United States–Nicaragua Relations

The United States–Nicaragua relationship, as recounted by Noam Chomsky, is a central test of whether the language of terrorism and the rules of international law apply equally to powerful states and their opponents. He describes the U.S. attack on Nicaragua, the International Court of Justice’s ruling against the United States, and Washington’s rejection of that judgment as a sequence that exposes the gap between official counterterrorism rhetoric and the conduct of a major power. Nicaragua’s recourse to courts and United Nations institutions, rather than retaliation against Washington, provides Chomsky with a contrasting model of how a state under attack might seek redress.

The attack and the Court’s ruling

During the 1980s, the United States attacked Nicaragua in a campaign that Chomsky characterizes as international terrorism. He says it caused tens of thousands of deaths and left the country almost entirely destroyed, with damage from which it might never recover. He places the military campaign alongside a devastating economic war, emphasizing Nicaragua’s vulnerability as a small country isolated by a much stronger power. Historian Thomas Walker is cited among the scholars who have documented the consequences.

Rather than answer the attacks by bombing Washington, Nicaragua brought its case to the International Court of Justice. The Court ruled in Nicaragua’s favor, ordered the United States to end its actions, and directed it to pay substantial reparations. For Chomsky, the judgment is not incidental background: it gives the conflict a clear legal dimension and establishes that the claims against U.S. conduct were adjudicated by an international court.

Rejection and international response

The United States rejected the Court’s decision and intensified its attacks. Nicaragua then appealed to the United Nations Security Council, where a resolution calling on states to respect international law was proposed. The United States alone vetoed it. Nicaragua next brought the issue before the United Nations 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 on one occasion.

Chomsky presents this institutional sequence as a contrast between Nicaragua’s use of available legal and diplomatic channels and Washington’s refusal to accept their outcome. He argues that a sufficiently powerful Nicaragua might have sought a special criminal tribunal, but its actual appeals already demonstrated a route for responding to grave state violence without retaliatory attacks. In his account, countries involved in the contemporary conflict were asking the United States to follow comparable procedures, including some of its allies.

The case in U.S. political rhetoric

The relationship also recurs in Chomsky’s discussion of the proposed international counterterrorism coalition. The Bush administration warned Nicaragua’s Sandinista party that it could not be included, citing its past connections with states and organizations described as terrorist. Chomsky sets this exclusion against the record of U.S. actions toward Nicaragua: in his account, Washington treated Nicaraguan resistance to U.S. attack as evidence of danger while the Court had rejected the allegations used to justify the U.S. embargo as unfounded.

He recalls that Ronald Reagan declared a national emergency on May 1, 1985, and renewed it annually, describing the Nicaraguan government’s policies as an extraordinary threat to U.S. security and foreign policy. Reagan also imposed an embargo, claiming it answered an emergency created by Nicaragua’s aggressive conduct in Central America. Chomsky’s account reverses the official framing: the asserted aggression, he says, was Nicaragua’s resistance to the U.S. attack. He further juxtaposes Reagan’s invocation of a longstanding alliance between law and liberty with the administration’s announced refusal to heed the International Court’s coming judgment. After the Court condemned the use of force and treaty violations, the United States disregarded its order to stop and intensified the actions at issue.

Definitions and the contested label

For Chomsky, Nicaragua makes visible a broader problem in the political use of “terrorism.” He contrasts the official U.S. definition—calculated violence or the threat of violence for political, religious, or ideological ends—with a conventional propaganda usage that applies the label to enemies while describing comparable conduct by powerful states in different terms. Under the official definition, he argues, state violence can fall within the same category as violence by non-state actors; the identity of the perpetrator should not change the meaning of the conduct.

He also links the Nicaraguan campaign to the official doctrine of low-intensity warfare, which he says closely resembles official definitions of terrorism when its treatment of coercion against civilian populations is compared with those definitions. In the Nicaragua case, he points to a stated policy of attacking “weak targets”—including peasant cooperatives and clinics—rather than confronting the Nicaraguan army directly. He says U.S. control of Nicaraguan airspace and sophisticated communications equipment supplied by its protectors enabled those attacks. The comparison, in his argument, is not a claim that all actors or episodes are identical; it is a demand that the same stated criteria be applied rather than altered to accommodate a powerful state.

A recurring example of selective accountability

Chomsky repeatedly returns to Nicaragua as his clearest example of what he calls U.S. international terrorism. He stresses that the International Court of Justice condemned the United States for the unlawful use of force for political ends, ordered it to stop and pay substantial damages, and was met with contemptuous rejection. He also points to the U.S. veto of a Security Council resolution urging respect for international law and to its votes, with Israel and sometimes El Salvador, against related General Assembly resolutions.

The episode therefore carries two connected meanings in his account. It is a history of severe harm to Nicaragua and a record of the country’s unsuccessful effort to obtain compliance through international institutions. It also serves as a counterexample to the selective coalition rhetoric that excludes Nicaragua while treating U.S. conduct as beyond the reach of the same accusations. The relationship’s decisive significance lies in that unresolved asymmetry: Nicaragua appealed to law, the Court ruled in its favor, and the power against which it appealed rejected the ruling and continued its campaign.