International Court of Justice judgment in the Nicaragua case

The International Court of Justice judgment in the Nicaragua case gives Chomsky’s critique of state violence a concrete legal test: the United States was condemned for its actions against Nicaragua, ordered to end them and pay substantial reparations, and then refused to comply. The judgment matters not only as a ruling but as the beginning of a sequence in which Nicaragua turned to the United Nations, while the United States used its veto to block a Security Council resolution. Chomsky returns to this history as both evidence of international law’s reach and an example of how readily a powerful state can defy it.

The case and the Court’s ruling

In the 1980s, the United States attacked Nicaragua amid a devastating economic war. Chomsky describes the country as nearly destroyed, with tens of thousands dead and a recovery that might never be complete. He cites the historian Thomas Walker in support of the account of the economic pressure imposed on a small country isolated by a vindictive superpower. The scale and circumstances of the campaign make Nicaragua, in his telling, an especially clear case for examining state violence through the same standards used for violence by non-state actors.

Nicaragua did not answer the attacks with bombs on Washington. It brought its case to the International Court of Justice, which ruled in its favor, ordered the United States to cease its actions, and directed it to pay substantial reparations. Chomsky emphasizes the contrast between the remedy sought and the conduct condemned: Nicaragua appealed to a court and accepted its legal process, while the United States rejected the decision with contempt and intensified its attacks. The ruling thus establishes a legal judgment in the account, but it also marks the limit of that judgment’s immediate power when the state it addresses refuses to act on it.

From the Court to the United Nations

After Washington rejected the ruling, Nicaragua appealed to the United Nations Security Council. The Council proposed a resolution calling on states to observe international law; the United States alone vetoed it. Nicaragua then took its case to the General Assembly, which adopted a similar resolution by a majority. The United States and Israel voted against comparable resolutions for two consecutive years, with El Salvador joining them on one occasion. The sequence extends the dispute beyond the courtroom: Nicaragua sought enforcement and public support through international institutions, while the United States blocked one measure and opposed the others.

Chomsky presents this process as a model for responding to political violence. In his account, Nicaragua pursued legal remedies instead of retaliation and carried its case from the Court to the Security Council and the General Assembly. He adds that a sufficiently powerful Nicaragua might have sought a special criminal tribunal. His counterfactual underscores the asymmetry in the case: the available procedures were not absent, but access to stronger forms of enforcement depended on power as well as law.

The judgment as a standard for counterterrorism

In discussing terrorism after the attacks on New York and Washington, Chomsky calls the Nicaragua ruling an example of how to respond when the aim is to reduce a threat rather than enlarge it. He argues that crimes can be investigated and prosecuted through appropriate legal means, and that the case provides a precedent for that approach. He also notes the Court’s finding that the United States had engaged in the unlawful use of force, which he characterizes as international terrorism, and connects the ruling to Washington’s subsequent veto of a Security Council resolution calling on all states—including the United States—to respect international law.

The case also anchors his argument about evidence and collective procedure. Chomsky says that international legal institutions could support efforts to arrest and try Osama bin Laden and his associates, including the use of force, if their culpability could be demonstrated. He reports that governments around the world were asking the United States for evidence of Osama bin Laden’s involvement and argues that proof would have made international support for an operation under United Nations auspices readily available. The case therefore functions as more than a historical analogy: it helps define the alternative he advocates—establish responsibility, seek lawful authority, and pursue arrest and trial rather than treating military retaliation as the default response.

Equal standards and the case’s continuing significance

Chomsky repeatedly frames Nicaragua as a test of whether international law applies equally. He stresses that the United States is the only country he identifies as having been condemned by the Court for international terrorism and as having rejected a Security Council resolution calling on states to obey international law. He cites the Court’s order to end the conduct and pay substantial damages, followed, in his account, by Washington’s contemptuous rejection of the judgment and intensification of its war against Nicaragua. These details make the ruling a point of contrast between a legal order that purports to bind states and a political order in which a powerful state can resist its consequences.

That contrast informs his objection to retaliation as a general principle. At the end of the Second World War, he says, nations devised a different rule from the old cycle of answering attack with attack: the use of force was prohibited except in self-defence against an armed attack, pending action by the Security Council to protect international peace and security. He argues that the United States could not invoke the self-defence provision in Article 51 of the United Nations Charter because, in his view, it was not under armed attack in the relevant legal sense. Nicaragua’s appeal to the Court and the United Nations supplies the counterexample to reprisal: a state subjected to violence can seek judgment and collective action rather than bomb the capital of the state responsible.

The judgment also gives force to Chomsky’s demand for moral consistency. He recalls that nobody believed Nicaragua or Cuba had the right to bomb Washington or assassinate American political officials, even while he describes American violence against those countries. On that standard, the right to use force cannot depend on which side holds power or on whether its actions are presented as counterterrorism, intervention, or war. The Nicaragua case’s decisive significance in the book is therefore twofold: it records a judicial finding against the United States, and it exposes the gap between the legal remedies Nicaragua pursued and the compliance those remedies could compel.