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Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-1990
A detailed history and analysis of the Nicaraguan Revolution and the American response to it
928 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 1995
122 people want to read
About the author
Robert Kagan
28 books240 followersRobert Kagan is an American historian and foreign policy commentator. Robert Kagan is the son of Yale classical historian and author, Donald Kagan. He is married to Victoria Nuland, the former U.S. ambassador to NATO, and has two children. He is the brother of political commentator Frederick Kagan.
Kagan is a columnist for the Washington Post and is syndicated by the New York Times Syndicate. He is a contributing editor at both The New Republic and the Weekly Standard, and has also written for the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, World Affairs, and Policy Review.
Kagan is a columnist for the Washington Post and is syndicated by the New York Times Syndicate. He is a contributing editor at both The New Republic and the Weekly Standard, and has also written for the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, World Affairs, and Policy Review.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 30, 2016
A thorough and critical history of US intervention in Nicaragua, Kagan’s book is quite dense. Although Kagan was a participant in many of these events, he describes all of this history in a detached and critical manner.
Kagan describes the origins of US intervention in Nicaragua under Carter, arguing that this was done out of a sense of guilt over US support for Somoza. The expansion of the operation under Reagan, Kagan argues, was done due to typical Cold War anxiety over Soviet designs in the western hemisphere, despite the reservations of many of his advisers. Kagan ably describes all of the negotiations between the US and the Soviets that made Nicaragua such a hot spot. Kagan describes American policy toward Nicaragua, and the decision-making process that formulated it, as "chaotic, lurching, changeable, and often inherently contradictory." US support for the Contras was always accompanied by a debate on whether the US should push for a decisive victory or just use it as one of many means to pressure the perceived communist foothold in the region.
Curiously, there is little coverage of the contras’ controversial drug running operations. Some more detail on the 1987 mining controversy would also have helped. In fairness, Kagan does, however, detail the Contras’ many atrocities, as well as the Sandinistas’ mismanagement of the economy, its dwindling popular support, and their diplomatic isolation. Kagan argues that the Sandinistas were “their own executioners.” Although Kagan does a fine job describing the machinations of American policymakers and politicians, he is not so great at describing the contra leadership, and he often describes the neighboring Central american states as “democracies.” Also, the book could probably have been cut by at least half due to the sheer amount of detail that seems irrelevant to the story.
An interesting and comprehensive if somewhat bloated book on the subject.
Kagan describes the origins of US intervention in Nicaragua under Carter, arguing that this was done out of a sense of guilt over US support for Somoza. The expansion of the operation under Reagan, Kagan argues, was done due to typical Cold War anxiety over Soviet designs in the western hemisphere, despite the reservations of many of his advisers. Kagan ably describes all of the negotiations between the US and the Soviets that made Nicaragua such a hot spot. Kagan describes American policy toward Nicaragua, and the decision-making process that formulated it, as "chaotic, lurching, changeable, and often inherently contradictory." US support for the Contras was always accompanied by a debate on whether the US should push for a decisive victory or just use it as one of many means to pressure the perceived communist foothold in the region.
Curiously, there is little coverage of the contras’ controversial drug running operations. Some more detail on the 1987 mining controversy would also have helped. In fairness, Kagan does, however, detail the Contras’ many atrocities, as well as the Sandinistas’ mismanagement of the economy, its dwindling popular support, and their diplomatic isolation. Kagan argues that the Sandinistas were “their own executioners.” Although Kagan does a fine job describing the machinations of American policymakers and politicians, he is not so great at describing the contra leadership, and he often describes the neighboring Central american states as “democracies.” Also, the book could probably have been cut by at least half due to the sheer amount of detail that seems irrelevant to the story.
An interesting and comprehensive if somewhat bloated book on the subject.
October 16, 2024
oh dear doctor neocon with his spin-free history
Kirkus Review
A comprehensive history of recent Nicaraguan-American relations, written by a man who helped shape that `"bloody and conflict-ridden embrace". Kagan, a policy advisor in the Reagan administration, is refreshingly self-critical; `"The ambivalent soul of America has consistently sought the fruits of hegemony in this hemisphere but just as consistently balked at the moral costs of exercising it."
But he is not overly apologetic for the Reagan administration's missteps, which came out of a domino-theory policy of armed confrontation with the avowedly Marxist Sandinista regime in the form of covert action, or what officials called `"the lowball option".
