In Central America, No Quick Fix

By Strobe Talbott

For a long time to come, Central America is likely to be testing U.S. patience. Unfortunately, that very quality has been missing in American foreign policy. Impatience is the dark side of a whole cluster of Yankee virtues. Confronted with intractable, ambiguous challenges in other lands, America's cando, problem-solving, troubleshooting instincts twitch in an often misguided quest for the quick fix. Got a problem? Send in a military governor or a proconsul or a special envoy. Still got a problem? Send money. Still got a problem? Send in the Rough Riders, or the Marines. For nearly a century, that has been the standard American response to troubles down south.

There have been long periods of neglect punctuated by sporadic intervention. Generally, North Americans have preferred to look in other directions, particularly East and West, toward old friends and big enemies. The troubles of Central America have seemed sordid and insoluble, uninviting and even unworthy of American ministration; the peoples and cultures there have remained surprisingly alien, given their proximity.

When the region has forced itself on American attention, political debate has usually degenerated quickly into an argument over illusory, mutually exclusive panaceas. Liberals have tended to favor responding with money, self-criticism and tolerance for radicalism of the left; conservatives have leaned toward guns, toughness and tolerance of the extreme right. Early in the Reagan Administration, former Secretary of State Alexander Haig struck just the wrong note with his tough talk about "going to the source." He meant Cuba. He seemed to be suggesting that if the U.S. could just clobber Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua would behave, or better yet, go away. He also inadvertently aroused suspicion that he was blind to indigenous sources of turmoil, such as poverty and social injustice.

One reason for the current deepening doubt about U.S. policy is the impression conveyed by the Administration that it is again getting itchy for a military quick fix. But any military action that would be quick would not be, almost by definition, a true fix, and might well end up being the opposite. Sending in U.S. combat forces would surely wreak political havoc at home before it could prove decisive against the guerrillas in El Salvador. As for Nicaragua, a full-scale U.S.-supported invasion by the contras and the Honduran armed forces might drive the Sandinistas back into the countryside, but almost certainly the war would go on, and the U.S. would have little stomach for it.

In reaction to solution-mongering from the right, liberals argue that what the U.S. really needs is a quick fix of its own attitude: If only we were more willing to accept "change," more self-critical of our own past sins in the region, less hung up on Communism--if only we could bring ourselves to live with the Sandinistas and encourage a "dialogue'' between guerrillas and government in El Salvador. Yes, we would have more leftists running countries in the hemisphere, but those countries are too weak, too poor, too desperate for our help to become genuine Soviet stooges, unless of course we drive them into the Soviets' arms as we did Castro.

But this proposition that indulgence will soften the hard line of Marxists is dubious in the extreme. While it has been convenient for Castro to blame his problems on a hostile "Tio Sam, "the few occasions on which the U.S. has hinted at a milder, more accommodating approach seem to have convinced him that he had won and that he could go his own way with impunity. And Castro's way, if he gets it in the long run, raises another question that the liberals tend to duck: What happens if the momentum of change in Latin America confronts the U.S. with a Mexico that has acquired a leadership, political system, foreign policy and degree of militarization roughly along the lines of what Castro has achieved in Cuba and what the Sandinistas have in mind for Nicaragua? One need not resort to the hackneyed image of falling dominoes to imagine that the sequential triumph of leftist revolutions and, perhaps more important, the establishment of leftist dictatorships around the waist of the Central American isthmus, could increase the chances of upheaval in Mexico, the largest and potentially most volatile nation in the region. If Mexico were transformed from a problem-ridden, rather resentful but basically friendly and dependent neighbor into a militarized, antagonistic one, oriented toward the Soviet Union internationally, the security problem for the U.S. would be second only to the one posed by the U.S.S.R. itself.

The liberal goal of eradicating the squalor that breeds revolution is valid enough. Of course, all the money in the world would be a poor investment in corrupt, feudal economies. But the means that have been applied to easing poverty so far have been totally inadequate; whatever the failings of the U.S., it cannot be accused of profligacy toward Latin America. To its credit, the Reagan Administration came forward last year with the Caribbean Basin Initiative, a joint effort by the U.S., Canada, Mexico and Venezuela to promote trade, investment and aid to the region. It was conceived largely in response to Jamaican Prime Minister Edward Seaga's call for a "mini-Marshall Plan."

Mini indeed. The original Marshall Plan for Western Europe after World War II was fueled by a U.S. contribution of $13.6 billion; that would amount to $50.9 billion today. Yet the initial U.S. price tag for the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) was $350 million, less than seven-tenths of 1% of the Marshall Plan adjusted to 1983 dollars. Only last week did Congress pass a scaled-down portion of the CBI, 17 months after Reagan originally proposed it.

Moreover, the billions spent in Europe in 1949-52 rebuilt the industrial base of highly developed societies, with skilled work forces and large pools of executive talent. In Central America, the economies are backward to begin with, and the political systems polarized, even without the devastation of warfare. The U.S. is not just dealing with a structure that was damaged, as it was in Europe; a whole infrastructure must be built, practically from scratch. All that is going to take a long, long time, and a lot more money than either the Executive or the Legislative Branch is now willing to contemplate. It is also going to require much more help than the U.S., even at its most magnanimous, will be able to provide by itself. That means lots more from other countries.

The Caribbean Basin Initiative, however paltry the sums, established the useful precedent of involving other countries in the region as donors and envisioning the eventual participation of Europe and Japan. Unfortunately, two of the regional partners, Mexico and Venezuela, are now in terrible financial straits. As for the Europeans and Japanese, the U.S. has not convinced them that their security too is at risk and that they therefore have an obligation to help out with economic aid.

A leading liberal critic, Senator Paul Tsongas, made what may have been an unintentionally telling comment earlier this year. "The problem with Central America," he said, "is the absence of any consensus that U.S. policy there will work." That frustration was echoed from across the ideological battle lines by Under Secretary of Defense Fred C. Ikle, a key advocate of using more gunboats and less diplomacy in the region. "Traditional remedies simply haven't worked in addressing the challenge in the area," he said. The operative verb in both complaints is a favorite one in the American vocabulary: work. Americans work hard and want their exertions to work quickly. But it may be an inescapable fact that no policy will work in that sense. The situation in Central America has festered for decades; it will take decades to bring under control. And it will take a variety of responses: diplomatic, economic, political and military, an indispensable element despite understandable concern about its dangers. All those ingredients are necessary in steadily applied, mutually reinforcing doses. But even with luck and wisdom, they are not going to produce results soon. Getting helicopter gunships in place may take hours or days. Teaching soldiers to fight efficiently with them is a matter of months. But training an officer corps to see itself as fit for waging war and defending a nation, rather than settling feuds and carrying out vendettas, is likely to require years. Which is why another key ingredient, one missing to date, must be added to the list: patience.

--By Strobe Talbott This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.