Volume 34, Number 12 · July 16, 1987
Washington in Miami
By Joan Didion
There were in Washington during the Reagan administration a small but significant number of people for whom a commitment to American involvement in Central America did not exist exclusively as an issue, a political marker to be moved sometimes front, sometimes back. These were people for whom a commitment to American involvement in Central America was always front, in fact 'the' front, the battleground on which, as Ronald Reagan had put it in his second inaugural address and on many occasions before and after, 'human freedom' was 'on the march.' These were people who had believed early on and even formulated what was eventually known as the Reagan Doctrine, people committed to the idea that 'rollback,' or the reversal of Soviet power which had been part of the rhetoric of the American right since at least the Eisenhower administration, could now be achieved by supporting guerrilla resistance movements around the world; people who believed that, in the words of A New Inter-American Policy for the Eighties, a fifty-three-page policy proposal issued in the summer of 1980 by the Council for Inter-American Security, 'containment of the Soviet Union is not enough. Detente is dead. Survival demands a new US foreign policy. America must seize the initiative or perish. For World War III is almost over.'
Feature, 7102 words
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