Thanks to the Iran-contra scandal that arose from the use of that option, Kagan concedes, even Republican stalwarts had to recognize that the Reagan doctrine of containment was a failure.
Kagan is a little short on addressing the notorious atrocities committed by the contras, but he openly admits their value in destablizing the Sandinista government. He is long on describing the manifold twists of superpower negotiation that kept Nicaragua on the front burner for so many years, for instance the 1987 US-Soviet summit in which Reagan suggested to Gorbachev that the Soviet Union end aid to Nicaragua as a gesture of goodwill, then went on to announce, incorrectly, that Gorbachev had agreed to a unilaterial Soviet withdrawal of military aid—thus undoing much effort to arrive at a diplomatic solution.
Kagan credits Costa Rican president Oscar Arias with helping break the impasses in US- Soviet-Nicaraguan relations, which eventually led to a Bush-era restoration of full diplomatic exchange and the establishment of free elections. Leftist critics of American policy will fault some of Kagan's interpretations. Still, this is a welcome and fluent effort to ``address that most contentious of American foreign policies not as an occasion for polemic but as a serious subject of historical investigation.''
........
Publishers Weekly
Kagan contends that the Carter administration's halfhearted intervention in Nicaragua was in response to American feelings of guilt for Washington's longtime support of the Somoza dynasty. The Reagan-era intervention, on the other hand, originated in American anxiety over Soviet encroachment in the Western hemisphere.
Kagan recounts how American popular aversion to the employment of U.S. military muscle in Central America led to the administration's covert support of the contras and goes on to explain how the clash between the Reagan White House and Congress over "freedom fighter" funding led to the Iran-contra affair in 1987.
Although the surprising electoral victory of Violeta Chamorro over the Sandinistas was widely recognized as a success for American policy, the U.S. remains caught in a continuous cycle of intervention and withdrawal in Nicaragua, according to Kagan.
As a member of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, Kagan was a direct participant in many of the events described in this authoritative and definitive account of U.S. Nicaragua relations from 1977 to 1990.
........
Foreign Affairs
A brilliant and encyclopedic history of the American intervention in Nicaragua. Kagan served in the Reagan State Department and was a midlevel participant in many of the events he chronicles.
Without abandoning his dubious conviction that aid to the contras was indispensable to removing the Sandinistas (who actually fell in a democratic election they were convinced they could not lose), Kagan nevertheless has succeeded admirably in approaching his subject from the more detached and objective station of the historian, and his literary gifts make the work appealing despite its oppressive length.
His explanation of the Sandinistas' fall stresses the "disorderly mix of policies" that other analysts have invoked to explain the demise of the Soviet Union and the collapse of South African apartheid, a synthesis admirably suited to reconciliation among ideological warriors that has the added advantage of probably being true. Americans puzzled by contemporary policies in Somalia and Bosnia in which the exit is the strategy will find ample precedent in the history of American policy toward Nicaragua in this century, a history shaped, as Kagan argues, "by the tension between the impulse to exercise moral, economic, strategic, and philosophical hegemony and the equally powerful impulse to reject both the responsibilities and the moral costs of such a role."
........
Wilson Quarterly
Robert Kagan served as assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs during the Reagan administration, and he regards U.S. support for the contras as essential to the eventual triumph of democracy in Nicaragua in 1990. But this book is more than an apologia for that policy.
An insider’s unvarnished account, it recalls the adage that if one likes sausage, one should not inquire too closely about how it is made. Kagan argues persuasively that the decision-making process was "chaotic, lurching, changeable, and often inherently contradictory."
Initially, Kagan writes, Reagan’s policymakers were no more eager to "get tough" with the Sandinistas than Jimmy Carter had been. They decided with some reluctance to support the contras only after several diplomatic overtures had failed.
At first, their goal was limited to pressuring the regime not to aid the rebels in El Salvador. But as the contras grew in number and strength, an incipient split within the administration widened between the "conservatives", who saw the contras as a force for expelling the Sandinistas, and the "pragmatists", who insisted that the contras were a political liability.
During this battle, which lasted until well into Reagan’s second term, the Sandinistas learned to their frustration that the policy’s only durable element was agreement between the White House and a shifting congressional majority that the contra option should be retained as insurance that the Sandinistas would keep promises made at the negotiating table.
Kagan regards this policy of limited aid to the contras as a necessary but not sufficient condition for the Sandinistas’ eventual demise.
