Does Barack Obama Deserve to Claim the Reagan Mantle?

[Woodmonkey]

So is Barack Obama another Ronald Reagan?

On Tuesday morning I saw that RealClearPolitics had highlighted — in the No. 3 position, in fact — an article teased under the provocative headline, “Obama Isn’t Jimmy Carter — He’s Ronald Reagan.”

Wow.

I worked for Ronald Reagan, from 1979 to 1984, in two presidential campaigns and in his White House in between. And while I can’t really say I knew Reagan, I will say I have never thought of The Gipper and the junior senator from Illinois as having much in common.

So is Barack Obama another Ronald Reagan?

On Tuesday morning I saw that RealClearPolitics had highlighted — in the No. 3 position, in fact — an article teased under the provocative headline, “Obama Isn’t Jimmy Carter — He’s Ronald Reagan.”

Wow.

I worked for Ronald Reagan, from 1979 to 1984, in two presidential campaigns and in his White House in between. And while I can’t really say I knew Reagan, I will say I have never thought of The Gipper and the junior senator from Illinois as having much in common.

But in fact, the Obama = Reagan meme seems to be going around a lot lately — encouraged by Obama himself. In January, Obama appeared at the offices of the Reno Gazette-Journal, and had the following to say:

I don’t want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what’s different are the times… I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

The Washington Post’s Shailagh Murray was moved to exclaim: “Ronald REAGAN? The Democrats’ mortal enemy, that smiling, supposedly simple-minded actor who expanded the Republican Party by wooing all those white, working-class voters?”

And in fact, the normally in-the-tank-for-Obama lefty blogosphere got all over Obama’s case for his admitting that the 40th president had a good side. Typical was OpenLeft.com’s Matt Stoller, who allowed, “There are many reasons progressives should admire Ronald Reagan, politically speaking. He realigned the country around his vision, he brought into power a new movement that created conservative change, and he was an extremely skilled politician.” Stoller is saying here that it’s OK for a lefty grudgingly to admire Reagan for his tactical skills as an agenda-setter and leader. But it’s not OK, Stoller continues, for a “progressive” actually to approve of Reagan or what he believed.

Here’s more from an angry Stoller: “But that is not why Obama admires Reagan. Obama admires Reagan because he agrees with Reagan’s basic frame that the 1960s and 1970s were full of ‘excesses’ and that government had grown large and unaccountable.”

Yikes! Imagine that any Democrat — never mind those 10 million or so “Reagan Democrats” who voted twice for the Gipper, in ‘80 and ‘84 — would dare to think that maybe things got too wacked-out and crazy in the ’60s, or that the country suffered from a government-caused “malaise” in the stagflationary ’70s, or that the country should return to the limited-government vision of the Founders.

But Obama said it six months ago, never took it back, and ever since, the “Obama-hearts-Reagan” meme has continued to reverberate — despite Obama’s overwhelmingly liberal voting record and presidential platform.

And so now to Tuesday’s Obama-is-Reagan Jr. offering, written by Eli Lake, a smart reporter who normally writes for the cerebrally right-of-center newspaper, The New York Sun. And in fact, Lake’s topic is relatively narrow, as one sees after reading the piece as it appears in The New Republic, “Contra Expectations/Obama isn’t Jimmy Carter — he’s Ronald Reagan.”

Lake is careful in his comparing. He ventures nothing, for example, about Carter’s disastrous domestic policy. And we can say that Obama, for his part, some pro-Reagan rhetoric notwithstanding, seems much closer to the high-tax-and-high-spend policies of Jimmy Carter than the low-tax-and-low-spend policies of Ronald Reagan.

But on the issue of foreign policy, Lake might be on to something, in one key area. He focuses his argument on the approach that a President Obama might take to opposing America’s enemies, especially in the Middle East. And here he reaches back in time to identify correctly a key element of Reaganite foreign policy: the successful strategy of equipping local freedom fighters to fight for themselves. That’s what Reagan did — in Afghanistan, where we armed the Mujahedeen to oppose the Soviet Red Army, which invade that country in 1979; in Nicaragua, where Reagan ordered help for the Contras (hence the first word in the title of Lake’s article); and in Angola, where he helped the UNITA forces led by Jonas Savimbi oppose pro-Moscow rivals.

