CHRISTIANITY & CRISIS, Vol. 44, No. 7 (30 April 1984), 154-160 Grenada as looking glass: Playing the “Russian game” in the Americas By Andrew Reding “LOOKING BACK on Grenada,” James Finn has suggested (C&C, April 2), is a useful exercise. It is indeed—but not, as Finn would have it, so that those who criticized the U.S. invasion of last October can now be led to confess their error. Rather because the invasion was a revealing symbol of a fundamental misdirection in U.S. foreign policy— how far it departs from our national ideals, how fundamentally it distorts the relationship between elected leaders and the citizenry, how dangerous it is to this nation and the world. Grenada is a problem not because U.S. actions there were unjustly criticized but rather because the lessons of the event may be neglected or forgotten. If that happens, it will not be for the first time. To understand Grenada it will be helpful to look even further back, because the 1983 invasion is in many disturbing ways reminiscent of this country’s conquest of the Philippines at the turn of the century. Both actions were justified on grounds that appeared to be expressions of basic American tenets. It was said that we were taking action to rescue peoples who were being hopelessly brutalized by governments imposed upon them by outside forces—Spain in the case of the Philippines, Cuba and the Soviet Union in the case of Grenada. In both instances assurances were given at the outset that we were seeking no selfish gains for ourselves, but only to extend to others the blessings of freedom and democracy. In both cases, these assurances were false. And here we come upon a more ominous parallel. In both cases, the American public and the U.S. Congress were deliberately kept in the dark regarding the facts of the invasion, and regarding conditions on the islands prior to invasion. Press freedoms were curtailed at critical periods when the president (McKinley in the former case, Reagan in the latter) sought to mislead the public so as to obtain its acquiescence in policies that betrayed our most distinctive national values. In response to the earlier betrayal, Mark Twain was moved to write a satirical essay, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” in which he compared the application of two very different foreign policy norms to the Philippine situation—one of them rooted in traditional “American” values of self-determination, the other in “European” values of imperial domination. Faced with this choice, he suggests, President McKinley was too attracted to the material rewards of European-style realpolitik to do justice to our own revolutionary principles: For presently came the Philippine temptation. It was strong; it was too strong, and he [McKinley] made that bad mistake: he played the European game…It was a pity; it was a great pity, that error; that one grievous error, that irrevocable error. For it was the very place and time to play the American game again. And at no cost. Rich winnings to be gathered in; rich and permanent; indestructible; a fortune transmissable forever to the children of the flag. Not land, not money, not dominion—no, something worth many times more than that dross: our share, the spectacle of a nation of long harassed and persecuted slaves set free through our influence; our posterity’s share, the golden memory of that fair deed. The game was in our hands. With the sinking of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay, the United States had a unique opportunity to assist the spread of the principles of 1776. A Filipino republic was proclaimed, a congress elected, and the Spanish were forcibly removed from the entire archipelago except Manila by Filipino armies under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo. At this point Filipinos held the warmest feelings for the Americans who, they believed, had come to assist them in their independence struggles. They were sadly mistaken. For unlike the French forces that helped us secure our independence, the American armies turned on their Filipino allies as soon as the Spanish had been vanquished. With the American public deliberately kept in the dark about the already established independent and democratic government in the Philippines, the decision was made to seize the archipelago for its geopolitical and economic advantages. The U.S. Army was ordered to invade the islands and crush the infant republic. Of course they [the Filipinos] wore surprised—that was natural; surprised and disappointed; disappointed and grieved. To them it looked un-American; uncharacteristic; foreign to our established traditions. And this was natural, too; for we were only playing the American game in public—in private it was the European. Brezhnev in the Americas Twain’s concluding words may have a familiar ring for correspondents covering the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon during the U.S. invasion of Grenada. For even as President Reagan described the invasion to the nation as a “rescue mission” to evacuate American medical students and to free Grenadians from Cuban and Soviet tyranny, administration sources were privately admitting that