Military pressure alone would not have sufficed either to topple them or to force them into elections. But combined with other factors—the Sandinistas’ mismanagement of the Nicaraguan economy, growing diplomatic isolation, and doubts about sustained Soviet support—contra aid sharply narrowed the regime’s options.
By 1989, the Sandinistas came to see free elections as the only way they could keep power, but by then it was too late.
Throughout the 1980s they had passed up too many opportunities to make peace on terms that would have saved their revolution. In the end, Kagan notes, they were "their own executioners."
Regrettably, several hundred pages of unnecessary detail make A Twilight Struggle one of those books that would have been twice as good at half the length. And it is curious to see this former Reagan administration official use certain phrases without apparent irony—such as "North American aggression" and (for U.S. encouragement of democratic elections) "hegemony."
Nevertheless, this is an impressive achievement that will surely become the standard work on a troubled chapter in U.S. foreign policy.
............
The New Republic
In 2005, the historian John Lewis Gaddis proposed in these pages that the United States adapt its Cold War strategy to the “war on terror,” as it was then termed. Even though he recognized that stateless terrorists posed a very different kind of threat than the Soviet Union’s multinational empire did, he nonetheless strove to salvage a series of lessons.
He was far from alone in drawing such analogies: In the decades since the Berlin Wall fell, foreign policy elites have looked back on the Cold War with longing.
From realists, such as John Mearsheimer and Robert Kaplan, to hawks like Niall Ferguson and Robert Kagan, thinkers have too often succumbed to the lure of nostalgia, whether to forecast post–Cold War anarchy or to valorize U.S. interventions.
.....
Kirkus Review
A comprehensive history of recent Nicaraguan-American relations, written by a man who helped shape that `"bloody and conflict-ridden embrace". Kagan, a policy advisor in the Reagan administration, is refreshingly self-critical; `"The ambivalent soul of America has consistently sought the fruits of hegemony in this hemisphere but just as consistently balked at the moral costs of exercising it."
But he is not overly apologetic for the Reagan administration's missteps, which came out of a domino-theory policy of armed confrontation with the avowedly Marxist Sandinista regime in the form of covert action, or what officials called `"the lowball option".
Thanks to the Iran-contra scandal that arose from the use of that option, Kagan concedes, even Republican stalwarts had to recognize that the Reagan doctrine of containment was a failure.
Kagan is a little short on addressing the notorious atrocities committed by the contras, but he openly admits their value in destablizing the Sandinista government. He is long on describing the manifold twists of superpower negotiation that kept Nicaragua on the front burner for so many years, for instance the 1987 US-Soviet summit in which Reagan suggested to Gorbachev that the Soviet Union end aid to Nicaragua as a gesture of goodwill, then went on to announce, incorrectly, that Gorbachev had agreed to a unilaterial Soviet withdrawal of military aid—thus undoing much effort to arrive at a diplomatic solution.
Kagan credits Costa Rican president Oscar Arias with helping break the impasses in US- Soviet-Nicaraguan relations, which eventually led to a Bush-era restoration of full diplomatic exchange and the establishment of free elections. Leftist critics of American policy will fault some of Kagan's interpretations. Still, this is a welcome and fluent effort to ``address that most contentious of American foreign policies not as an occasion for polemic but as a serious subject of historical investigation.''
........
Publishers Weekly
Kagan contends that the Carter administration's halfhearted intervention in Nicaragua was in response to American feelings of guilt for Washington's longtime support of the Somoza dynasty. The Reagan-era intervention, on the other hand, originated in American anxiety over Soviet encroachment in the Western hemisphere.
Kagan recounts how American popular aversion to the employment of U.S. military muscle in Central America led to the administration's covert support of the contras and goes on to explain how the clash between the Reagan White House and Congress over "freedom fighter" funding led to the Iran-contra affair in 1987.
Although the surprising electoral victory of Violeta Chamorro over the Sandinistas was widely recognized as a success for American policy, the U.S. remains caught in a continuous cycle of intervention and withdrawal in Nicaragua, according to Kagan.
As a member of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, Kagan was a direct participant in many of the events described in this authoritative and definitive account of U.S. Nicaragua relations from 1977 to 1990.
........
Foreign Affairs
A brilliant and encyclopedic history of the American intervention in Nicaragua. Kagan served in the Reagan State Department and was a midlevel participant in many of the events he chronicles.
