Don’t Let Them Reagan-Shame You, Ron

T he news this week has conservative hawks hardening their hearts to the point of brittleness. Russia’s human-wave attacks are wearying the Ukrainian army, and American support for sponsoring the conflict endlessly continues to wane. When Ron DeSantis answered Tucker Carlson’s questionnaire on Ukraine, indicating that he did not think that Ukraine was a vital national interest, the hawks’ spirits sank. Many apparently believed that after Obama and Trump, the United States could go back to 2003 again.

But in 2023 many Republican voters trust the foreign-policy establishment to reorder world affairs as much as they trust the diversity, equity, and inclusion consultants to remake social relations between all races and genders. Both gangs are ideological utopians who aim to create a new world, and make misery in the process. People haven’t forgotten. As W. James Antle III reminded us in the latest print issue of National Review, “In the public’s mind, the Iraq War exceeds the Great Recession and the federal response to Hurricane Katrina as a monument of Republican failure.”

Joining the Atlantic magazine, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Joe Scarborough, a half dozen Republican senators lined up to denounce DeSantis. “There are lots of different opinions on the U.S. involvement in Ukraine,” Senator John Thune told reporters, according to The Hill. “But I think the majority opinion among Senate Republicans is that the United States has a vital national security interest there in stopping Russian aggression, and that’s certainly the view I have.”

That may be true, but it’s not the majority opinion of Republican voters. At the start of the war, just 26 percent of Americans wanted the U.S. to play a major role in it. According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, 47 percent of Republicans say we are doing too much to help Ukraine. Only 19 percent of Republicans polled took the position of Republican hawks in the Senate that the United States is currently doing too little for Ukraine.

Only 7 percent of Republicans name Russia/Ukraine as the top issue facing the country now. Doubtless some number of those are of the Tucker Carlson school, rating its importance high because they view it as the potential start of World War III. Republicans are vastly more likely to list inflation or immigration as a top issue.

Hawks are behind the times. The Wall Street Journal’s denunciation of DeSantis is long on analogies to Ronald Reagan and the Cold War. They demand that Republicans retain their Cold War instincts against Moscow in a totally different context. The Kremlin is not possessed by a universal and totalizing ideology like Communism. In fact, Americans do retain their Cold War prioritization of Communism as a threat. That’s why the same Quinnipiac poll shows that 61 percent of Americans view China as the biggest threat; only 22 percent say the same for Russia.

In the New York Times, David French likewise castigates DeSantis and Trump for lacking the moral clarity of Ronald Reagan, claiming Ronald Reagan wouldn’t even recognize today’s GOP. French’s analytical preference for verbal moralism over an analysis of history has misled him again.

Ronald Reagan could tell Ron DeSantis: “I was denounced by the neoconservatives and other right-wing hawks in the Wall Street Journal, too!” See the New York Times headline from May 1982: “The Neo-Conservative Anguish Over Reagan’s Foreign Policy.” You can read it for yourself. They denounced Reagan for not imposing sanctions or taking sufficient action to support Solidarity in Poland. For this, they put him in a roll of shame with Eisenhower’s caution over Hungary in 1956, or Johnson’s in ’68 over Prague. They denounced Reagan for not being as tough as Jimmy Carter. They said his policy was “indistinguishable from appeasement.”

Commentary magazine regularly featured Norman Podhoretz criticizing Reagan’s foreign policy: “Appeasement By Any Other Name,” and in Foreign Affairs: “The Reagan Road to Détente.” They mocked Reagan for believing in “the fantasy of communist collapse.”

Just as Ron DeSantis is being accused of abandoning his principles and his senses this week, so did right-wing hawks accuse Reagan throughout his presidency. The people demanding confrontation with Russia over the downing of a single drone this week — what would they have said to Reagan, who withdrew from Lebanon after 241 Marines were killed in a terrorist bombing there? Would they have agreed with the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ assessment: “It is beneath our dignity to retaliate”? Of course not. But Reagan had a keen sense that Lebanon was peripheral to American interests and that the American public would not support a mission there capable of achieving anything for us.

My advice to Ron DeSantis: Don’t let serial failures shame you out of representing the position of Republican voters. George W. Bush listened to these people, and look where it left him. Ronald Reagan ignored them, and 40 years after denouncing him, they are claiming his legacy as their own.