Over time, this strategy of using military surrogates to fight the “Evil Empire” became known as the “Reagan Doctrine.”

Needless to say, liberals and leftists back in the ’80s were horrified that Reagan’s America was effectively opposing communism. Some critics did not want to see the U.S. helping, in any way, to thwart the “progressive” forces of history, while others, not quite as dupey, were nevertheless agonized that we were assisting “thugs” and “butchers.” To which Reagan’s realpolitik answer was, in effect, “Get over it. It’s better to recruit locals to fight local wars for freedom, as opposed to sending in American troops and letting the conflict escalate into a big international hotspot.”

The Reagan Doctrine was thus both idealistic and realistic. It held that it was a) vital to oppose communism, and b) difficult, sometimes impossible, to oppose communism with American troops in every instance. That was one lesson of Vietnam and Indochina in the ’60s and ’70s. Whatever one thinks of the Vietnam War — and Reagan forthrightly called it “a noble cause” during the 1980 presidential campaign — we learned that the American people would not stand for a protracted costly commitment in such a murky conflict. As Reagan understood, a great policy isn’t great if it can’t be implemented.

So the answer that Reagan — and his stalwart aides, such as CIA Director William Casey — came up with was the use of surrogates. And it worked more often than not.

Indeed, the overall pressure of effective resistance to communist expansion — including other measures, such as strong national defense, close cooperation with key allies such as Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and some “Evil Empire”-quaking rhetoric — helped accelerate the historic collapse of the Soviet Union.

And Lake’s argument is that Obama has learned at least one of those lessons, concerning the use of military surrogates:

If you read the fine print of Obama’s policy papers and talk with his advisers and examine their careers, you’ll find something surprising about how an Obama administration would view this dark side of the war on terrorism. Far from eschewing alliances with unsavory proxies, these ties are essential to Obama’s plans for destroying Al Qaeda. As he has put it, the United States must develop the ‘partnerships we need to take out the terrorists.’ Obama hasn’t fully fleshed out what he means, but his advisers have some ideas. They told me that he would deepen cooperation with Pakistan’s government and military and Somalia’s transitional federal government in their battles with Al Qaeda — and that, while opposed to the troop surge, he applauds the partnership between the U.S. military and Iraqi tribal leaders that helped turn the tide in the fight against Al Qaeda there.

We might pause over the key sentences above: “Far from eschewing alliances with unsavory proxies, these ties are essential to Obama’s plans for destroying Al Qaeda.” That is, make a deal with the devil, if you have to, so as to defeat an even worse devil. And let’s take another look at this sentence, in which Lake says that Obama believes, “The United States must develop the ‘partnerships we need to take out the terrorists.’” “Partnerships”? Partnerships with whom? That would seem to suggest that if a President Obama can find a warlord in Afghanistan or Pakistan who can figure out a way to help capture or kill Usama bin Laden, he would strike a deal, with few questions asked. And that, of course, would sound pretty good to most Americans.

Of course, we don’t yet know if Obama is truly committed to such a practical-minded neo-Reaganite policy, as opposed to the more familiar ivory tower liberalism of Carter and most Democrats. Perhaps Lake is optimistically over-interpreting the policy statements of a few Obama advisers. And we might never know the real truth about Obama’s executive leadership — because John McCain might win the presidency.

But whoever wins the presidency next, he will be well advised to take some lessons from Reagan. The 40th president, in his foreign policy, exemplified a practical understanding of how to use power in tough situations.

Reagan was a visionary, and yet he was a shrewd visionary — he never let the bright vision cloud his good judgment.

And so what a change Reagan made, beginning in 1981, when he replaced Carter! As Lake recalls, Carter emphasized a liberal idea of human rights, above everything else, during his presidency. That might sound nice, but sometimes our friends, imperfect as they might be, are still a whole lot better than our enemies. Here’s Lake reminding us of Carter’s wrong-headedness:

A bit of a refresher course in the horrors of the late 1970s: Jimmy Carter pledged to enshrine human rights as a central value in U.S. foreign policy. That was an admirable goal, but Carter didn’t just inject human rights into U.S. foreign policy; he allowed it to rule policy, no matter the implications for the fight against communism. During the Carter era, the United States cooled its relations with vital client states like the Shah’s government in Iran and the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, even as they fought for their lives.

