As America grapples with the challenge of radical Islam and the consequences of disaster in Iraq, strategy and policy analysis of the United States experience in Central America at the end of the Cold War offers important lessons that advance our understanding of irregular warfare and counsels prudence regarding the costs and risks of military intervention.

The challenges that vex the United States today in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere are not altogether as new and unique as they seem. U.S. involvement in Central America during the 1980s clearly demonstrated the costs, risks, and limits to intervention and the use of force in internal conflicts. Much can be learned today about the nature of irregular warfare from the experiences of the United States and the other protagonists in Central America during the final phase of the Cold War. The U.S. perceived a threat to national security in these wars from determined insurgents with a compelling revolutionary ideology and powerful allies that linked them to other conflicts around the world. This strategy and policy analysis makes a new contribution to irregular warfare theory through an examination of the origins, strategic dynamics, and termination of the Sandinista insurrection in Nicaragua, the decade long counterinsurgency of the Salvadoran government against the FMLN guerrillas, and the concurrent Contra insurgency against the Sandinistas.

Many of the lessons about the fundamental and recurring nature of irregular warfare are being rediscovered in the current challenges of radical Islam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, despite the great differences in circumstance, culture, and geography. In the Central American case, three successive Presidents encountered serious domestic controversy over U.S. policies and refrained from sending U.S. combat troops to intervene directly. Most importantly, they prudently heeded warnings that internal wars of all types are rarely subject to military solutions, because their natures are equally and fundamentally political. Greentree presents his argument as a strategy and policy case study of the civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador during the final decade of the Cold War. The book comprises an examination of the origins, strategic dynamics, and termination of these wars from the points of view of the main participants—Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and the United States. It also develops a general conceptual framework for understanding the nature of insurgency, counterinsurgency, revolution, and intervention that builds on classic strategic theory and contemporary thought on irregular warfare. From the perspective of global superpower conflict, the wars in Central America were peripheral small wars or low intensity conflicts. However, for the internal protagonists these were total and bloody wars for survival. Involvement in such wars has been cyclical in the U.S. experience, and it is misfortunate, if not tragic, that the greatly similar problems encountered across widely varying circumstances are quickly forgotten.

Foreword (Robert W. Tucker)
Preface
1. Introduction: The Strategy and Policy of Intervention in Central America
2. What Was at Stake?
3. The Problem of Limits
4. Nicaragua: The Fall of Somoza and the Triumph of the Sandinistas
5. El Salvador: Reform with Repression
6. The Contra War: Revolution, Counter-Revolution, and the Cold War
7. Every War Must End
8. Epilogue and Aftermath
Notes
Selected Readings
Index

Reviews
"American policymakers...like anyone else who wants to learn about those conflicts, would profit greatly from reading this...very useful study."—The Historian

"[An] excellent and very timely book... Greentree’s book is an excellent place to start for those who would like to refresh their memories about this critical era in the history of irregular warfare."—Survival

Endorsements
"Crossroads of Intervention is a superlative book, even-handed, succinct, and laced with shrewd judgments. Todd Greentree demolishes the cliches that both the left and the right have devised to describe American involvement in the wars that battered El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s. The result is a model of good scholarship, with considerable relevance to present-day U. S. foreign policy."—Andrew J. Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War

"Between Vietnam and Iraq, the United States was involved in another set of now-forgotten conflicts in Central America during which it was forced, painfully, to re-learn the principles of insurgency counterinsurgency warfare. ^ICrossroads of Intervention^R tells this tale in a gripping fashion, and demonstrates the essential continuity in the nature of these conflicts. It's only too bad that this book had not been available before the start of the Iraq War."—Francis Fukuyama, Bernard Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy and Director, International Development Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University

"Crossroads of Intervention is a superb examination of the Central American wars of the 1980s. Greentree brilliantly describes the mixed motives, unintended consequences, and moral dilemmas of these wars, and persuasively brings to light their status as a bridge between Vietnam and Iraq. Military strategists keen on learning more about irregular warfare will find rich rewards in this study. Greentree knows the region intimately and has a knack for asking-and answering persuasively-the larger questions. Briskly written and eminently readable, this work belongs on the bookshelf of all students of American foreign and military policy."—David Hendrickson, Professor of Political Science, Colorado College