One of the best things about working at Commentary, where I was for nearly eight years, is the magazine’s extraordinary digital archive, which houses every article published in its pages over its 78-year history. That infernal archive is also one of the magazine’s most frustrating things because it is impossible to read and internalize everything its prolific contributors wrote over the decades. Someone will always find something you missed. Michael has done just that in his latest piece, in which he advises Governor Ron DeSantis to ignore the Right’s “hawks” and their criticisms of the governor’s confused statement on Russia’s war against Ukraine, just as Ronald Reagan supposedly “ignored” his neoconservative critics.
In his piece, Michael indicts DeSantis’s scolds over their efforts to compel the governor to adopt a position the author believes is at odds with the Republican electorate’s growing skepticism of America’s commitments to Ukraine’s defense. Citing a Wall Street Journal editorial that’s “long on analogies to Ronald Reagan and the Cold War,” Michael also observes that even Reagan was not Reaganite enough for some of his intermittent supporters on the neoconservative Right.
“They denounced Reagan for not being as tough as Jimmy Carter,” Michael wrote. “They said his policy was ‘indistinguishable from appeasement.’” That’s not quite right. The quote Michael cites from a May 1982 New York Times column authored by Commentary founder Norman Podhoretz reads: “It is, to be sure, detente in the sophisticated Nixon-Kissinger form, not the corrupted adaptation, so often indistinguishable from appeasement, pursued by the Carter Administration.” In this passage, Podhoretz criticized détente’s realist approach to rapprochement with the Soviets and Carter’s maintenance of that doctrine, even though he dispensed with its Nixonian disregard for Moscow’s human-rights abuses. Reagan was critical of détente as a candidate and dispatched with it as president. Podhoretz praises him for that, even though he remained keen to discern and condemn the policy’s remaining vestiges.
“Commentary magazine regularly featured Norman Podhoretz criticizing Reagan’s foreign policy: ‘Appeasement By Any Other Name,’” Michael continues, “and in Foreign Affairs: ‘The Reagan Road to Détente.’” In that July 1983 Commentary article, Podhoretz reserved the charge of “appeasement” almost exclusively for Reagan’s Democratic critics — some, including Senator Chris Dodd, by name. He condemned their skepticism of foreign deployments to counter Soviet expansionism, and he attacked their quasi-religious conviction that arms-control agreements were a virtue in and of themselves, even if the Soviets declined to abide by their terms. In Podhoretz’s late 1984 piece in Foreign Affairs, the columnist praises various Reagan-era initiatives while remaining dissatisfied with what he perceived to be the administration’s halting efforts to “roll back” Soviet Communism in Europe and Asia.
It is, to some extent, within any ideological writer’s job description to make the perfect the enemy of the good. Michael has identified the degree to which some of the 40th president’s most prominent allies suffered occasional bouts of dyspepsia over their belief that Reagan failed to pursue their policy preferences with sufficient vigor. What Michael doesn’t dwell on, however, is how Reagan took his critics’ pointed advice to heart. These three items published within a consequential three-year span illustrate how the administration incorporated Podhoretz’s critiques into its conduct of foreign affairs.
In 1982, Podhoretz commended Reagan’s domestic politics. He lauded Reagan’s application of supply-side economic theories to revitalize the American market, and he endorsed the White House’s assault on racial quotas — the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives of his day. But Podhoretz declined to overlook the ways in which Reagan’s foreign policy would not achieve the president’s self-set goals.
Podhoretz admonished Reagan for failing to confront Soviet efforts to destabilize Latin America and the Middle East (where Podhoretz worried that America’s support for the Saudis might come at the cost of its support for Israel). He further lamented Reagan’s failure to mount a “significant nonmilitary response” to the Soviet-backed crackdown on Poland’s nascent Solidarity movement.
Reagan answered the first part of Podhoretz’s criticism in the coming months. In August 1982, American Marines arrived in Lebanon to oversee Israeli efforts to expel the Soviet-backed Palestine Liberation Organization and its Syrian sponsors. The operation was fraught. There were military setbacks, and the Beirut barracks bombing threatened to derail America’s strategic mission in the Middle East.