the real purpose was to replace a Marxist government with one friendlier to our interests. It was further admitted that the action had been contemplated for years, and awaited only a suitable pretext for execution. Once again we’ve begun to play the American game in public while playing our adversaries’ game in private. Only this time it was not the “European game” of the Spanish and British empires, but rather that other “European game” of the Russian socialist empire, known also as the “Brezhnev Doctrine.” For this kind of enterprise, secrecy and disinformation are essential tools. Though McKinley allowed American correspondents into the Philippines, he saw to it that their dispatches were censored so that embarrassing material could not get through. Reagan achieved the same purpose by barring newsmen from Grenada during the invasion. In both cases the news media were supplied with government-managed “news” carefully tailored to fit the president’s pronouncements, so that in the crucial periods all that reached the American public was a combination of falsehoods and misrepresentations— backed, if at all, by selective documentation and manufactured statistics. In each of these episodes, much of the truth emerged, but only in bits and pieces, and only after the conquest was a fait accompli and had been accepted by most of the public as the glorious achievement the administration proclaimed it to be. This reliance on disinformation is not a minor aspect of the Grenada episode but rather a principal reason why we should look at the event in very close detail, beginning with the stance taken by the U.S. toward the People’s Revolutionary Government set up in Grenada by Maurice Bishop following the overthrow of Sir Eric Gairy. In terms of civil and political rights, Bishop’s PRG was hardly modeled on our own democracy, but it would be difficult to conceive a more fitting description of its origins than the rationale Thomas Jefferson provided for the American Revolution: “[W]hen a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce [the people] under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.” For Prime Minister Gairy had transformed a nominal parliamentary democracy into a brutal dictatorship; he organized a secret police, rigged elections, seized opponents’ properties, squandered public funds, and imprisoned, tortured, and murdered political adversaries. Yet under the Carter administration our government was friendly to the regime of terror and hostile to the popular revolution that brought it down in March of 1979. Characteristically, the hostility was expressed in the language of the “American game”: It was charged that Bishop’s government was violating human rights. What had been tolerable in extreme form under a right-wing dictatorship became intolerable in a milder form under a socialist government. Gairy could get away with controlling the media, bullying the churches, denying free elections, and imprisoning political adversaries; Bishop could not. It made no difference that Bishop did not use torture, order killings, or seize the land and property of adversaries, as Gairy had done; what mattered most was that radical elements had overthrown an “elected parliamentary democracy” by force of arms. (It is ironic that armed revolution should earn automatic condemnation in a city named after a rebel general, where tourists pay homage at a memorial to the author of one of history’s greatest revolutionary manifestos.) With Gairy threatening a countercoup, Bishop asked the U.S. for defensive arms and economic aid. The Carter administration coupled its refusal with a warning to Bishop not to turn to Cuba. When Grenada then asked and got help from Castro, the U.S. used that fact as a sufficient reason for continuing hostility. Under Reagan, hostility became malevolence. Bishop’s efforts to seek accommodation— first by a letter to Reagan promising elections, then during a visit to Washington— brought no improvement. Bishop’s brand of socialism was focused on infrastructure (the airport, roads, public housing) and public services (health care, schools). It allowed room for the private sector; according to the International Monetary Fund, private investment increased 130 percent in the first year after Bishop’s New Jewel Movement (NJM) took power. Yet the administration not only refused bilateral aid but fiercely opposed all proposals for multilateral assistance and took steps to discourage tourist visits to Grenada. It was ideologically motivated economic warfare. One of its effects was to nurture the Cuban connection. Another was to strengthen the hardline faction within the NJM that regarded Bishop as a compromiser. Veiled and not-so-veiled threats of U.S. military action further reinforced the hardliners’ resolve (International Policy Report, January 1984). Irrational rationale Bypassing for the moment the intervening steps, it is appropriate to examine the Reagan administration’s publicly stated reasons for claiming that the invasion was legal and necessary. Two reasons were declared at the outset. First, it was said that the military landing was undertaken to evacuate endangered U.S. citizens. But