On Iran, the Neocons Are No Ronald Reagan

In their pursuit of a policy of maximum pressure on Iran, America’s neoconservatives have pushed a nostalgic narrative: the Trump administration can bring down Iran’s theocracy the way that the Reagan administration helped defeat and dissolve the Soviet Union.

This comparison has been advanced by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), which promotes draconian sanctions against the Islamic Republic. Its arguments figured prominently in Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent speechat the Reagan library in which he asserted that Iran is still a revolutionary regime “committed to spreading the revolution to other countries, by force if necessary.”

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How The American Neoconservatives Destroyed Mankind’s Hopes For Peace

When Ronald Reagan turned his back on the neoconservatives, fired them, and had some of them prosecuted, his administration was free of their evil influence, and President Reagan negotiated the end of the Cold War with Soviet President Gorbachev. The military/security complex, the CIA, and the neocons were very much against ending the Cold War as their budgets, power, and ideology were threatened by the prospect of peace between the two nuclear superpowers.

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Neocons Arrested and Pardoned by the Government

How Reagan Neocon Aides Planted the Seeds of Iran-Contra

Led by neoconservative officials within the Reagan administration like National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane in the early 1980s, the U.S. endorsed a third-party deal to send weapons to Iran just six months after the hostage crisis ended there. The move—meant to align American policy with Israel’s desires to sell weapons to Iran while it was at war with Iraq—ultimately helped plant the seeds for the later Iran-Contra scandal, newly released documents from the National Archives reveal.

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The False Neocon View of Reagan

OF ALL the U.S. presidents since Franklin Roosevelt, none stands taller in history or exercises a greater lingering influence on American politics than Ronald Reagan. Republican politicians invoke his name as example and lodestar, and Democrats have granted him increasing respect as the passions of his presidential years have ebbed with time. Surveys of academics on presidential performance, initially dismissive, now rank him among the best of the White House breed. Even President Obama has extolled his approach to presidential leadership.

This veneration poses a dark danger—that Reagan will become associated with philosophies he never held and policies he never pursued. This is happening today with increasing force as neoconservative intellectuals and politicians seek to conflate Reagan’s Cold War strategy with their push for American global dominance in the name of American values. Their aim is to equate today’s Islamic fundamentalism with Russian Bolshevism and thus boost the argument that U.S. military actions in the Middle East are a natural extension of Reagan’s forceful—and successful—confrontation with Soviet Communism in the 1980s.

The Cult of Reagan, and Other Neocon Follies

Conservatives see in Jacobin principles a hair-raising obliviousness of life’s complexity. To implement such principles may devastate a society. A society may be wholly unsuited or unprepared for changes demanded of it. So what, say America’s neo-Jacobins. We need moral clarity. What was there before does not matter. "Democracy" must take its place. One model fits all. To ensure a democratic world, America must establish armed and uncontested world supremacy.

The will to power is here bursting at the seams. What argument could be better for placing enormous power in the hands of the neo-Jacobins than a grandiose scheme for remaking the world. At lunch yesterday we got to hear [from Max Boot] the pure, undiluted neo-Jacobin message.

Ronald Reagan was no hawk – and certainly no neocon

Ronald Reagan is back. Today more than a thousand people crowded into London's Grosvenor Square to celebrate the centenary of the birth of the former US president. The ceremony, held a few metres from the US embassy, saw the unveiling of a 10ft bronze statue of Reagan, who died in 2004 at 93.

A hundred years on from his birth, seven from his death, and 22 years after he left the Oval Office, the Gipper remains a towering figure in American politics. In recent weeks Republican presidential candidates have been falling over each other to invoke his name and wrap themselves in his mantle, as Bushes I and II are quietly airbrushed from the party's history. Even Barack Obama, after his "shellacking" in November's midterm elections, made it known to reporters that he was reading a biography of Reagan. Oh, and liberal icon John Lennon was, according to his assistant, a secret supporter of America's 40th president.

Reagan Was No Neocon

Despite Reagan's "ringing speeches," he was "quite circumscribed in his efforts at democracy promotion," Colin Dueck writes in Hard Line, a new history of GOP foreign policy. Reagan viewed the U.S. as a city on a hill, a "model to other countries," not a crusader state with "an obligation to forcibly promote democracy overseas."

Most of all, what separates Reagan from his hawkish latter-day admirers was his optimism. He viewed the United States as dynamic and free — and, therefore, strong enough to outlast any enemy.

For the neoconservatives, however, it's always 1939, and the free world is always under siege, whether from a decrepit Soviet monolith of the 1980s or today's allegedly "existential threat" presented by several hundred cave-dwelling Islamists.

In the Gorbachev era, Norman Podhoretz accused Reagan of buying into "the fantasy of communist collapse." Some fantasy.