Without abandoning his dubious conviction that aid to the contras was indispensable to removing the Sandinistas (who actually fell in a democratic election they were convinced they could not lose), Kagan nevertheless has succeeded admirably in approaching his subject from the more detached and objective station of the historian, and his literary gifts make the work appealing despite its oppressive length.
His explanation of the Sandinistas' fall stresses the "disorderly mix of policies" that other analysts have invoked to explain the demise of the Soviet Union and the collapse of South African apartheid, a synthesis admirably suited to reconciliation among ideological warriors that has the added advantage of probably being true. Americans puzzled by contemporary policies in Somalia and Bosnia in which the exit is the strategy will find ample precedent in the history of American policy toward Nicaragua in this century, a history shaped, as Kagan argues, "by the tension between the impulse to exercise moral, economic, strategic, and philosophical hegemony and the equally powerful impulse to reject both the responsibilities and the moral costs of such a role."
........
Wilson Quarterly
Robert Kagan served as assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs during the Reagan administration, and he regards U.S. support for the contras as essential to the eventual triumph of democracy in Nicaragua in 1990. But this book is more than an apologia for that policy.
An insider’s unvarnished account, it recalls the adage that if one likes sausage, one should not inquire too closely about how it is made. Kagan argues persuasively that the decision-making process was "chaotic, lurching, changeable, and often inherently contradictory."
Initially, Kagan writes, Reagan’s policymakers were no more eager to "get tough" with the Sandinistas than Jimmy Carter had been. They decided with some reluctance to support the contras only after several diplomatic overtures had failed.
At first, their goal was limited to pressuring the regime not to aid the rebels in El Salvador. But as the contras grew in number and strength, an incipient split within the administration widened between the "conservatives", who saw the contras as a force for expelling the Sandinistas, and the "pragmatists", who insisted that the contras were a political liability.
During this battle, which lasted until well into Reagan’s second term, the Sandinistas learned to their frustration that the policy’s only durable element was agreement between the White House and a shifting congressional majority that the contra option should be retained as insurance that the Sandinistas would keep promises made at the negotiating table.
Kagan regards this policy of limited aid to the contras as a necessary but not sufficient condition for the Sandinistas’ eventual demise.
Military pressure alone would not have sufficed either to topple them or to force them into elections. But combined with other factors—the Sandinistas’ mismanagement of the Nicaraguan economy, growing diplomatic isolation, and doubts about sustained Soviet support—contra aid sharply narrowed the regime’s options.
By 1989, the Sandinistas came to see free elections as the only way they could keep power, but by then it was too late.
Throughout the 1980s they had passed up too many opportunities to make peace on terms that would have saved their revolution. In the end, Kagan notes, they were "their own executioners."
Regrettably, several hundred pages of unnecessary detail make A Twilight Struggle one of those books that would have been twice as good at half the length. And it is curious to see this former Reagan administration official use certain phrases without apparent irony—such as "North American aggression" and (for U.S. encouragement of democratic elections) "hegemony."
Nevertheless, this is an impressive achievement that will surely become the standard work on a troubled chapter in U.S. foreign policy.
............
The New Republic
In 2005, the historian John Lewis Gaddis proposed in these pages that the United States adapt its Cold War strategy to the “war on terror,” as it was then termed. Even though he recognized that stateless terrorists posed a very different kind of threat than the Soviet Union’s multinational empire did, he nonetheless strove to salvage a series of lessons.
He was far from alone in drawing such analogies: In the decades since the Berlin Wall fell, foreign policy elites have looked back on the Cold War with longing.
From realists, such as John Mearsheimer and Robert Kaplan, to hawks like Niall Ferguson and Robert Kagan, thinkers have too often succumbed to the lure of nostalgia, whether to forecast post–Cold War anarchy or to valorize U.S. interventions.
.....