no such endangerment was ever demonstrated until alter the invasion had begun. In fact, prior to the invasion the Grenadian military council had given assurances regarding the safety of all foreigners, and had offered to assist in evacuating anyone who wished to leave. The Reagan administration responded that the military council could not be trusted. In particular, it was charged that the council had kept the airport closed. This claim is contradicted by Canadians and by a former U.S. official (the director of President Reagan’s Social Security Commission) who flew out of the airport at this time (New York Times, Oct. 29, 1983). As it turns out, it was the airports of U.S. allies in the region that were deliberately closed to flights from Grenada, hampering evacuation prospects. Thus, the case for military action to evacuate U.S. citizens was weak until the landing itself endangered U.S. medical students at one of their two campuses. In any event, even if it could be shown that a military rescue of U.S. citizens was imperative, international law does not sanction such extreme measures as invasion of a country and overthrow of its government for such a purpose. As another supposed legal justification, President Reagan told the public that the U.S. had been requested to participate in a regional military action by the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS). The OECS is the product of a 1971 pact among seven small island nations (Grenada, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, Dominica, Antigua, St.Kitts-Nevis, and Montserrat) that sought mutual security against external intervention. Article 8 of the OECS Charter provides for their common defense in cases of “external aggression,” contingent upon the unanimous vote of the member countries. The violation of those provisions has been flagrant. Only four of the seven members voted to request U.S. intervention. (The other two Caribbean countries joining in the request, Barbados and Jamaica, were not OECS members.) It was later claimed that Grenada itself had formally requested the invasion through Governor General Paul Scoon. But in the British Commonwealth system the governor general of a country is merely the queen’s ceremonial representative, no more entitled to make major political decisions for the country than the queen is for Great Britain. Further difficulties rise if one recalls that Maurice Bishop was the Grenadian signatory to the agreement that created the OECS. There is no conceivable way he would have consented to a treaty that would enable a governor general appointed on the recommendation of the dictator he overthrew (Eric Gairy) to invite the foreign power most hostile to his government (the U.S.) to invade under cover of a safeguard against “external aggression.” The ironies run deep in the newspeak logic of the Reagan administration. What then of the “external aggression” prerequisite for invoking Article 8? No one has yet demonstrated the existence of any such aggression apart from the U.S. invasion itself. Confronted with this reality, St. Lucia Prime Minister John Compton (who had asked for foreign intervention to crush the Grenadian Revolution in 1979) termed the invasion a “preemptive defensive,” justified by the need to prevent imminent attack from Grenada. From a legal viewpoint, the treaty’s provisions relating to external aggression can only mean aggression from outside the seven-country association, since each member country was reserved the veto power. Militarily, no one has been able seriously to suggest that Grenada, without any air, naval, or amphibious forces, posed any imminent threat to its neighbors. To do so could only invite ridicule. It must have been clear to the administration that those verifiable facts would turn out to be highly embarrassing. Then, too, there was the spectacle of one of the world’s most powerful countries invading one of the smallest with a large naval task force and more than 6,000 of its most elite troops; Brobdingnag stepping on Lilliput. How then to rescue the legal argument and secure public approval for the absurd? The only way was to play the Russian game further: to supply the public with untruths and hyperbolize half-truths in large quantities, and then to deny the possibility of verification to an over-inquisitive free press. Fragile facts Reagan himself took the lead. Announcing that “we got there just in time,” he said on national television that Grenada had already become a “Soviet-Cuban colony being readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy.” In support of this conclusion he revealed that the invading troops had discovered three warehouses full of arms and munitions, including one with “weapons and ammunition stacked almost to the ceiling, enough to supply thousands of terrorists.” He also asserted that the number of Cubans on the island was far more than anticipated, and that they had turned out to be “a military force” rather than the airport construction workers they pretended to be. He suggested that the Cubans and Russians had instigated the assassination of Prime Minister Bishop and declared that “a Cuban occupation of the island