Reagan was much more cautious and judicious about using military force than many hawks would lead you to believe.
By James Antle
Whatever happens to Bashar Assad, you can be sure that Ronald Reagan
is rolling in his grave. That’s the assessment of a small but loud
faction of conservatives who are perplexed that Republicans aren’t
rushing to join Barack Obama’s march to war in Syria.
If Rand Paul gets more than 10 percent of the 2016 Republican primary vote, Hugh Hewitt fears “the party of Ronald Reagan is dead, and former Ohio Sen. Bob Taft will finally get his due.”
The Wall Street Journal‘s Bret Stephens also sees Robert
Taft’s ghost, and he is very afraid. The wild-eyed view that Congress
has the power to declare war, expressed in a subversive document known
as the Constitution, penned by peacenik pinkos like James Madison,
“would have astonished Ronald Reagan.”
But such “faux-constitutional assertions,” as Stephens describes them, “would have sat well with Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio.”
Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol helpfully divided the GOP into two factions: “Reagan Republicans” and “Snowden Republicans.” Guess whose side the hawks are on?
“Now Ronald Reagan wasn’t a libertarian, folks,” Lindsey Graham reminded
the crowd at a Charleston fundraiser. Graham is among the minority of
Republican senators likely to vote with Obama on authorizing military
force in Syria.
“Ronald Reagan, if he were president, would get Assad like that,” Bill O’Reilly blustered.
Well, Ronald Reagan was president at the same time Assad’s father was running Syria and he didn’t. And Reagan might have had stronger grounds for doing so than Obama has today.
Republicans who almost seem to be itching to fight wars — or at least
type on their laptops while other people fight them — often say they
are adhering to Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy. Peace through strength,
better dead than red. They don’t much like it when less hawkish
Republicans invoke Reagan.
But Reagan’s actual foreign policy was more complicated than authors
of the thousandth call for a “neo-Reaganite foreign policy” would have
it. Yes, he built up the military and invaded Grenada. He also, as the
American Conservative Union’s Donald Devine writes in America’s Way Back, “actively committed fewer U.S. ground forces on foreign soil than any modern chief executive other than Jimmy Carter.”
Reagan, writes
George Mason University professor Colin Dueck, “generally avoided
protracted, failed, or militarily improbable entanglements abroad.” The
Grenada invasion was undertaken to rescue American medical students and
prevent the establishment of a Soviet base camp in the region, at the
request of treaty allies, against an army of 600 men.
Even Ron Paul, while chastising Reagan for not going to Congress
first, conceded “we have a legitimate national interest” in Grenada.
“It now appears that there were troops and advisers in Grenada from
Libya, Cuba, Bulgaria, the Soviet Union, East Germany and North Korea,”
Paul said on the House floor in 1983. “If that is the case, I fail to
see how anyone can believe that Grenada posed no threat to our
well-being.”
“Clearly, in comparison to post-Vietnam liberal Democrats, Reagan was
a foreign policy and national security hawk, comfortable with the use
of force and unapologetic about it,” observes Dueck. “At the same time,
when it came to the prospect of large-scale, direct military
interventions overseas, President Reagan in practice was genuinely
careful.”
In fact, Reagan devoted much of his foreign policy to arms control,
eliciting criticism from many of the same people and institutions who
consider themselves “ne0-Reaganite” today, as well as some Cold War
hawks who eventually became paleocons.
“The President’s warmest friends and his most virulent enemies
imagined that they had found in him a champion of the old conservative
dream of going beyond containment of Communism to the ‘rollback’ of
Communist influence and power and the ‘liberation’ of the Soviet
empire,” complained Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz. “The
truth, however, is that Mr. Reagan as President has never shown the
slightest inclination to pursue such an ambitious strategy.”
Since Reagan’s passing, the Republican Party has conspicuously lacked
leaders who combine the neocons’ forceful rhetorical denunciations of
tyranny with Taft-like skepticism of war.
More measured Republican critics of hyper-interventionism would be
nice, but the people who might qualify have been completely ineffective.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel appears to be on board with his boss’
plans for Syria, just as he once reluctantly supported the Iraq war. Jon
Huntsman has signed on to the Syria strikes and doesn’t think Obama should have involved Congress.
When it comes to opposing wars when it counts — even the kind Bob
Dole once called “Democrat wars” — Taft’s disciples have had to do the
heavy lifting.
But the John McCains and Lindsey Grahams aren’t just more hawkish
than the Pauls and Robert Taft. They are, contra Hugh Hewitt, more
hawkish than Dwight Eisenhower or Reagan. Perhaps even more hawkish than
some earlier versions of McCain, who voted against Reagan sending
Marines to Lebanon while many who now cheer him criticize Reagan for
pulling them out.
From Iraq to Syria, are GOP hawks really following the six-point test for the use of force devised by Caspar Weinberger or the similar eight-point test recommended by Colin Powell?
Point five in the Weinberger doctrine held that “U.S. troops should
not be committed to battle without a ‘reasonable assurance’ of the
support of U.S. public opinion and Congress.” Both Powell and
Weinberger, who worked for Reagan, said that war should only be
considered as a last resort.
Similarly, “peace through strength” was premised on the hope that
strength would make the actual use of military force unnecessary. “The
neo-Reaganite foreign policy drawn up by Kagan and Kristol is vastly
more ‘neo’ than ‘Reaganite’,” concluded Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke.
A foreign policy based heavily on preventive war is something of an
aberration, largely abandoned even by George W. Bush during his second
term.
It would be inaccurate to call Reagan a non-interventionist,
obviously. But the neo-Reaganites conscripting him aren’t painting a
truer picture.
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