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Dictatorship, like misery, loves company. Right-wing military rulers have enjoyed their longest runs side by side in Latin America.
Where a despot of either the right or the left has ruled in relative isolation, he has been more likely to fall of his own weight and more vulnerable to internal enemies. To wit: the Greek Colonels, who were America's sons of bitches, and Sukarno of Indonesia, who was Moscow's and who was ousted in an anti-Communist military coup in 1966. Even today the Soviet Union is hard pressed to save the tottering Marxist dictatorship of President Noor Mohammed Taraki from an Islamic rebellion in Afghanistan.
The spectacles in Iran and Nicaragua did not fit the pattern that Americans have grown used to in watching the rise and fall of client dictators. Far from propping up the Shah and Somoza, as the U.S. had so often been accused of doing, the Carter Administration seemed to be helping topple them, or at least undermining them with criticism of their human rights abuses.
Henry Kissinger feels that the Administration's campaign of proselytizing for democracy in Iran and Nicaragua aggravated, even if it did not cause, the crises in those countries. Viewing what he regards as a dual debacle from the perspective of a once and possibly future Secretary of State, Kissinger told TIME: "I'm convinced that trying to bludgeon societies into behavior analogous to our own either will lead to a deadlock and American irrelevance, or it will lead to the collapse of existing authority without a substitute compatible with our values and, therefore, the emergence of a radical outcome, as in Iran and Nicaragua. When we begin overthrowing a government, as indirectly we did in Nicaragua, we should either have an idea of what we are going to put in its place, or we should think through the foreign policy consequences if the radical alternative takes over. If there is no moderate alternative and our choice is between the status quo and the radicals, it is a serious question whether the radicals are more in our long-term interest than the status quo."
Carter Administration officials vehemently reject Kissinger's complaint that they overthrew Somoza. The Sandinistas did that themselves. All the U.S. did was to administer a diplomatic coup de grâce in order to end the civil war. To preserve the status quo in Iran or Nicaragua—i.e., keep the Shah or Somoza in power—would probably have required direct military intervention, with G.I.s fighting alongside the Shah's imperial troops and Somoza's national guard. Even then, the Islamic and Sandinista revolutions might well have triumphed, leaving American prestige and strategic interests far more badly damaged than they are today.