August 28, 2023
Caveat Lector. Reader Beware! Robert Kagan is one of the kings of America's neoconservatives, so everything he writes in this fascinating book on the United States armed and violent response to the Nicaraguan Revolution, from the first battles fought by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) to overthrow U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1977 until their peaceful and shady removal by U.S. backed presidential candidate Violeta Chamorro in 1990, all that he was for I was against and vice versa. We were both in academia and the political trenches, just on opposite sides. He made policy and I could only protest with a bullhorn. The title of this apologia pro bellum is, of course, taken from John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, proclaiming America's "long twilight struggle" against the Soviet Union everywhere in the world. That's the first of many lies Kagan tells. The Sandinista Revolution of 1979 was not an extension of the Cold War into the Western Hemisphere. Quite the opposite. Washington, first under Jimmy Carter and then after January 1981 Ronald Reagan, yanked the Sandinistas into fighting the enemies of the Revolution, the Contras, by telling the American people that the Soviets and Fidel Castro were "playing dominoes in Central America" or to quote Reagan's Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, "First came Nicaragua, to be followed by El Salvador, then Guatemala, and Honduras". In this manichean world all methods of warfare, including assassination, were deemed permissible if they "stopped the Red Menace". When Congress cut off aid to the Contras following the Iran-Contra affair, Reagan circumvented both U.S. elected officials and public opinion by "privatizing" aid to the Contras, thus breaking the law, a point Kagan takes for a mere technicality. I had a professional colleague, now sadly deceased, who specialized in the history of the Constitution who told me "Reagan could and should have been impeached for violating his Constitutional oath to uphold the law". Meanwhile, back on the home front, polls showed an overwhelming number of Americans thought Reagan a liar and in favor of a U.S. withdrawal from Central America. Little did it surprise us, after Reagan left office, that all anti-intervention groups, particularly in Los Angeles, with its huge Nicaraguan population, had been infiltrated by the F.B. I. (I always knew there was something sinister about that kid who used to pass out anti-war pamphlets with me.) As in Chile, Cuba, Iran etc. the U.S. proceeded to "make the Nicaraguan economy scream" through embargoes and sabotage, and in 1990 the Nicaraguan people voted the FSLN leader Daniel Ortega out of power in favor of a C.I.A.-backed dumsky, the widow Chamorro. The headline in the NEW YORK TiMES the next day? "Americans United in Joy at Chamorro Victory". I surmise Kagan must have popped open the champagne, or tasted that white substance the Contras had been smuggling into the U.S. throughout the 1980s. TWILIGHT STRUGGLE is an Orwellian rewriting of history and thus the official U.S. history of this ugly, dirty war.
Read
November 13, 2022"In the end the Sandinistas were their own executioners, the victims of their own blindness. Fidel Castro had warned them against holding the elections. 'The people," he pointed out sagely, 'can make mistakes.' It was the Sandinistas who made the greatest mistake, however, by ignoring their own nation's history. Every Nicaraguan government that had ever submitted itself to a fair vote had been thrown out of office by the Nicaraguan people."
November 26, 2025
A moving look into the suffering of the people of Nicaragua
May 17, 2016
How does this book fall out of print?? Actually, I don't think it ever made it to paperback. A shame. Kagan's big book on Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua and American foreign policy is an excellent summary of the battles between the right & the left, hegemonic influence and independence, democracy and socialism, not to mention American aid and what the Sandinistas were willing to do to get it throughout the 80s. America's internal political disruptions are dissected by Kagan which caused US policy fluctuations, thereby allowing the Sandinistas ample opportunity to bargain for aid to help support a financially bankrupt system of government. They'd bargain, but seldom keep their end of it. Along the same lines, Reagan's periodic clandestine attempts to unsettle, if not unseat the regime are chronicled. The Central American weapons dynamic whereby Castro would pass military aid into Nicaragua for the purpose of supplying revolutionaries in El Salavador, as well as the US's role of sponsoring the Contras via training grounds in Honduras gets thorough treatment. The battle in politics, the media, and aid to eventually establish a democratic vote for the Nicaraguan people makes for an exciting and compelling read. The ending is nothing short of fascinating as Ortega agrees to allow a free democratic election in Nicaragua in order to get desperately needed monies from the US, but this gamble is buttressed by his unshakeable belief that the people would election him. Part of this is dictator delusion, when a leader becomes so removed from the everyday hustle of life he just paints onto it whatever appeals to him, while part of this is undoubtedly & ironically due to the enormous positive coverage Ortega received from the US's own media, which described his rule as benign and loved, if not always solvent. Castro makes a potentially game-changing appearance to warn Ortega not to bite and allow the democratic election as they're a "Yankee game" that Ortega was doomed to lose. Castro was right, though no one was more surprised than Danny. Of course, he's doing okay for himself. Even got his old job back. Kagan's book is great for bringing you back to the old stormy political debates of the 80s. I find myself as nostalgic for them as I am for the music of Duran Duran or the fashion of narrow lapels.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews