Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua is the case through which Nicaragua sought legal redress for United States force and support for attacks against it. In Noam Chomsky’s account, the International Court of Justice ruled in Nicaragua’s favor and ordered the United States to stop its actions and pay reparations; Washington rejected the judgment and intensified its campaign. The case becomes more than a dispute between two states: it is Chomsky’s central example of a small country pursuing legal remedies while a powerful one refuses the ruling, and of the unequal application of the international rules invoked against others.

Background and the Court’s ruling

Chomsky presents the case as an alternative to answering violence with violence. During the 1980s, the United States attacked Nicaragua, causing tens of thousands of deaths and leaving the country almost entirely devastated. The campaign was accompanied by destructive economic warfare, which, in his account, a small country isolated by a hostile superpower could scarcely withstand. He notes that the damage to Nicaragua may have been more serious than the recent tragedies in New York. Rather than bomb Washington, the Nicaraguans brought their case to the International Court of Justice.

The Court ruled for Nicaragua, ordered the United States to end its actions, and directed it to pay substantial reparations. Chomsky emphasizes that this was not merely a symbolic rebuke: it supplied a legal judgment and a remedy. He describes the ruling as a condemnation of the United States for illegal use of force, which he identifies as international terrorism. In his retelling, the case is especially significant because the judgment came from an international court, not from Nicaragua’s unilateral accusation.

Rejection and recourse to the United Nations

The United States rejected the Court’s decision with contempt and immediately intensified its attacks, Chomsky says. Nicaragua then took its case to the United Nations Security Council, which proposed a resolution calling on states to observe international law. The United States alone vetoed it. Nicaragua subsequently appealed to the General Assembly, where a similar resolution passed by a majority. The United States and Israel voted against it in two successive years; on one occasion, El Salvador joined them.

This sequence gives the case its stark institutional shape: a court ruling, a call for compliance in the Security Council, a veto, and a further appeal to the General Assembly. Chomsky treats Nicaragua’s resort to these bodies as the appropriate course for a state confronting an attack. He adds that, had Nicaragua been powerful enough, it could have sought a special criminal tribunal. The contrast is not between a perfect institution and an imperfect one, but between the available legal avenues and the choice to reject them.

International law and the limits on retaliation

Chomsky sets the case against the principle, established after the Second World War, that force is prohibited except in self-defence against an armed attack, pending action by the Security Council to protect international peace and security. The arrangement, he argues, was devised after centuries of violence had brought Europe close to self-destruction. Retaliation is specifically prohibited within this framework. He argues that the United States could not invoke the self-defence justification in Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, because it had not been subjected to an armed attack of the kind that provision addresses. His point is that international principles must apply to the United States as well as to states its government opposes.

Nicaragua’s response makes that argument concrete. The country did not treat its suffering as authorization to bomb American cities; it pursued a case before the Court and then appealed through United Nations institutions. Chomsky presents this as a precedent for lawful action against crimes at any scale: identify those responsible, bring evidence, and use courts and international procedures rather than assume that military reprisal is the answer. In an interview following the September 11 attacks, he invokes Nicaragua as an example of how a state could seek redress without replicating the violence directed against it.

The case in Chomsky’s argument about terrorism

The Nicaragua case underpins Chomsky’s challenge to the political use of the word “terrorism.” He distinguishes the literal definition in official United States documents—calculated violence or the threat of violence to achieve political, religious, or ideological ends—from a propagandistic usage that reserves the label for violence committed by enemies against the United States or its allies. By the literal standard, he argues, state actions can also qualify. Calling a campaign a “war on terror,” in his view, becomes propaganda if it does not actually target terrorism and if the powerful actors conducting it exempt their own conduct from the same definition.

He returns to the Court’s ruling as a test of that inconsistency: the United States was condemned for illegal force against Nicaragua, yet, he argues, it rejected the judgment and intensified the campaign. Chomsky also points to the United States veto of the Security Council resolution and its opposition, alongside Israel, to General Assembly resolutions as evidence of the gap between stated support for international law and willingness to be bound by it. The case therefore serves both as a legal precedent in his account and as a measure of power: Nicaragua used the institutions available to it, while the United States could refuse their conclusions.

Lasting significance and its limits

Chomsky’s account extends the Nicaragua example beyond the original litigation. He says that the case shows how the United States might respond to international terrorism through legal procedures, provided evidence established responsibility: arrest and trial, potentially with international support under United Nations auspices. In discussing the September 11 attacks, he argues that such a process could have attracted broad support if evidence of Osama bin Laden’s involvement were assembled. He says that proposals for diplomatic means had been indicated by the Taliban, but were rejected in favor of force. The comparison is an argument for applying a legal route consistently, not a claim that the Nicaragua case itself adjudicated the later attacks.

The case also frames Chomsky’s account of the strategic consequences of the 2001 War in Afghanistan. He describes the establishment of major United States military bases in Central Asia as a significant consequence, linking them to access to regional resources and to the broader military positioning around the Persian Gulf. He argues that the new phase of the war on terror offered the Bush administration an opportunity to consolidate military dominance, and interprets the bombing of Afghanistan partly as a warning about United States capabilities. These claims are his political analysis, distinct from the Court’s ruling on Nicaragua. Taken together, the distinction sharpens the case’s role in the book: the judgment supplies the legal benchmark, while the later examples illustrate Chomsky’s concern that military power and strategic purpose repeatedly displace equal application of law.