American Communists and fellow travelers in the U.S. Congress, universities, and churches have undermined the nation’s ability to combat the spread of Marxist-Leninist regimes in the Third World. This is the thesis of Michael Radu’s recent review of six counterrevolutionary movements occurring in the 1980s (Eritrea, Angola, Mozambique, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua). The six case studies are written mostly by consultants or staff members of the RAND Corporation, Freedom Research Foundation, CIA, and Radu’s own Foreign Policy Research Institute. It is not a scholarly work. The collection assumes that the new insurgencies constitute some sort of coherent, cross-nationally comparable phenomenon hut fails to explain convincingly its nature. What do the Nicaraguan Contras, Afghan Mujahideen, Cambodian Khmer Rouge, Eritrean Liberation Movement, and the rest all have in common? Certainly there is no ideological unity to these movements that run from revolutionary to traditional aims. Radu’s introduction claims instead that all the insurgencies are “functionally anticommunist,” an ill-defined phrase that is immediately elided to stand for proindependence. Yet no consideration is given to whether these movements aspire to independence from the West or for their own people.
The New Insurgencies is little more than an analytically (and morally) muddled defense of U.S. intervention in Third World struggles of all sorts. It fails to identify a coherent phenomenon and to pursue its explanation. Theories of revolution receive no attention, which is not surprising for a nonacademic work. But even the evidence contradicting the book’s thesis about liberal domination of U.S. foreign policy is ignored—perhaps because of the embarrassing fiasco of illegal funding of the Nicaraguan Contras that, in fact, was U.S. policy when the book was written.
