U.S. War Against Nicaragua

The U.S. War Against Nicaragua serves as a central case in Noam Chomsky’s argument that terrorism cannot be defined by the identity of the perpetrator: the same standards must apply to state violence and violence by nonstate actors. He describes a devastating U.S. campaign, its condemnation by the International Court of Justice, and the refusal to comply with the resulting judgment. Nicaragua’s recourse to courts and the United Nations becomes, in his account, a pointed alternative to retaliation—and a test of whether powerful states accept the rules they invoke against others.

Background and Scale

Chomsky situates the war in the 1980s and describes it as both a military campaign and an economic assault. He says the United States caused tens of thousands of deaths and left Nicaragua almost entirely destroyed, with damage so severe that the country might never recover. A superpower’s economic pressure compounded the harm to a small country isolated by the United States; Chomsky argues that the consequences for Nicaragua exceeded those of the recent tragedies in New York.

He also places Nicaragua within a wider pattern of U.S.-backed violence in Central America. The Nicaraguan campaign, he says, was one of Washington’s terrorist wars in the region during a decade in which hundreds of thousands of people died and four countries were left in ruins. This wider context matters to his argument: Nicaragua is his most legally documented example, not his claim to be the most extreme case.

The Court and the United Nations

Rather than answer the attacks with bombs on Washington, Nicaragua brought its case before the International Court of Justice. The Court ruled in Nicaragua’s favor, ordered the United States to stop its actions, and required substantial reparations. Chomsky presents this resort to adjudication as a deliberate choice of legal process over retaliation.

The United States rejected the judgment and intensified its attacks. Nicaragua then took the issue to the United Nations Security Council, where a proposed resolution calling on states to respect international law was vetoed by the United States, the only state to oppose it. Nicaragua next appealed to the General Assembly. A similar resolution passed by a majority, while the United States and Israel voted against it for two consecutive years; El Salvador joined them once. Chomsky argues that these steps show both the availability of legal avenues and the limits imposed on them when a powerful state refuses the outcome. Had Nicaragua possessed sufficient power, he adds, it could have sought a special criminal tribunal.

Methods and Responsibility

In Chomsky’s account, the campaign relied on attacks against “weak targets”: civilian sites unable to defend themselves, including peasant cooperatives and clinics, rather than direct engagements with Nicaragua’s army. He says the U.S. State Department officially approved such attacks even after the Court had ordered the United States to end its campaign and pay reparations. The Contra forces, he argues, could carry out these instructions with U.S. control of Nicaragua’s airspace and sophisticated communications equipment supplied by their protectors.

Chomsky also highlights how this policy was defended in public debate. Michael Kinsley, a prominent commentator at the liberal edge of the mainstream, argued that the State Department’s case for attacks on weak targets should not be dismissed without considering costs and returns. The calculation, as Chomsky recounts it, weighed increased bloodshed and misery against the possibility of an eventual democracy defined on U.S. terms. He treats this defense as evidence that the violence was not simply an aberration but could be accepted within a prevailing political framework.

The dispute extended to Nicaragua’s right to defend itself. U.S. pressure sought to stop its allies from supplying arms, in the hope that Russia would take their place. When the Reagan administration circulated rumors that Nicaragua had received Russian fighter aircraft, the rumors were false; the aircraft were said to be for defending its airspace against U.S. attacks. Yet some critics who questioned the rumors also said that, if they proved true, the United States should bomb Nicaragua because it would then pose a threat to U.S. security. Chomsky points to the scant attention given to Nicaragua’s right of self-defense as evidence of a deeply rooted double standard.

Terrorism, Law, and Political Language

Chomsky’s analysis rests on the official U.S. definition of terrorism as calculated violence or its threat for political, religious, or ideological ends, including actions that intimidate, coerce, or instill fear. By that definition, he argues, the attacks on the World Trade Center were an appalling act of terrorism. But he distinguishes this literal definition from a propagandistic convention in which the label is applied to violence by enemies, while similar acts by powerful states are described differently.

The Nicaragua case makes that contrast concrete. Chomsky says the International Court of Justice condemned the United States for international terrorism, identifying its conduct as unlawful force used for political ends. Yet the United States rejected the ruling, vetoed a Security Council resolution urging compliance with international law, and continued the campaign. In Chomsky’s formulation, calling a “war against terrorism” a genuine campaign against terrorism is propaganda if it excludes conduct that meets the government’s own definitions. The case therefore challenges the boundary between state policy and terrorism, rather than treating that boundary as self-evident.

He further connects the language of counterterrorism to official low-intensity warfare doctrine, which he says closely resembles the official definition of terrorism when both are compared as the use of coercive means against civilian populations for political purposes. He also notes that postwar U.S. counterinsurgency programs drew on the Nazi model: Wehrmacht officers were consulted and their manuals used in designing programs for the wider world, which were themselves called counterterrorism. For Chomsky, these examples show how the same kinds of actions can receive different names according to political alignment.

The Alternative to Retaliation

Nicaragua’s legal appeal provides Chomsky with a model for responding to atrocities: identify those responsible, establish the evidence, and pursue accountability through law. He argues that governments confronting terrorist networks have themselves demanded credible proof and action within at least a minimal framework of international law. His comparison is not that legal action guarantees a remedy—the United States’ rejection of the Court’s decision demonstrates otherwise—but that it offers a principled alternative to indiscriminate reprisal.

The alternative, he warns, is extreme violence followed by escalation, producing further crimes of the kind that first provoked demands for vengeance. He links this concern to the response to the September 11 attacks: NATO leaders and regional specialists warned that a massive assault causing many civilian deaths would fulfill Osama bin Laden’s aims. Even if bin Laden were killed, Chomsky argues, the massacre of innocents could deepen anger, despair, and frustration and recruit new supporters. The lesson he draws from Nicaragua is thus both legal and political: pursuing evidence and accountability, while addressing the grievances that can sustain violence, is less likely to reproduce the cycle that retaliation promises to end.