had been planned.” These charges were dutifully reinforced by Admiral Wesley McDonald in a subsequent press conference. He declared that captured documents showed there were at least 1,100 “well-trained professional [Cuban] soldiers” on Grenada, who had been “impersonating construction workers.” Other captured documents were said to show that “341 more officers and 4,000 more reservists” were soon to arrive in preparation for “the Cubans to come in and take over the island, which they had already started to do at that time.” These spectacular claims conveniently fill in the gaping holes in the administration’s legal argument. Were they true, Cuba would be the “external aggressor” required by Article 8 of the OECS Charter for the initiation of collective security measures. Furthermore, Cuban and Soviet complicity in Bishop’s overthrow and assassination would have constituted unlawful interference in the domestic affairs of Grenada under the charters of the United Nations and the Organization of American States, and would have validated the governor general’s appeal to the OECS as the only legitimate authority still able to make the appeal. But not one of the administration’s charges has been substantiated. On the contrary, almost all have been conclusively disproved. Although the Soviet Union promptly recognized the Revolutionary Military Council (RMC) that executed Maurice Bishop, Cuba denounced the council well before the U.S. invasion, stating that “no doctrine, principle, or proclaimed revolutionary position, and no internal split justifies such brutal procedures as the physical elimination of Bishop” (Newsweek, Oct. 31, 1983). Castro’s credibility in this matter is enhanced by the fact that he and Bishop were personal friends, while his relationships with Bishop’s successors were anything but cordial. In a speech he made in Havana on November 14, Castro praised Bishop as an exceptional revolutionary leader in whom he had the highest trust, but said that “the [Bernard] Coard group never had such relations, or such intimacy, or such confidence.” He said relations between Cuba and the Revolutionary Military Council “were cold and tense,” and that “there did not exist the most minimal coordination between the Grenadian army and the Cuban construction workers and collaborators” in the period preceding the invasion (New York Times, Nov. 15, 1983). As for the number of Cuban combat troops on the island, the State Department eventually admitted that the Cuban estimate of 784 Cubans on the island was substantially correct, and that only a little more than 100 of these were “combatants” (meaning they had defended themselves by force of arms), carefully sidestepping the fact that even they could not be represented as troops. It was quietly acknowledged that the Cubans had in fact been the construction workers, doctors, nurses, and teachers that Havana had claimed they were. Furthermore, of the more than 60 Cuban “combatants” the Pentagon claimed to have killed and whose bodies were shipped to Cuba, only 28 were in fact Cuban. The others had to be shipped right back to Grenada. What then of the captured documents proving that 4,341 Cuban soldiers were to be sent to Grenada? A senior Pentagon official later privately conceded that the document in question concerned the training of 4,341 Grenadian reservists (New York Times, Nov. 6, 1984). What of the warehouses full of arms? On inspection, they turned out to be not so full alter all, with only one of them being one-quarter full, and all of them containing mainly small arms. According to George Louison, Bishop’s minister of agriculture, the arms belonged to the Grenadian militia, and had been removed to that location from rural caches under cover of the round-the-clock curfew imposed by the RMC after Bishop’s execution (Newsday, Oct. 30, 1983). With the military government so unpopular, it dared not trust the country’s own militia, and so disarmed it. As far as the remaining “captured documents” are concerned, Fidel Castro pointed to a clause in the Soviet agreement on shipment of arms to Grenada that prohibited their export to third countries. He also accurately pointed out that the documents “contained nothing having to do with the idea of military bases in Grenada.” As difficult as it may be to admit, it has to be acknowledged that Fidel Castro has turned out to be telling the truth all along about Cuban involvement in Grenada as our own president has been deceiving us. Even more troubling is that this deception has been going on for some time now. Months before the overthrow of Bishop, Ronald Reagan made a televised address in which he displayed an aerial reconnaissance photograph of the Point Salines international airport under construction in Grenada. Pointing to the 9,000-foot runway and the oil storage tanks, he asserted that these were unnecessary for commercial flights, and could only mean that the airport was to become a Cuban-Soviet airbase. Reagan failed to mention that the airport had been first proposed by the British government in 1954, when Grenada was still a colony; that it had been designed by the Canadians, underwritten by the British government, and