The Breach: Iran-Contra and the Assault on American Democracy, Alan McPherson, 2025, University of North Carolina Press
American democracy may have finally died on Tuesday 25 February when Donald Trump, in a little noticed flourish in the Oval Office, signed the 69th executive order of his second presidency.
Amid the flurry of other such decrees—the tool of choice for presidents the world over who worship power and detest oversight—this declaration on the “accountability” of federal agencies was easy to miss.
But as journalist Chris McGreal has pointed out, it sets in stone an extreme interpretation of a political doctrine—the Republicans’ so-called “unitary executive theory” dreamed up under Ronald Reagan—that elevates the US president into an elected dictator.
Trump’s decree gives the US chief executive paramount authority to decide the law and who should obey it, casting aside the constitution’s checks and balances.
In essence, it declares that that the executive’s opinion on all legal matters, no matter how absurd, is absolute—so don’t bother arguing. Legally speaking, Trump can now all but do what he wants.
Putting aside the unease this has caused among constitutional lawyers, to understand the implications of this move we need only turn to history for examples of previous Republican leaders who, frustrated by democratic norms, purposefully subverted them—and Latin America plays a key role in this story, in the form of the Iran-Contra affair.
It is no small irony that the best past example of a self-inflicted wound to America’s body politic came under Reagan and reflected an unholy nexus of US imperial interests that stretched from the Middle East to Central America then back home.
Contemporary parallels abound. Reading Alan McPherson’s brilliant examination of the Iran-Contra affair it is almost as if Washington has become trapped in a timeless Bermuda Triangle of deception of its own making that stretches from Iran to Nicaragua to DC.
The Breach is exceptional for teasing out the critically important implications of the Iran-Contra affair for US democracy—and pulls no punches in alluding to its relevance today given current Republican behaviour.
One of the problems facing any discussion of this episode is its apparent complexity, which tends to monopolise attention seeking to comprehend it in a way that can distract from its political implications.
A brief summary of what came to light in 1986 is as follows: despite promising never to bargain with terrorists, Reagan’s government secretly sold weapons to revolutionary Iran in an effort to free American hostages.
At the same time, it was coordinating the private funding and training of counter-revolutionaries seeking to destroy Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolution, against the express intentions of Congress.
Finally, the National Security Council was diverting profits from its sale of arms to Iran to fund its Contra operations. There were also allegations that the CIA may have engaged in drug-trafficking—smuggling cocaine into the US—to fund its alliance with the Contras.
As McPherson points out, when the full details of this affair began to emerge, there was considerable debate about which—or even if—laws had, formally, been broken, even though it was obvious that both Congress and the American people had been lied to, foreign policy had been “privatised”, and there had been the mother of all cover ups.
Let’s not forget the carnage visited upon revolutionary Nicaragua through the Contra war by an imperial power deranged by anti-communist obsession. The war cost the lives of at least 31,000 Nicaraguans, destroyed critical infrastructure, and trashed the economy, thereby inflicting severe hardship on Nicaragua’s long-suffering people for generations.
Key figures such as Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter of the NSA and Oliver North (NSC) faced misdemeanour charges or eventually had their cases dismissed, and confusion allowed the subsequent Bush presidency to ensure impunity for many through pardons.
However, liberal observers were clear: democratic tenets within the US constitution, in particular the separation of powers which is arguably the keystone of this foundational document, had been seriously breached.
McPherson identifies six ways in which the Reagan administration compromised the basic standards of democracy.
It violated the separation of powers by discarding the role of Congress in foreign affairs; it desecrated the rule of law by breaking statues; it obstructed justice and thereby infringed the independence of the judicial branch; it undermined the importance of truth through open lies and attacks on the press; it privatised foreign policy, removing it from democratic and public scrutiny; and it interrupted the active participation of US citizens in government by reaching quid pro quo agreements with foreign governments.
In these ways, Reagan’s administration actively undermined the norms of US democracy, but as the author points out, to many observers the antidemocratic nature of the Iran-Contra affair has always been as opaque as the events themselves.
Yet since 1986 there have been far-sighted analysts who have understood the underlying threat it had both posed to US democracy but, more disturbingly, how it illuminated the ways in which that democracy could be undermined through the abuse of executive power.
And it is on this point that McPherson’s tale is most cautionary.
He writes: “The Iran-Contra scandal is an object lesson in how the supposed guardians of democracy—elected officials—can themselves threaten its norms. Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s onslaught against those norms led to their backsliding in several areas. In the 2020s, a general erosion of democratic beliefs beset the United States, accompanied by a rise of authoritarianism among Republican voters.”
In his effort to understand the full implications of Iran-Contra for US democracy then and now, the author concentrates significant attention on the separation of powers, its most fundamental principle defining the very character of the political system, but in practice an arena of struggle over foreign policy that only grew after Watergate.
It was this tussle that set the scene for Reagan’s open embrace of the unitary executive theory and the subsequent, long-term damage this Republican president visited upon US democracy.
McPherson explores the plotting itself, the public exposure of the scandal, the drawn-out institutional scrutiny of it that then took place, and the lessons that the disdain for democracy hold today for a country now in the thrall of a man whose own acts teeter on the brink of tyranny.
He has Trump clearly in his sights for the norm-busting repetition of all the sins exposed by the Iran-Contra affair—assaults on the separation of powers, disdain for congressional oversight, the use of pardons, contempt for the rule of law and obstruction of justice, endemic deceit etc.
Indeed, the way in which the author directly applies all of these abuses to the current incumbent of the Oval Office is an admirable expression of academic responsibility; as such, it should be essential reading for American students of history and politics. It will ring in their ears.
McPherson writes of what US democracy lost through Iran-Contra: “The collective loss found its measure in the erosion of the will of the people, of national sovereignty, of justice, of law, and of truth. That erosion helped to warp these concepts in Republicans’ minds in the decades that followed, culminating in even grosser abuses of all six norms by President Trump, an individual with zero concern for his nation or for democracy and elected by voters who had diminished appreciation for its norms.”
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Categories: Central America, International, Iran, Middle East & North Africa, Nicaragua, North America, United States