Jesse Walker, reason.com
For a moment this week, the debate about Ukraine became a debate about Ronald Reagan. Rand Paul, a Kentucky senator who represents the relatively libertarian side of the Tea Party movement, set the stage by saying that some conservatives “are so stuck in the Cold War era that they want to tweak Russia all the time.” The most hawkish major faction of the GOP, the neoconservatives, deemed these comments insufficiently muscular, and on Sunday the Texas senator Ted Cruz, a frequent ally of Paul’s, joined the critics. “I’m a big fan of Rand Paul,” Cruz told ABC. “But I don’t agree with him on foreign policy….I agree with him that we should be very reluctant to deploy military force abroad. But I think there is a vital role, just as Ronald Reagan did.”
As Paul fired back with a Breitbart article headlined “Stop Warping Reagan’s Foreign Policy,” the neocons gave Cruz an attaboy, with the reliably pro-war Washington Post pundit Michael Gerson ending a column with the lines: “Paul is left to insist, ‘I’m a great believer in Ronald Reagan.’ This amounts to a serious concession, since Reagan would not have returned the compliment.” So this week Reagan gets to be the terrain where the right’s internecine foreign-policy battles are being fought.
It’s a landscape with weapons for everyone. If you’re more interested in Reagan as a symbol than as a flesh-and-blood historical figure, you can cherry-pick from his record to invoke him all sorts of ways. He invaded Grenada, and he pulled out of Lebanon. He believed in confronting communism, and he dreaded the prospect of nuclear war. Early in his administration, he battled the doves to build up America’s nuclear arsenal; when he became convinced that Mikhail Gorbachev was serious about making peace, he battled the hawks to push through missile reductions. He angered the anti-nuclear movement with a plan to build a space-based missile defense, but he defended that program with some of the most starry-eyed rhetoric ever to come from a sitting president, even offering to share the technology with the Russians.
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