In Condemned to Repetition, Robert Pastor has been successful in walking the narrow tightrope between the political memoir of a national security council official and an academic analysis of the evolution of U.S.-Nicaraguan police during the presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. As director for Latin America and the Caribbean in the Carter administration National Security Council, Pastor might well have been excused a purely memoir account, and even had he not gone beyond that he would still have made a very positive contribution to our understanding of the decision-making process in those years. Much to his credit, however, Pastor has given us more.
Quoting a 1983 Foreign Affairs article by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Pastor reminds us that foreign policy is the face a nation shows to the world, and that U.S. foreign policy is in large part the product of the political culture in which the modern United States was born: the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with its emphasis on individualism, rationalism, and political and religious tolerance. He traces many of the differences between the U.S. approach and that of Latin America to the latter’s political heritage from Mediterranean Europe of absolutism, centralism, hierarchy, and militarism—a heritage that was little altered by independence from Europe. Although those traits have not been restricted to the political right in Latin America, Pastor observes, correctly I believe, that the main concern of the United States in Latin America has not been with the right but with the Communist left, or what has been perceived to be Communism. That anxiety considerably predated the cold war; it was, after all, the Kellogg State Department in the 1920s that produced a semihysterical document on the Bolshevik threat in Central America.
Except for a brief historical survey of pre-1977 Nicaraguan history and of U.S. policy during that period, the book concentrates on the Carter years and should remain an indispensable source on that administration. Pastor has supplemented his own NSC office files with an impressive range of privileged interviews with U.S. and Nicaraguan participants. The Carter administration confronted a series of dilemmas in Central American policy: how to treat the corrupt, authoritarian regime of Anastasio Somoza Debayle; whether to contribute to his overthrow, and, if so, how to find a mechanism that would establish a pluralistic, non-Marxist Sandinista government that would not be pro-Cuban and pro-Soviet. Pastor argues convincingly that the Carter administration, as well as the governments of Costa Rica and Venezuela, were determined to avoid another Cuban debacle but failed because the administration waited too long to act against Somoza, and for 18 months after Somoza’s fall supported the Sandinista revolution. The implication is that if the Carter administration had acted earlier against Somoza, it would have been possible to avoid a clear military victory by the Sandinistas, factions of which were being supported in part by Venezuela and Costa Rica. At the same time, it is difficult to fault the Carter administration’s preoccupation with its human rights commitment in Central America and its determination to adhere to negotiation and diplomacy, a refreshing contrast to what would follow under his Republican successor. It should be of some consolation to Carter administration officials to see the return in 1988 to an emphasis on negotiation, with much of the initiative coining from Central America.
In his necessarily abbreviated analysis of the post-Carter years, Pastor casts a wide net of responsibility for the “loss” of Nicaragua, although it is highly debatable that Nicaragua has at any time in the period covered been “lost.” Pastor is justifiably critical of the Reagan administration’s abandonment of diplomacy to fund an “exile” war which often represented the worst factions of the old Somoza regime without incorporating the best of the anti-Sandinista groups; yet the Carter administration’s legacy in Nicaragua did not leave very much latitude for negotiation. As Pastor suggests, the Sandinistas succeeded, at least in the short term, because they had a “realistic military and political strategy.” One is left with the question of how one applies the title of Pastor’s book. Is the United States condemned to repeat past errors because it has failed to adopt realistic military and political strategies and placed too much emphasis on commitment to democratic processes and human rights? Is a realistic policy possible as long as a series of administrations and large sectors of North American society fail to rise above the simplistic rhetoric of anti-Communism? The history of twentieth-century reformist governments in Latin America, from some phases of the Mexican Revolution, through Guatemala in the early 1950s, Cuba in 1959, Bosch in 1965, and Allende in 1973, suggests that what is “inevitable” is that leftist reform in Latin America can count on little support and considerable open opposition from the United States, although the recent record in El Salvador suggests a basis for hope. Given the uncertainty of what to expect from the United States between 1977 and 1979, can the Sandinistas be faulted for developing a “realistic” political and military strategy? Pastor is to be congratulated for presenting an often critical look at policies to which he contributed.
