Politics is the art of the possible, and policy is a way of defining a problem so that it can be solved. By that definition, the Administration and the Congress have yet to produce sound politics or successful policy in response to the ongoing crisis in Nicaragua. The White House and Capitol Hill have both reverberated with one-sided and unrealistic assessments of the challenge in Nicaragua, with deceptive and diversionary claims about what the U.S. should be trying to accomplish there and with unconvincing recipes for what to do. The result is an impasse that may come to a head this week, one from which the Sandinistas themselves may emerge the only winners.
The Administration's position is that the Sandinistas are, in a word that Secretary of State George Shultz has used repeatedly, "unacceptable." The implication not only of that word but of much of the accompanying policy is that the Sandinistas must go. The Administration's chosen instrument for attaining that goal is a U.S.-backed guerrilla war waged by the contras. The President's go-for-broke campaign on behalf of the contras seems to court defeat both in Washington, at the hands of an increasingly recalcitrant Congress, and in Nicaragua itself, at the hands of the Sandinistas. That is partly because the policy has taken on an all-or-nothing quality: either the U.S. succeeds in bringing about the overthrow of the Sandinistas, or there will be hell to pay both geopolitically (Central America will be awash, in Reagan's colorful phrase, in a "sea of red") and politically here at home (the President's political operatives are already eager to ask voters next November, "Who lost Nicaragua?"). American inability to cope conclusively with such an antagonistic regime so close to home would certainly carry a price, potentially a heavy one. But the means to get rid of the Sandinistas are slim and risky. Since the Congress, much of the public and many independent experts doubt that the contras can achieve all that they and their Administration sponsors want, there is a growing temptation to give them nothing, not even the relatively piddling $100 million that President Reagan is asking for, or to give them so little, so late, that it would be meaningless. On the eve of the President's speech appealing for the contra cause, which was scheduled for last Sunday night, a majority of the House, faced with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down choice, was leaning toward a cutoff of all U.S. aid to the contras and a pious but toothless exhortation to diplomacy.
What is needed, at this late and perhaps last-minute juncture, is for the Administration to redefine the problem in Nicaragua in a way that it can be solved, through diplomacy as well as military pressure, and then for the Congress to support the contras as a goad to diplomacy and to do so without attaching conditions that would mitigate or eliminate the pressure they actually exert on the Sandinistas.
The starting point for a fresh approach has to be a consensus about what Shultz's depiction of the Sandinistas as unacceptable means, not in terms of anyone's tastes and preferences but in terms of a policy that can be carried out in the real world: What is it that the U.S. cannot accept about the junta in Managua? And what must the U.S. do to transform the Sandinista regime into something the U.S. can live with?