(4 of 5)
If and when the contra campaign finally petered out, the Sandinistas would probably have accumulated an arsenal of East bloc arms far beyond even what they have now; they would have succeeded in militarizing the society even further, perversely helped by the pretext of the civil war; and they would have built up an even greater grudge against Tío Sam, hence an even greater incentive to go to work on their rather fragile neighbors.
Of course, the Sandinistas already have an inclination to go after their neighbors. That is the principal drawback of the fourth option, which is to keep the contra campaign going long enough to bring about a diplomatic solution. Like their mentor in Moscow, Soviet-style regimes are generically determined at least to neutralize, better yet to destabilize, and ideally to communize other states. They wage war abroad, either outright or by more covert means, for the same reason that they oppress internal opposition: because it is opposition, and because they are totalitarian. Genuine live-and-let-live peaceful coexistence is as alien to a Marxist-Leninist foreign policy as power sharing is to Marxism-Leninism on the home front. The Sandinistas show no sign of being an exception to this rule.
That is a large part of why the Administration has paid only lip service to the diplomatic option to date. But there are even greater disadvantages to the alternatives now available: pursuit of a military victory; abrupt abandonment of the contras, toward which Congress now seems inclined; and an open-ended civil war, which might wear down American will before it wears down the junta in Managua.
Besides, the Administration has not really pursued a diplomatic solution in a serious and realistic way. Whenever the Sandinistas have put a card on the table, the Administration has upped the ante, asking the Sandinistas to negotiate away their power within the country, which they are simply not going to do.
What they might conceivably do, however, is sign an agreement that would trade away their license--and at least some of their wherewithal--to follow the Soviet pattern of behavior outside their borders. Elements of such a deal are at hand in the Contadora proposal, which calls for the reduction of the Sandinista armed forces, the withdrawal of Soviet and Cuban military advisers and a ban on the export of revolution. The Sandinistas have hinted they might be willing to accept something along those lines. Even some Administration officials believe the Sandinistas might pay that price to get the contras off their--backs.
Meanwhile, Salvadoran President José Napoleón Duarte has offered to conduct parallel negotiations with the leftists he is fighting, as part of a broader settlement whereby the Sandinistas would negotiate with the contras to end the civil war. The contra leaders have endorsed the Contadora and the Duarte initiatives, and Reagan reiterated his own support for both when appointing veteran Troubleshooter Philip Habib as his special envoy for Central America two weeks ago.