built in part by a London firm; that the runway length was required for landing the jumbo jets flown by Caribbean airlines, and that no fewer than six neighboring islands have runways at least as long. As for the oil storage tanks, they would have been underground and, ironically, out of sight, had the airport been intended for military uses. Our government has known all of this all along. To suggest otherwise is to suggest that the Central Intelligence Agency is incapable of the most rudimentary investigation. So why the sensationalized presentation on nationwide television half a year before the crisis even got under way in Grenada? Improving the scenario The answer is that the American public was being prepared for an invasion that had been in the works since the early days of the Reagan presidency. Back in the summer of 1981, the invasion was rehearsed as part of the Ocean Venture ’81 naval maneuvers. The operation was code-named “Amber and the Amberdines” (Cuba’s code is “Red”), in undisguised reference to Grenada and the Grenadines, and the target was further labeled “our enemy in the Eastern Caribbean.” The scenario called for “Amber” to “seize American hostages,” prompting invasion after “negotiations with the Amber government break down.” This full dress rehearsal was carried out on Vieques Island off Puerto Rico, an island of roughly Grenada’s dimensions and topography. Paratroopers were flown in from the U.S. for a dawn drop at one airport, while marines made an amphibious landing at the other. The scenario concluded with the rescue of the “hostages” and the seizure of the island, with U.S. troops remaining on Amber “to install a regime favorable to the way of life we espouse.” Knowledge of these preparations helps answer some lingering questions about the actual invasion. The pretext for intervention had all along been the seizure of American “hostages,” necessitating a “rescue mission.” So when the Revolutionary Military Council failed to play its role in the script, the U.S. and its Caribbean “allies” turned down the RMC’s evacuation offers, and closed airports on neighboring islands so as to block independent evacuation efforts (Newsday, Oct. 27, 1983). The stage was then just about set for the requisite “rescue mission.” All that remained was to produce a credible threat to U.S. citizens—which brings us to the curious incident of the forgotten campus. What is curious about it is that although the rescue of the medical students was one of the two announced central objectives of the invasion, U.S. military forces said they had not been informed that the school had two campuses on the island. The invaders therefore secured only one campus in the initial stages; the second campus was then encircled by enemy troops and could only be secured after 36 hours of heavy fighting. How could this happen? The island had been under surveillance for years; the invasion had been not only contemplated but planned and rehearsed. U. S. officials were in continuous contact with the school’s administrators in the days before the invasion; two officials from the U.S. embassy in Barbados had been permitted to visit the school at the time (New York Times, Oct. 23, 1983). To try to believe that the existence of the second campus was unknown asks too much of the most credulous. In the circumstances, it is not irrelevant to point out that the RMC, conscious of the “Amber and the Amberdines” scenario, was doing all it could to avoid giving provocation; the last thing it wanted was to lend substance to any claim of a need for a rescue operation. But once the invasion was under way, with one campus secured and the other left exposed, the Grenadian military had nothing to lose by rising to the bait, thus setting the stage for a dramatic mission of liberation. The drama was an instant hit in the U.S. With independent reporters barred from the action, administration propaganda dominated the news. Americans were bombarded with shocking tales of an attempted Cuban-Soviet takeover of the island, of secret bases for the export of terrorism, of a Cuban army taking to the hills, of American medical students under fire, and of a heroic rescue by our marines and rangers. It was the “Russian game” of managed news, and it was a big success, yielding Ronald Reagan a commanding lead in the public opinion surveys. But the drama did not play so well abroad. Many countries, large and small, East and West, were on good terms with Maurice Bishop’s People’s Revolutionary Government while Ronald Reagan was plotting its downfall. When Reagan mentioned the Cubans, Russians, Libyans, and North Koreans on the island, he failed to mention the French, the Venezuelans, the Canadians, the Italians, the British, etc., who were likewise working on development projects. Because of their presence, foreign governments were sufficiently well informed about Grenada from their own direct experience to see through the lies and misrepresentations. In an interview on January 21, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher rebutted every one of President Reagan’s supposed justifications for invasion. Stressing that her information indicated that