Letting the World Scream

On April 9, 1984, the government of Nicaragua filed suit with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague alleging that the United States had committed “massive violations … of its obligations … under general principles of international law.” The Nicaraguans accused the U.S. of doing so by — among other things — using force to disrupt Nicaragua’s trade, violating its airspace, and attempting to overthrow its government. All of this was true, the product of Ronald Reagan’s covert war against Nicaragua’s revolutionary ruling party: the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional or “Sandinistas.” The court would rule in Nicaragua’s favor two years later, but not before the U.S. had rejected the ICJ’s compulsory jurisdiction, something it had accepted since helping to establish the institution after World War II. 

While the U.S. intervention in Nicaragua during the 1980s is somewhat well-remembered today, it is usually as part of the story of the end of the Cold War and the Reagan administration’s aggressive anticommunism in Latin America. Less recalled is Nicaragua’s case in the ICJ and the American response. At a time when some U.S. policymakers regularly invoke a “rules-based” international order while others fear what Donald Trump’s return to the White House might mean for it, the story of Nicaragua v. United States provides valuable context and is worth revisiting. It reveals that the U.S. has a long history of ignoring international rules it sees as unfavorable, even when the U.S. was instrumental in creating those measures in the first place. 

The ICJ, part of the broader United Nations system, was established in 1946 to settle disputes between states through legal argument rather than war. It was very much America’s brainchild, a product of plans for international arbitration championed especially by Republican luminaries, including Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge, since the late 19th century. The U.S. was one of the first countries to accept the court’s jurisdiction in 1946, supporting its legitimacy throughout the court’s first three decades. 

By the early 1980s, however, the U.S. had long since fallen out of love with both international law and the United Nations. As the Cold War intensified in the 1950s, the U.S. had regularly defied international conventions by using covert action to undermine sovereign governments — in Iran in 1953, for example, and Guatemala in 1956 — while also pushing its client states to avoid treaty requirements where convenient, such as the call for elections to unify Vietnam contained in the 1954 Geneva Accords (ignored by South Vietnam in 1956). 

Americans also turned against the United Nations. Once seen as a bastion of pro-American sentiment, the General Assembly had by the early 1970s turned into something else, a body dominated by states from the Global South that regularly did not see American interests as aligning with their own. This new majority had gone on, against strenuous U.S. objections, to expel the nationalist Chinese regime in Taiwan from the Assembly in 1971 — replacing it with the communists in Beijing — while calling for a “New International Economic Order” in 1976 to replace a global economic system the Global South saw as unfairly dominated by the United States. 

Such moves had caused considerable indignation in the U.S., where in 1980 presidential hopeful Ronald Reagan promised that he would make the world “respect” the U.S. again. As one campaign ad put it: “do you think third-rate military dictators would laugh at the United States … if Ronald Reagan were president?” 

Immediately upon arriving at the White House the following year, Reagan looked to raise the temperature on the Cold War in the “Third World,” as the Global South was often called at the time. While not exactly the aggressive Cold Warrior he is sometimes remembered as — he came into office with a strong desire to negotiate with the Soviet Union — Reagan and his advisors believed in the necessity of restoring what they saw as the eroding U.S. position in the superpower contest.

Nicaragua seemed a good place to start. In 1979, the Sandinistas had overthrown the long-running, brutal, U.S.-supported, and anti-communist dictatorship of the Somoza family, pledging to bring socialist reform to one of the poorest and most unequal societies in the world. Though the U.S. had soured somewhat on the Somozas in the late ’70s (thanks to President Jimmy Carter’s focus on international human rights), many in the Reagan administration were still alarmed by the regime’s overthrow, the result of first successful left-wing revolution in Latin America since Fidel Castro’s 1959 triumph in Cuba. The new Nicaraguan regime did align itself with the global left, including Castro’s Cuba and the Soviet Union, and was seen by some as an afront to U.S. authority in its own hemisphere. 

At the urging of CIA director William Casey in 1981, Reagan authorized a program to arm and train counterrevolutionary Nicaraguans — the “Contras,” as they were called — in their quest to overthrow the Sandinista regime. The CIA provided arms, weapons, intelligence, training, cash, and, according to some accounts, encouragement to treat civilians ruthlessly. The Contras killed thousands in brutal extrajudicial murders and public executions, triggering a vicious civil war in the countryside that neither side could bring to a quick resolution. U.S. support increased over the next few years and by 1984, even included CIA operatives in speedboats mining Nicaragua’s deepwater harbors. 

The CIA origins of those small “firecracker” mines were quickly revealed after they began to detonate next to passing vessels, ranging in size from local fishing boats to a Soviet oil tanker. U.S. allies in Europe, and administration allies in Congress, condemned the CIA’s actions as outrage mounted worldwide. Even the conservative Republican Senator Barry Goldwater called the move a “violation of international law.” The Senate voted overwhelmingly in April 1984 to cut off any federal money for mining, and then for the Contras writ large in October. 

