The Soviet Assault on America's Southern Flank.

SPEAKING at the University of Virginia this past December, Ronald Reagan conceded that perhaps the greatest disappointment of his Presidency was his failure to favorably resolve the crisis in Central America. Far from diminishing in intensity, the conflict has widened in recent years as the Sandinistas have been permitted to retain power in Nicaragua, becoming the region's leading source of Communist insurgency. Indeed, as James R. Whelan and Franklin A. Jaeckle argue in their new book, The Soviet Assault on America's Southern Flank (Regnery Gateway, $17.95), "The very stability and safety of the United States itself is at greater risk now from our southern flank than ever before in our history." In some four hundred pages of text, the authors provide a comprehensive overview of the current situation and dispel many of the myths generated by our own news media.

It is easy to forget that as recently as the mid 1970s, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua enjoyed political stability and previously unknown levels of economic prosperity, and were firmly allied with the United States. Conditions in Central America, as elsewhere, took a sharp turn for the worse after Jimmy Carter became President in 1977. The authors point out that "Carter brought to the Presidency an innocence of historical perspective perhaps without parallel among our modern Presidents. . . . Carter approached every new international crisis as if it had no roots." Carter made "human rights" the theme of his foreign policy. In practice, this theme became an ideological bludgeon to be used against governments-many of them with a long record of friendship with the U.S. that fell into disfavor with the New Left activists who filled the policy-making ranks of the Carter Administration.

El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua were among the first targets of Carter's human-rights crusade-of which, as one unfortunate government after another underwent U.S.-supported "destabilization," Communist guerrillas emerged as the prime beneficiaries. After four years of Jimmy Carter, Central America stood transformed, torn by Marxist insurgency and deteriorating economic conditions. In their review of the current scene, Whelan and Jaeckle demonstrate that Nicaragua, under the Carter- and Castro-backed Sandinista regime, has undergone an economic collapse of catastrophic proportions: real income per capita was more than eight times as high in 1979Somoza's last year in power-as it is today.

Despite the poverty of their subjects, however, the Sandinistas have acquired the military means to spread their brand of Marxist revolution, and its attendant chaos, well beyond the borders of Nicaragua. Since 1980, the USSR has poured twice as much military aid into Nicaragua as the U.S. has sent to the other four Central American states combined. According to Major Roger Miranda Bengoechea (who was chief aide in the Sandinista defense ministry when he defected to the U.S. in 1987), the Soviets have promised to underwrite Nicaragua's military expansion to the point where, by the early 1990s, the Sandinistas will be able to field a well-equipped army of six hundred thousand.

Whelan and Jaeckle stress that the turmoil in which Nicaragua threatens to engulf more and more of Central America could well spill over into Mexico, a country already debilitated by decades of misrule. Needless to say, if social and economic conditions in Mexico deteriorate much further, the present silent invasion of Mexican "feet people," which already brings more than a million illegal immigrants into the U.S. each year, could become a tidal wave. (In the meantime, it is interesting to note that while the U.S. continues to debate the wisdom of securing its southern border against any manner of incursion, in 1982 Mexico formed a quick-reaction force to defend its own southern border.)

Tomas Borge, the Sandinistas' minister of the interior, told Newsweek in 1983: "The battle for Nicaragua is not being waged in Nicaragua. It is being fought in the United States." Thus far, the Sandinistas have more than held their own, their cause championed in this country by a network of political and religious organizations that are well connected with both the Democratic Party and the national press. Aid to the anti-Communist elements, on the other hand, has amounted to only a fraction of that needed to overthrow the unpopular Sandinista regime. Don Simon, a military analyst cited by the authors, sums it up this way: "What we are doing now is something very immoral. We are giving the Contras just enough money to keep on bleeding and dying in the jungles without giving them enough to win."

In the end, it would certainly cost us less to deal with the Marxist threat in Central America now than to let the entire region become part of a Sandinista empire, thus sending even more millions of refugees streaming toward this country (already, more than 10 per cent of the population of El Salvador is living illegally in California and Texas). The information and insights contained in this book need to be widely disseminated in order to break the deadlock on U.S. policyforeign and domestic. to the infinitely busier, showier, phonier emoting of Dustin Hoffman. But for the reat thing-unaccommodated man, the poor, bare, forked animalmake mine Max.