all foreign nationals, including the U.S. students, had been safe before the invasion, she insisted that “if they were going to be in danger, the time of maximum danger would be the time when anyone else set foot on the island. ” She added that the Cuban-built airport was essentially no different from and no more threatening than similar airports on neighboring islands. And she pointed out that the OECS meeting requesting intervention had been followed by a meeting of the Caribbean community (Caricom) representing the wider Caribbean, which had counseled against the use of force. Instead, Caricom responded to the military coup and the murder of Bishop by imposing trade and diplomatic sanctions and by sending a list of demands to the RMC. But Reagan ordered the invasion to proceed before the council had a chance to reply to the Caricom initiative. The administration also ignored other diplomatic opportunities, including a remarkable overture by Fidel Castro. Several days before the invasion, Castro sent a message to the U.S. government through the Swiss embassy in Havana: …The United States knows our position [condemning the murder of Bishop and takeover by the Revolutionary Military Council] in relation to the events in Grenada and of our position not to involve ourselves in the internal affairs of that country. We know that they are concerned for their numerous North American residents there, as we are also concerned about the hundreds of Cuban cooperation personnel working there in several fields, and about the news that U.S. naval forces are approaching Grenada. According to reports we have, no U.S. citizen or other foreigner has had any problems, nor have our personnel. It is important to maintain contact on this matter in order to cooperate if any difficulty arises and so that measures may be taken for the security of these persons without violence or intervention into the country (New York Times, Nov. 4, 1983). It would be hard to imagine a more conciliatory message, and therein lies the problem. By responding in kind, the Reagan administration would have been joining in civil diplomacy with the government it refers to as the source of all aggression and terrorism in the Americas, and would have thereby suggested the possibility of negotiations over other issues, including the situations in Nicaragua and El Salvador. And that would undermine its objective of—to use UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick’s words—rolling back Marxism in the hemisphere. Other available diplomatic options were similarly spurned. The administration could have taken its case to the UN or the OAS. It could have approached the British Commonwealth of Nations, of which Grenada was a member. It could have immensely strengthened Caricom’s hand by supporting or joining in its forceful diplomacy rather than ignoring it. But the administration renounced diplomacy altogether in favor of overwhelming military force. Prime Minister Thatcher gave expression to the norms violated by this choice: “[Y]ou do not, in my strong feeling, use force” against another country without “an overwhelming case” and before “everything else” has been tried. By failing to satisfy these preconditions, President Reagan placed in jeopardy “the reputation that we, the free world, do not pursue our objectives by force, whereas we have always said that the difference was that the Soviets did.” Flouting the law Granting that the record of the “free world” (including Great Britain and the U.S.) is hardly as spotless as Thatcher implies, it is true that our government’s action toward Grenada constitutes a clear application of the Brezhnev Doctrine and a repudiation of our own professed standards. It was as barefaced a violation of the law of nations—and specifically of the UN and OAS charters— as the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. Article 2, Section 4, of the UN charter mandates that “all members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations. ” Among the purposes enumerated in Article I is the “develop[ment of] friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.” This language leaves so little room for ambiguity in interpreting the legality of the U.S. action in Grenada that the U.S. lost the support of even its closest allies in the United Nations. The Security Council voted 1l-l on a motion condemning the invasion, with France and the Netherlands in the affirmative, Britain abstaining, and the U.S. casting its veto. The disapproval was equally overwhelming in the General Assembly, where only El Salvador, Israel, and several Caribbean countries supported the U.S. position. Not a single member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization voted with the U.S.: Even such anticommunist allies as the Philippines and Thailand acknowledged that the U.S. action was “a flagrant violation of international law” (New York Times, Nov. 4, 1983). The language of the OAS Charter is even less favorable to the Reagan administration’s position. According to Article 15, “no state or group of states has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other state.” Article 17 then adds that “the territory