With the Soviets bogged down in Afghanistan, the cold warriors' attention in the early eighties shifted to Latin America, where left-wing insurgencies were rising against right-wing authoritarian rulers. In Nicaragua, the deed was already done, the Somoza regime having yielded to the Sandinista movement in July 1979. Toward El Salvador, Reagan, like Carter, cast a wary eye. He was reluctant to send troops, yet unwilling to see the country fall to Marxist guerrillas. As Podhoretz jotted privately to himself: “If they prevail we're finished (our backyard). Will they?” Not if the United States stepped in to “help create a democratic Center as an alternative both to the Communist-dominated guerrillas (who are not supported by the people of El Salvador, as they showed in the last election) and to the extreme Right.” To create such a democratic center, the United States would doubtless have to act alone. Its intervention in Grenada in October 1983, both in reaction to a Soviet–Cuban expansion of an airfield that could be used for military purposes and out of concern for American medical students who might be held hostage by the new revolutionary government, had been condemned in the U.N. General Assembly by an overwhelming margin.

Why was the Grenada intervention right and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan wrong? It was, as Raymond Aron had said, “a question of what the invading army is bringing with it.