The situation provided an opening for Nicaragua to further embarrass the United States by filing suit at the ICJ in 1984. Few expected the U.S. would avoid a negative judgement in the case. U.S. support for the Contras was no secret — only its full extent was truly classified — and the evidence from Nicaragua made the relationship quite clear. The administration had long insisted that it was not seeking to overthrow the Sandinistas, but simply trying to support the Contras in their war, a position hard to plausibly maintain following the revelation of the CIA’s mining. Rather than seeking to deny its involvement before the court, therefore, the U.S. argued that the ICJ did not have jurisdiction. If it was to be considered anywhere, State Department lawyers argued, the case should be brought to the UN Security Council — where the U.S. had a veto. The court disagreed, ruling in a 1985 hearing that the court’s authority in such matters was laid out in its charter. The ICJ’s final judgment against the United States in 1986 came as little surprise. The Reagan administration, however, was unperturbed, ready to defend itself to the audience that mattered most to it: American voters. 

Reagan and many of his advisors saw the UN and the ICJ as, at best, part of a “dream that failed” — as Reagan had described the UN in 1975 — and at worst as a front for Global South anti-Americanism. He had campaigned on promises to get tough with the Third World in 1980, and planned to continue in 1984. Polls suggested that Americans generally believed that Reagan had increased respect for the U.S. abroad. 

Thus, the administration leaned into resentment of international institutions as it sought to undermine the ICJ in the eyes of Americans. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick lambasted the court as a “semi-legal, semi-judicial, semi-political body which nations sometimes accept and sometimes don’t.” A State Department lawyer, meanwhile, suggested that Nicaragua’s use of the court was somehow frivolous, and showed how far the court had declined from its founding principles. Nicaragua’s suit had used “the court in a most cynical way,” he complained, “as a political stage on which to parade … propaganda.” The ICJ, Kirkpatrick argued similarly, was not really a legal institution, but rather a political body, corrupted by the UN’s Global South majority. The court, she remarked sarcastically, was “as nonpolitical as the [General] Assembly itself.” Reagan supporters on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board agreed, encouraging the administration to tell the justices to, in essence, pound sand, and then “let the world scream.”

The U.S. withdrew from further participation in the case in 1984 and rejected the ICJ’s compulsory jurisdiction entirely in 1986. It also stymied efforts by the UN Security Council to force the U.S. to pay damages resulting from the ruling. From then on, the administration announced, the U.S. would only recognize the ICJ’s jurisdiction when it chose to do so, in effect pre-rejecting any ruling that was unfavorable to American prerogatives. 

The possibility that Reagan’s actions were setting a negative precedent for the nation’s future involvement with international law concerned many at the time. Perhaps the most significant of these detractors was Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The senator from New York had resurrected his own political career just a few years earlier by attacking the Global South’s majority at the UN during a brief stint as U.S. Ambassador to the UN in 1975-76. Despite his skepticism about the institution’s internal governance, Moynihan was aghast at Reagan’s wholesale rejection of the UN. This was, as he put it to the media in 1984, “squalid behavior,” and represented “a policy devoid alike of ethical authority, political promise, or legal authority.” It demonstrated that the U.S. no longer supported its own rules-based order, and sent the message that if America’s enemies “dissemble and cheat and Lord knows what else, they are going to get a taste of their own medicine” in return. “We seem to have come to regard international law” Moynihan wrote, “as a self-imposed restraint that puts us at a disadvantage in a lawless world.” On the contrary, he would continue, as a powerful state which supposedly treasured the rule of law at home, it was in the U.S. “interest to advance the cause of law in world affairs,” not the other way around. 

Moynihan’s views were echoed by several prominent supporters of international law at the time. Columbia Professor Richard Gardner, an international law expert and former advisor to Jimmy Carter, argued in the Wall Street Journal that the case “undermined the reputation of the U.S. as a law-abiding nation.” Moynihan himself eventually resigned from the Senate Intelligence Committee in protest over U.S. policy towards Nicaragua. Yet despite Congress cutting off support for the Contras, not much came from these protests in the long run, and Reagan was reelected in a landslide in 1984. His administration continued to fund the Contras in his second term, turning in part to the illegal scheme to sell arms to Iran that exploded into the “Iran-Contra” scandal in late 1986 and nearly led to an early end for Reagan’s presidency.

Regardless of whether the U.S. had ever meaningfully respected international law in the way Moynihan suggested, his comments — and the entire controversy around the case — demonstrate that the country was moving even further away from the more cooperative vision of international order it had advanced — at least rhetorically — immediately after World War II. Reagan’s presidency survived Iran-Contra and his reputation has done nothing but improve through subsequent decades. Though the U.S. would occasionally work within the UN system when it proved malleable to American objectives — as in the 1991 Persian Gulf War — it was also quite ready to dispense with it when it did not. American policymakers would go on to use Reagan and Kirkpatrick-esque logic to justify ignoring the United Nations throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s  — in particular, in the run up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Reagan’s dismissal of the ICJ has been reaffirmed in the decades since, most recently when the U.S. largely ignored the court’s July 2024 ruling that Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank violated international law.

Far from being a small chapter in the history of a long-ended Cold War, Nicaragua v. United States belongs to a larger story about the U.S. and the world — one that remains very much with us today. In his 1990 book on international law, Moynihan highlighted a line from Lars-Erik Nelson, a New York Daily News columnist who had written about the U.S.’ 1989 invasion of Panama. Nelson asserted that: “America’s message to the world is that we are strong, we are good, we are moral, and we will do whatever we think is right. Most Americans will probably agree with this. Just don’t be surprised if nobody else does.” This, Moynihan wrote then, “summed up the situation.” It still does.