But the White House didn’t abandon its commitments to the region. As Professor Fred Lawson wrote, “collaboration with Israel took on increasing importance for the Reagan administration in its efforts to hold on in Lebanon.” For a time, this dynamic produced the very opposite of the “strategic consensus” between Israel and the Sunni Arab states that Podhoretz envisioned. That would not materialize for another 36 years. Moreover, intervention in Lebanon did not dislodge the Soviets from the region. But it did pave the way for basing rights and arms agreements throughout the Middle East, even among erstwhile Soviet client states, hemming in both Moscow and Tehran in the longer term without “further U.S. military involvement in the fighting.”
Likewise, Reagan deployed U.S. advisers to El Salvador in March 1983 despite the objections of the Democrat-led Congress, helping to prop up its embattled government and aid in its integration with the Western economic zone. He dispatched forces to Grenada in October 1983 to dislodge Cuban and Soviet-backed Marxist elements in command of its government and supported Nicaragua’s Contra rebels against the Marxist Sandinista government. The American Left recalls the latter campaign only for the scandal it produced involving Iranian arms sales to Nicaraguan rebels, the civil war that followed, and the brazen display of “American imperialism” it represented. But that “American imperialism” displaced Soviet imperialism from the region, thwarting the establishment of a Communist bloc in the Western Hemisphere.
Podhoretz didn’t get satisfaction from Reagan’s approach to combating Soviet imperialism in Poland, and he remained unsatisfied in his 1983 Commentary article. He shared the frustration of plain-old conservative George Will, who lamented that the Reagan administration “loved commerce more than it loathed Communism” because the White House emphasized carrots over sticks in its relations with Poland’s Jaruzelski regime. But Reagan’s efforts to decouple Europe from Moscow were not stick-free.
Reagan’s Air Force secretary later revealed a 1982 CIA plan to sabotage the Soviet economy and disrupt a Siberian natural-gas pipeline to Western Europe. That pipeline augmented Russia’s influence in NATO and produced consequences with which we still struggle today. Even imposing sanctions on that transit network was likened to a “neutron bomb” on America’s allies by supporters of the accommodationist status quo. Reagan did pare back the sanctions he imposed on Poland after Warsaw released Lech Walesa from prison and approved a papal visit. But he did so while simultaneously providing millions of dollars in covert support for Solidarity-movement activists’ efforts to destabilize the regime from within.
Reagan’s distaste for nuclear armaments nevertheless proved no obstacle to his adoption of Podhoretz’s preferences, among them deploying Pershing II missiles to Europe, modernizing and augmenting America’s nuclear stockpiles, and standing firm when the Soviets walked out of Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) negotiations. What Podhoretz critiqued in 1984 in the “Reagan road to détente” was the administration’s inconsistent effort to “roll back” Soviet influence everywhere and Reagan’s often fruitless affinity for U.S.–Soviet summitry. While these were valid criticisms, they became less operative in Reagan’s second term, as the Soviet Union withered amid the financial pressures of the arms race, retreated from its commitments abroad, and liberalized to the point that it collapsed under the weight of its own internal contradictions.
The initiatives Podhoretz advocated and Reagan pursued were not without unambiguous setbacks for America’s strategic goals. But they also contributed to Ronald Reagan’s defining legacy accomplishment — one that rivals his predecessors and eclipses his successors. Perhaps Michael would emphasize the costs of those efforts over their cumulative contribution to the implosion of Soviet communism in Europe, but that’s a different argument from the claim that the Reagan White House “ignored” the New York intellectuals’ efforts to nudge the Gipper toward their preferred policies.
What if Reagan had “ignored” his neoconservative critics? What if he had deferred to the moral relativism that militated against the enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine? What if he did acquiesce to “nuclear freeze” activists, putting the arms race to pasture and allowing Western Europe to drift languidly into a condition in which it could be economically blackmailed by Moscow even before the Cold War ended? What if he had followed the path taken by Harry Truman in 1948, Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, and Lyndon Johnson in 1968 by declining to authorize “an array of economic, diplomatic and covert measures to destabilize the Government of Poland and begin to break the Soviet Union’s dominance of Eastern Europe”? What if that initiative, which formed the backbone of the “Washington-Vatican alliance” and its mutual clandestine networks, never happened? Thankfully, we will never know.
“As a movement of dissident intellectuals,” Podhoretz wrote, “the neo-conservatives were (and are) a minority within a minority.” The blessings of the world we inherited from their often thankless advocacy are due in no small part to this movement’s rejection of the idea that it must fall in line with the “majority opinion of Republican voters.” There is a lesson in there for Ron DeSantis if he’s inclined to listen to constructive criticism.