login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Tarik Cyril Amar
Belen Fernandez
Gideon Levy
Penny S. Tee
Sharona Margolin Halickman
Jennifer Gerlach Lcsw
Andrew Silow-Carroll
Sabine Sterk
Andrew Mitrovica
John Nosta
Isolation is the Ortega Regime’s Primary Foreign Policy
The isolation the Ortega duo uses to punish the world, is really just a sign of their own aloneness.
By Silvio Prado (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES – The story goes that when there’s dense fog over the English Channel, the English say that Europe has been left isolated. Judging by the progressive retreat of the Ortega dictatorship from the international organizations, the provincial mentality of inverse isolationism seems to be the predominant factor in the foreign policy of a regime that claims to embody the second stage of the Sandinista revolution. During the eighties, the revolutionary government never stepped back from any of the international spaces, not even those where the US government maneuvered to try and expel them. Self-isolation was never any part of the revolution’s external doctrine, because that would have meant offering up on a platter the very ostracism their enemies sought.
During that era, the revolution fought all the battles, in all the forums, with all imaginable means. This is what we see portrayed in the recently published book by Eline Van Ommen, Nicaragua must Survive: Sandinista revolutionary diplomacy in the global cold war. I don’t recall if it was explicitly laid out to those of us who worked in international relations during the 1980’s, but there was a decision to strike before our adversaries did, to go around the track twice before the emissaries of imperialism even arrived. In tennis terms: the effort was to “not let any balls be considered lost.”
Drawing from valuable primary sources in several European foreign ministries, Van Ommen revisits the bitter frustrations suffered by US State Department officials, after failing to win over to their position their peers from the foreign ministries of Western Europe – not even those who were clearly opposed to the Sandinistas, such as Germany and England.
The author stresses that, in different stages, the revolution practiced a kind of “soft power.” Since they didn’t dispose of the means used by the world powers, the........
© Havana Times
visit website