of a state is inviolable; it may not be the object, even temporarily, of military occupation or other measures of force taken by another state, directly or indirectly, on any grounds whatever” (italics added). In this connection it is relevant to recall that by Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, treaties ratified by the Senate become “the supreme Law of the Land.” The UN and OAS Charters are such ratified treaties; the OECS Charter, to which the U.S. was never even associated, is not. To disregard elements of international law that our own government has formally pledged to observe in favor of a pretended observation of treaties to which we are not even a party is not only to dishonor our country before the world, but to violate our own highest law. But it is not only our law that is being thus trampled upon: It is also the ethical vision behind the law, that striving toward a more just and moral order that is still our most distinctive and valuable tradition, however often it has been dishonored. Lest we forget, the UN and OAS were largely U.S. creations, aiming in no small measure to project American democratic values to the hemisphere and to the world at large. That this is so can be readily seen by comparing the texts of their charters with those of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Guided by the vision of Franklin Roosevelt and Cordell Hull, the United Nations was established for the purpose of reducing recourse to war while promoting the decolonization of European empires and the rise to self- determination of their peoples. In this last respect it was a fitting embodiment of our Declaration of Independence’s affirmation of “the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them. ” In further reaffirmation of our founding principles, Roosevelt proclaimed the “Good Neighbor Policy,” and Secretary of State Hull accordingly renounced any right to intervention by the U.S. in the Western Hemisphere. The “Good Neighbor” principles were soon formalized in the OAS Charter, doing justice to our Declaration’s assertion that “as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.” There can be no greater betrayal of this American tradition than Ronald Reagan’s importation of the Brezhnev Doctrine into the Western Hemisphere. For like the Russian leadership, the Reagan administration has insisted on exercising a veto over the economic and political systems of its neighbors. The Good Neighbor Policy is dead. Grenada is the bellwether for the new U.S. foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere. Nicaragua appears to be next: Already the U.S, is trying to revive an alliance of Central American right-wing dictatorships (CONDECA) for the purpose of replicating the OECS precedent and justifying another U.S. invasion. Conciliatory actions by the Sandinistas are left untested and their offers to negotiate rebuffed, just as Maurice Bishop’s overtures were earlier spurned. Peace and mutual accommodation are no more a part of this administration’s foreign policy than evacuation was in Grenada. Nor are democracy, freedom, and self-determination, despite the heavy barrage of rhetoric about elections and freedom of the press. The real aim is to reduce our neighbors to satellites. As in Twain’s description of the Philippine tragedy, we have once again an American president who is trumpeting the “American game” in public while shamelessly playing the “European game” in private. Examined from this perspective, Grenada has become as a looking glass: Whatever light can be shed on it helps us better see ourselves. We are thereby enabled to perceive that those who are most strident in their denunciations of the Soviet Union, singling it out as the global “focus of evil, ” are also the most eager to adopt its ways; that the most energetic flag-wavers and Bible-thumpers are often the first to betray both their national heritage and the commandments of the Prince of Peace; that the loudest advocates of “law and order” become its most flagrant violators when its observance would shield the weak from the powerful. And that there is no way to adopt a Soviet-style foreign policy without bringing it home as well. For when we violate international law we inevitably violate constitutional law, and when we undermine the sovereignty of other peoples, we just as inevitably end up eroding our own. ANDREW REDING is founder and former president of Isles, Inc., a nonprofit organization created to foster socially and ecologically responsible development in poor communities in the U.S. and the third world, emphasizing the use of decentralized technologies and local self-determination with the goal of community empowerment. He became familiar with the people of Grenada and with the island’s politics and economy through an Isles project called Atlas of Grenada which explored local human and natural resources, among them the use of wind power. He is now a freelance writer and consultant. An article by Reding on the Grenadian revolution has appeared in the Christian Century (April 11); another, dealing with the future of U.S.-Grenadian relations, will be published by the World Policy Journal.