Nicaragua is the book’s principal example of a country subjected to state violence that, in Chomsky’s account, was condemned by international legal institutions yet intensified by the United States. Its history in the discussion reverses the usual direction of the word “terrorism”: Nicaragua appears not as the source of an attack on the United States, but as a small country that pursued legal remedies against a superpower’s violence and was then denied the protection those remedies promised.

The U.S. attack and its consequences

Chomsky describes the United States as having attacked Nicaragua in the 1980s, causing tens of thousands of deaths and leaving the country almost entirely destroyed, with recovery uncertain. The military assault was accompanied by devastating economic warfare. Nicaragua’s vulnerability is central to the comparison: a small country isolated by a vindictive superpower, it could scarcely withstand the combined pressures of military and economic attack. Chomsky argues that the consequences for Nicaragua were more severe than those of the recent tragedy in New York.

The violence was not presented as a series of direct engagements with Nicaragua’s army alone. Chomsky says U.S. policy prescribed attacks on “weak targets”: civilian sites that could not defend themselves, including farming cooperatives and clinics. The forces carrying out those attacks, he argues, could follow the policy with the help of U.S. control of Nicaraguan airspace and sophisticated communications equipment supplied by their protectors. In this account, Nicaragua’s experience makes visible the practical meaning of state violence directed at civilians, rather than leaving “terrorism” as a label reserved for non-state enemies.

The book also treats the assault as a longer political episode, not merely a past conflict. Chomsky recalls the Reagan administration’s claims that Nicaragua’s actions in Central America threatened U.S. security, and the emergency declared on May 1, 1985, which was renewed annually. He presents the accompanying embargo as a response to Nicaragua’s resistance to the U.S. attack, while noting that the International Court of Justice had rejected Washington’s allegations about Nicaraguan activities as unfounded. The contrast between the official justification and the conduct it was used to defend is part of the case’s broader argument about political language and power.

Nicaragua’s appeal to international law

Rather than retaliating 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 required substantial reparations. Chomsky emphasizes the sequence that followed: the United States rejected the judgment with contempt and intensified its attacks. Nicaragua then appealed to the United Nations Security Council, where the United States alone vetoed a proposed resolution calling on states to respect international law.

Nicaragua next took its case to the United Nations General Assembly. The Assembly adopted a similar resolution by a majority, while the United States and Israel voted against it for two consecutive years; El Salvador joined them on one occasion. For Chomsky, this sequence illustrates a lawful route available to a weaker country: seek a judicial ruling, pursue action through the Security Council, and then bring the issue before the General Assembly. He adds that a sufficiently powerful Nicaragua might have sought a special criminal tribunal. The central irony is that the institutions through which Nicaragua sought redress registered its complaint, but the superpower found ways to disregard or block their consequences.

The same history recurs when Chomsky answers a question about countries condemned for international terrorism. He points to the Court’s finding that the United States had used force illegally for political ends, and to its order that Washington end the conduct and pay compensation. The United States, he says, set aside the judgment and escalated its war against Nicaragua; it also vetoed the Security Council resolution and opposed related General Assembly resolutions, in some instances alongside Israel and, once, El Salvador. Nicaragua thus connects the book’s legal argument to its critique of selective obedience: a ruling against a powerful state did not produce the compliance that Chomsky presents as the ordinary purpose of law.

A test of consistent standards

Nicaragua is also the counterexample in Chomsky’s comparison between lawful accountability and collective retaliation. He observes that Nicaraguans did not answer U.S. violence by bombing Washington. Their recourse to the Court and United Nations stands in contrast to a response built around vengeance and escalating force. Chomsky treats this contrast as a model for addressing atrocities: identify those responsible, establish their guilt through evidence, and consider the grievances that may have motivated the crime, while pursuing lawful punishment. He warns that extreme violence instead risks reproducing the crimes that provoked the desire for revenge.

The comparison becomes sharper when Chomsky applies a principle of moral universality: an act judged right for one side must be judged by the same standard when others commit it, and conduct condemned when directed at others cannot be excused when carried out by one’s own government. He notes that no one considered Nicaragua entitled to bomb Washington or assassinate U.S. political officials, even after the country had endured a devastating U.S. attack and economic warfare. The point is not to treat the initial violence as permissible, but to reject the idea that power alters the standard by which violence should be assessed.

That argument also puts Nicaragua alongside the book’s critique of the official definition of terrorism. Chomsky cites the U.S. definition of the term as calculated violence, or the threat of violence, used to pursue political, religious, or ideological aims, including by intimidation, coercion, or the creation of fear. He argues that this definition resembles the official doctrine of low-intensity warfare and that terrorism, so defined, is a component of state action, not simply the “weapon of the weak.” Nicaragua’s place in the discussion makes the claim concrete: the country is the object of attacks described as U.S.-backed, aimed at vulnerable civilian targets, and defended through political rationales that Chomsky asks readers to examine by the same standards applied to other perpetrators.

The politics of coalition and memory

The history of Nicaragua remains active in Chomsky’s account of the post-September 11 counterterrorism coalition. The Bush administration warned the Sandinista left, which hoped to return to power through elections, that its links to states and organizations deemed terrorist meant it could not be counted among the coalition. State Department spokesperson Eliza Koch said there would be no compromise between those opposing terrorism and those supporting it. Chomsky reads the administration’s doubts about the Sandinistas’ moderation against the earlier U.S.–Nicaragua conflict: Washington had portrayed Nicaragua as a threat when, in his telling, the country was resisting U.S. attack, and the International Court had rejected the allegations used to support that portrayal.

He develops the irony through the date May 1. Reagan declared a national emergency against Nicaragua on that date in 1985, citing an extraordinary threat to U.S. national security and foreign policy. The previous year, Reagan had made May 1 “Law Day,” celebrating a long alliance between law and liberty and warning that lawlessness meant chaos. Yet, on the day before that observance, he had announced that the United States would disregard the International Court’s conclusions condemning his administration’s use of force against Nicaragua and its violation of treaties. Chomsky juxtaposes the celebration of law with the decision to reject a judgment against the United States; outside the United States, he adds, May 1 is a day of solidarity with workers’ struggles.

The country’s history therefore unsettles the language of a just international coalition. Chomsky remarks that Nicaragua, now led by Sandinistas, was expected to provide firm assurances of good conduct before joining an alliance organized by Washington, even as the United States invited other governments to participate in a war against terrorism it had been conducting, in Chomsky’s formulation, for twenty years. The case’s significance lies in this asymmetry: Nicaragua’s past appeal to law and its treatment as a suspect partner coexist with Washington’s demand that others join its campaign. Across the discussion, Nicaragua remains both a place devastated by violence and a test of whether legal and moral standards apply equally to states that wield vastly unequal power.