Robert W. Merry: The False Neocon View of Reagan

Robert W. Merry is editor of The National Interest and the author of books on American history and foreign policy.

Of all the U.S. presidents since Franklin Roosevelt, none stands taller in history or exercises a greater lingering influence on American politics than Ronald Reagan. Republican politicians invoke his name as example and lodestar, and Democrats have granted him increasing respect as the passions of his presidential years have ebbed with time. Surveys of academics on presidential performance, initially dismissive, now rank him among the best of the White House breed. Even President Obama has extolled his approach to presidential leadership.

This veneration poses a dark danger—that Reagan will become associated with philosophies he never held and policies he never pursued. This is happening today with increasing force as neoconservative intellectuals and politicians seek to conflate Reagan’s Cold War strategy with their push for American global dominance in the name of American values. Their aim is to equate today’s Islamic fundamentalism with Russian Bolshevism and thus boost the argument that U.S. military actions in the Middle East are a natural extension of Reagan’s forceful—and successful—confrontation with Soviet Communism in the 1980s.

Back in 2002, when neoconservative war advocates were beating the drums for the Iraq invasion, William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, told the Financial Times: "Americans see clearly which are democratic states and which are tyrannies in the world today, as they did when the Soviet Union was the main enemy." Writing in Kristol’s magazine, Reuel Marc Gerecht declared that George W. Bush’s "liberation theology" constituted a "Reaganesque approach." Bush himself, in declaring that the "advance of freedom is the calling of our time," invoked Reagan as a progenitor of his missionary drive. Some months later, Kristol noted admiringly that Bush’s foreign-policy advisers, nudging the country to war, were "all Reaganites."

More recently, these efforts to wrap Bush’s aggressive foreign policy in a Reagan blanket have been duplicated in the rhetoric of the now-dwindling field of candidates for this year’s GOP presidential nomination. Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich all identified Reagan as a model for the foreign-policy bellicosity they espoused with such zeal during the campaign.

This is all specious...