IT'S THE WEAPONRY, STUPID:

Worldviews: Reagan and Bush: President Bush's foreign policy vision borrows crucial elements from Ronald Reagan's playbook - but it differs in important ways, as well. (Peter Grier, 6/08/04, CS Monitor)

over the course of his two terms in office Reagan was also pragmatic about conducting the nation's business abroad. His foreign policy legacy involved more than confrontation - as his intensive arms negotiations with the "evil empire" showed.

In the end Reagan both talked tough and acted cautiously, even conventionally, in some regions. He was not altogether the bold cowboy claimed as an inspiration by the neoconservatives that today hold some of the most powerful US foreign policy posts.

"Neoconservatism is not updated Reaganism," concluded a recent article in the political journal American Spectator, by Stefan Halper, a security official in three GOP administrations.

In some measure, it shouldn't be surprising that President Bush should look back past the administration of his own father to that of Reagan for inspiration in foreign policy.

Many key officials of the Bush White House have Reagan ties. Confronted by the events of Sept. 11, they reached back and recalled what they felt were some of the signature aspects of the Reagan presidency: Its black-and-white view of the world, and its willingness to use military force.

It's difficult to remember today, when US troops are fighting throughout the crescent of the Middle East, but Reagan's invasion of Grenada in 1983 was widely seen as a reversal of a post-Vietnam reluctance to get involved in foreign wars.

Reagan's sometimes fierce anticommunist rhetoric was frightening to some - but bracing to others, who thought the nation had drifted into a morass of self-doubt and moral relativism. In a broadcast interview in 2002, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said that the staunchness with which President Bush had identified an "axis of evil" was simply a reflection of the "clarity" that Reagan had introduced into the cold war.

Some critics of the Bush administration's approach to Iraq say that this comparison is strained, however. Reagan was ratcheting up the rhetoric, true, but he was also the heir to decades of settled policy of containment of the Soviet Union. In its key elements, that was a policy he continued. "The first thing to remember about American policy towards the Soviet Union is that we never directly invaded another nation under Soviet control," wrote former Democratic presidential candidate and retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark in a recent issue of The Washington Monthly.

If the Soviets hadn't had nuclear weapons Ronald Reagan would have used nuclear blackmail on them. If Saddam had developed nuclear weapons he'd still be murdering his people today.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 7, 2004 6:24 PM