The secret war in Central America: Sandinista assault on world order.

Central America and the Reagan Doctrine The Secret War in Central America

WHILE THE Sandinistas may be winning the propaganda war in the U.S. media, they seem to be losing it on the scholarly front--two recent examples being Central America and the Reagan Doctrine (University Press of America/Boston University, 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, Md. 20706; $25.50 hardcover, $12.25 paperback), edited by Walter F. Hahn and with an introduction by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, and The Secret War in Central America: Sandinista Assault on World Order (University Publications of America, 44 North Market Street, Frederick, Md. 21701; $17.95), by John Norton Moore, who is Director of the Center for Law and National Security at the University of Virginia School of Law.

Central America and the Reagan Doctrine is a compilation of articles published originally in Strategic Review, the quarterly journal of the United States Strategic Institute, founded in Washington in 1972 by a group of military leaders and strategists alarmed by the defeatist attitudes engendered by the Vietnam War. The immediate focus of the volume at hand is the Soviet penetration of Central America and the Reagan Administration's response.

In "Central America: The Larger Regional Scenario,' R. Bruce MColm presents in outline the Soviet strategy in Latin America and the Caribbean, as described in vastly greater detail by Timothy Ashby's The Bear in the Back Yard ("The Right Books,' NR, June 5). This strategy could have the effect of holding the United States hostage, in its interests overseas, to perilously destabilized conditions along its southern border and in the Caribbean Basin--a threat to which President Reagan, breaking with the timorous inattention of the Nixon and Carter Administrations, responded with what has become known as the Reagan Doctrine, adumbrated by the Grenada action in 1983 and specified in the President's State of the Union address in 1986, in which he asserted that any people trying to free itself from Communist tyranny could count on receiving aid from the United States. In "The Reagan Doctrine in Outline,' William R. Bode describes the evolution of this policy, while, in "The Reagan Doctrine: It Awaits Implementation,' Angelo Codevilla assesses its efficacy to date, concluding that, so far at least, "The Reagan Doctrine is one more species of that present-day American phenomenon: the declaratory policy.' And, in a most thought-provoking article, "Why Not a Kennedy-Reagan Doctrine?' John R. Silber argues that Reagan's assertions bear a striking similitude to President John F. Kennedy's pledge, in 1962, that the United States would not invade Cuba so long as that island did not threaten the peace or freedom of the U.S. or any other country in the hemisphere: thus placing the Reagan Doctrine, largely treated by the media as simply another of this Administration's hawkish, swashbuckling poses, in the honorable tradition of Kennedy's "Go anywhere, pay any price' oration, the Truman Doctrine, and the Monroe Doctrine.

The Secret War in Central America is a book of 195 pages, probably a third of which are notes, but John Norton Moore gets his point across: that, for two thousand years, the "core principle of world order' has been that the aggressive attack by one country upon another is prohibited in international relations, but that there exists today a fundamental threat to said principle:

That threat is an assault on world order by radical regimes that share a common antipathy to democratic values and a "true belief' in the use of force for expansion of regime ideology. This radical-regime assault is particularly destabilizing since, by maintaining a moral justification for the use of force to achieve "revolutionary internationalism,' it simultaneously fights a guerrilla war against the core . . . principle while publicly denying any actual state-sanctioned use of force in order to receive the protection of the very legal order it is attacking.

After taking due note of the "alarming proliferation' of such hostile, trouble-exporting, and, in the truest sense of the word, "imperialistic' regimes, Moore defines the Cuba-Nicaragua connection, in Nicaragua's secret war against its Central American neighbors, as "one of the most serious challenges to the future of the legal order.' Closely associated with this war is a "diverse conglomerate' of such choice terroristic fraternities as the PLO, M-19 (Colombia), Montoneros (Argentina), Tupamaros (Uruguay), ETA (Spain), Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhof, and IRA, not to mention the Soviet, East German, Bulgarian, Czechoslovakian, Cuban, Vietnamese, Ethiopian, North Korean, Libyan, Iraqi, and Iranian governments, representatives of which are currently operating out of Nicaragua: quite an impressive array of international talent to be mixed in with what--so liberal critics of the Reagan Doctrine assure us--is merely a temporary, localized boiling up of indigenous grievances, certain to subside in due time if only Lieutenant Colonel North and his superiors will quit shoving sticks under the pot.