Reagan revisted

As Foreign Policy continues to add content, I have two fears.  First, at this rate, I’ll have to stop reading off-site material just so I can stay up-to-date with all of Foreign Policy‘s stuff.  Second, I fear I might be reluctant to criticize FP content — even though no one at FP has ever whispered such a thing. 

With all that said, I found Peter Beinart’s Think Again essay about Reagan to be well worth reading…. well, except for two things. 

First, Beinart is too soft on Reagan when he talks about the latter being soft on terror.  Beinart mentions the withdrawal of U.S. Marines following the 1983 Hezbollah bombing in Beirut.  He then observes: 

In 1985, after a U.S. Navy diver was shot in the hijacking of TWA Flight 847, Reagan once again channeled John Wayne as he vowed, "America will never make any concessions to terrorists." But within months, he was not only making concessions, he was selling anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to Iranian "moderates" in the hope that they would use their influence to help free Americans taken hostage by Hezbollah in Beirut.

Beinart fails to mention that the Reagan administration essentially capitulated to the hostage-takers on the TWA flight.  Actually, they got the Israelis to capitulate for them: 

In what was widely perceived as an implicit, never explicit, quid pro quo, the hostages started being released by the hijackers, followed some days after by Israel starting to free some of its hundreds of Shiite prisoners. At the time, U.S. officials denied there was a deal and said Israel had already committed to releasing the prisoners.

The second problem is that Beinart elides the biggest reason why Reagan’s actual legacy doesn’t quite match Reagan’s legacy in the eyes of conservatives:  the extent to which Reagan was constrained by his staff.  Whether true or not, the perception by conservatives at the time was that Ronald Reagan wanted to pursue a more hawkish foreign policy, but those damn moderates James Baker and George Schultz wouldn’t let him.  Hence the birth of the phrase "let Reagan be Reagan!" 

Now, how much of this was just Michael Deaver’s clever PR and how much of this is true remains an open question.  Nevertheless, this perception allows both neoconservatives and Tea Party activists to believe that their preferred foreign policy represents the "true Reagan."