ideological offensive has disappeared, depriving many Americans, and especially many Republicans, of the old rationale for a pro-democratic foreign policy in Nicaragua and elsewhere. After being vanquished by Reaganite idealism, “realism” has returned triumphant. As a result, most Americans believe that whatever happens in Nicaragua, whether presidential candidates are assassinated or elections are stolen, matters little to the United States. If our “vital national security interests” are no longer threatened by Soviet-backed Communist governments, then what concern need we have for the fate of Nicaraguan democracy?

In Nicaragua, and in other countries in this hemisphere, we seem to be caught in an endless repeating cycle of intervention and withdrawal, intervention and withdrawal. Ten years ago, we spent hundreds of millions of dollars, supported a brutal war, fought vicious political battles at home, and suffered through monumental scandals, all to put an end to Communist tyranny and bring democratic elections to Nicaragua. Having accomplished that goal, however, we seem prepared now to wash our hands of the place. The pattern is certainly familiar enough. In the 1930s, after two decades of occupation and the supervision of fair elections, the United States abruptly turned away and allowed the fragile edifice it had built to be destroyed under Somoza’s heel. Then, as now, the United States suffered from an apparently incurable case of inconsistency and inattention. Today, as in the 1930s, that inattention threatens the democratic insti tutions we did so much to implant in Nicaragua.

But the United States only has to do a very little bit to keep Nicaragua on a reasonably steady course in its democratic development. The 1990 elections did succeed in creating a more open society, one where criticism of the government can be heard uncensored in the media and in the National Assembly. The fresh winds of open democratic processes have tattered the old Sandinista party. It has splintered into factions. The military, once fully in Sandinista service, seems to have moved in the direction of political neutrality. The Nicaraguan economy remains in dire straits but is showing signs of improvement. And the most obvious symbol of the changing political culture in Nicaragua is the great success of someone like Arnoldo Aleman, a government critic outside the elite circles of power who nevertheless outpolls the government’s favored candidate ten-to-one.

Success in Nicaragua does not require a war, an economic blockade, or even large amounts of foreign aid. All Nicaragua needs is a few months’ worth of careful international scrutiny, ensuring a second fair election in October. The country craves the attention, and the voters need the security that scrutiny would provide.

If the United States pursued a consistent policy, one that assumed responsibility for the development of democratic institutions and the peaceful transfer of power in Nicaragua, it could break out of its cycle of spasmodic intervention and hasty withdrawal that has been harmful to both countries. Indeed, the more the United States assumed such a role, the less it would have to use its power directly. A steady, low level of involvement, making subtle use of American influence, would probably obviate the need for the kinds of forceful interventions that have caused so much controversy over the years. After all, the exercise of only a little influence would probably have prevented the first Somoza from upsetting the electoral system established in the late 1920s. Not much more would have been necessary to manage the transition from the Somoza dictatorship to a more moderate, democratic government in 1979. In the 1990s, a steady involvement by the United States could help forestall developments that may eventually threaten Nicaragua’s peace again.

But a steady policy requires steady adherence to some broader principles. Perhaps it is time for the United States, and especially for Republicans, to pick up the discarded principles of the Reagan Doctrine, to place our ideals once again at the center of our foreign policy. Sometimes such a principled foreign policy will require the sacrifice of blood and treasure. Happily, in Nicaragua, it requires only a watchful eye.

This article has been adapted from Contributing Editor Robert Kagan’s A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicargua, 1977-1990, just published by the Free Press.