In other words, in the name of a prissy vision of human rights, we helped topple our own allies in Iran and Nicaragua. And how did that work out? In 1979, during the Carter presidency, the pro-Castro communist Sandinistas took charge in Nicaragua, and, of course, the Ayatollah Khomeini seized power — and our diplomats — in Tehran. Carter had no intention of sullying himself with “partnerships we need to take out terrorists,” but in keeping himself purer than pure, he pushed America into a tailspin.

Politics is sometimes a dirty business and international politics is even dirtier. That’s reality.

Reagan was willing to take risks in pursuit of his strategic vision. And while winning might not be the only thing, it’s still better than losing.

Some might point out, to be sure, that Carter shifted gears late in his single-term presidency. After the Iranians seized our embassy in November 1979, and Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December, the 39th president enunciated what briefly became known as the “Carter Doctrine” in January 1980, which held that the U.S. would defend the Persian Gulf. In addition, Carter announced the creation of a Rapid Deployment Force to back up his promise — a force which eventually became U.S. Central Command. Such policy changes were better late than never, but it would have been better, obviously, if regional order had been preserved by U.S. allies, such as Iran under the Shah.

Also in 1980, pressed by his hawkish national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was finally able to prevail against the knee-jerk liberalism of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Carter also commenced extremely limited aid to the anti-Soviet Mujahedeen in Afghanistan. (Nothing said here, of course, is meant to endorse anything that Carter has done since leaving the White House on January 20, 1981.)

And then, once Reagan was inaugurated, the process of helping our friends — even if they were a bit dicey — to fight our enemies began in earnest. The book/movie “Charlie Wilson’s War” provides much useful history, even if liberal journalists and Hollywood chose to emphasize the role played by Democrats such as Congressman Wilson and not Reagan Republicans. Indeed, in Central America, Reagan found ways to aid the Nicaraguan Contras over the strenuous opposition of most congressional Democrats. And in Angola, the U.S. helped Savimbi oppose Soviet-Cuban expansion into Africa. Reagan & Co. even worked with Pope John Paul II to aid the quiet but determined patriots of Poland, who ultimately managed to throw off the shackles of communism in Europe.

So Reagan actively, and effectively, opposed communism all over the world. And yet Americans fired barely a shot. (One briefly violent exception to this rule was Operation Urgent Fury, the liberation of Grenada in 1983, where 19 Americans gave their lives to save American students and protect that Caribbean island from communism. Grenada was a great example of overwhelming force applied in a finite situation, with a clear victory strategy, as well as a clear exit strategy.)

Today, Americans might take stock of what works and what doesn’t work. In 2001, the U.S. went into Afghanistan, pursuing a Reaganesque strategy of limiting America’s military footprint; the battle was won quickly by U.S. airpower and a few CIA and Special Forces units, guiding the anti-Taliban forces to a remarkable victory. It’s a lesson of world geopolitics that local Muslims fighting local Muslims is much to be preferred — even by Muslims — than Westerners fighting Muslims.

By contrast, in Iraq, the Reaganite stratagem of supportive subtlety (let our friends fight our enemies) was rejected in favor a grander strategy (let us fight our enemies directly). The U.S. went into Iraq as we did in Vietnam, with flags flying and lots of boots on the ground. And, as in Vietnam four decades ago, the experience in Iraq has proved much more difficult than most experts anticipated. Also as with Vietnam, opinions on the wisdom of the war vary widely, as do opinions on what to do now. But this much seems clear: If at all possible, the Reagan idea — letting locals do the fighting, backstopped by Uncle Sam — is superior to the idea of having Uncle Sam himself climb into the ring. And that’s something to think about as we contemplate not only how to achieve a victorious peace with honor in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also how we might approach a possible conflict with Iran. The goal, after all, isn’t to fight. The goal is to win.

So, is Barack Obama as smart as Eli Lake thinks he is? Is he veering away from the brittle liberalism of Carter and learning sound strategy, instead, from The Gipper? For the sake of the nation, let’s hope so. And let’s hope that John McCain, too, is communing with Reaganism, because no matter who wins the next election, the well-being of America depends on wise leadership from the top.

But of course, as our 40th president would say, the true greatness of America resides not in its leaders, but in its people. So here’s hoping that all Americans are continuing to draw inspiration and instruction from our commander-in-chief from 1981 to 1989, the once and future Ronald Wilson Reagan.

The Source