Freedom on the Offensive

William Michael Schmidli, a US foreign relations historian at Leiden University in the Netherlands, has made another major contribution to the study of the late Cold War period. His first book, The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere: Human Rights and US Cold War Policy toward Argentina (2013), is the best bilateral study we have of US policy toward a South American country during the Jimmy Carter administration. This new book primarily focuses on US relations with Nicaragua during the Ronald Reagan administration. Readers may at times misunderstand Schmidli's own perspective, even in his title. When he writes about Reagan's policies, he sounds like a Reaganite. And when he writes about Nicaragua, he sounds like a Sandinista. Some may find this unsettling. I take it to be one of his strengths as a historian.Convinced that Carter's human rights policy had undermined valuable Cold War allies in the Western Hemisphere, Reagan came into office determined to undo it. After his nominee to replace Patricia Derian, Ernest Lefever, was defeated, he realized that the policy had been popular with many in his own party. President Reagan had to reverse himself and find a way to weaponize human rights for his own purposes. Schmidli devotes significant attention here to the worldview of Jeane Kirkpatrick, a Democrat who would serve as Reagan's first ambassador to the United Nations and who considered Central America “quite simply the most important place in the world” (quoted in p. 5). Hindered by the breakdown of the Cold War consensus over the previous decade, the administration sought to gain bipartisan support by selling its policy as democracy promotion.In the case of Nicaragua, this was defined as a frontal attack on the Sandinista attempt to transform their country's society. The Sandinistas made one of the last attempts to present an alternative vision to what, over the course of Reagan's two terms in office, would become a dominant neoliberal economic model, a free-market fundamentalism that admitted of no inclusion of social and economic rights as human rights. The Sandinistas were seen as having taken their country “behind the Iron Curtain” (quoted in p. 133). The evidence I have seen in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum shows clearly that officials really believed their own rhetoric on the nature of the Sandinista government, even though they privately had some suspicions that the guerrillas who they hoped would overthrow the Sandinistas were not who they claimed to be. In the end, pressure from the Reagan administration was successful in forcing the Sandinistas to spend more on defense, which then became a justification for the Reagan administration's policies. With this defense spending, combined with the failure of state-run farms, the Sandinistas' revolutionary project began to falter, ushering in austerity policies.Schmidli is particularly good on the development of the National Endowment for Democracy. He correctly sees this as a fundamental building block in the creation of an aggressive foreign policy that would reach its peak at the end of the Cold War and afterward. As the lone superpower, the United States felt free to engage in foreign adventures, particularly in the Middle East. The creation of this foreign policy is Schmidli's main concern, and many Latin Americanists will be less drawn to the many pages that he devotes to what is often a very big picture in which the reader loses sight of Nicaragua.One of his most effective chapters addresses the opposition of US citizens to US policy in Nicaragua. Schmidli is rather skeptical of the depth of understanding that many activists had about conditions inside Nicaragua. He powerfully frames this chapter around the experience of a Vietnam veteran named S. Brian Willson, who eventually sacrificed his limbs and suffered brain damage trying to prevent trains from delivering weapons to Central America.Schmidli does not convince this reader at least that Kirkpatrick herself became as influential a player as he insists. She was an isolated figure among Democrats and even ultimately in the Reagan administration. If there developed a bipartisan consensus in favor of the contras, it was intermittent and short-lived during the Reagan years and was done in not least of all in the end by the Iran-Contra Affair revelations. A bipartisan consensus did develop in Central America, of course, but on El Salvador, during the presidency of José Napoleón Duarte. Democrats and Republicans joined together again during the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush, with the opportunities created by Costa Rican president Óscar Arias's regional peace plan to provide large-scale (and public, at Democrats' instance) assistance to presidential candidate Violeta Barrios de Chamorro. Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration saw the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas as a victory for democracy promotion

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