The point is, there’s an awful lot of expanse within Reagan’s actual foreign policy record for a GOP candidate to camp in. William Kristol, Robert Kagan and others who brand the term “Reaganite” to equal neoconservatism do a disservice to history. ~Dan Drezner

They are also trying to obscure their past disagreements with Reagan so that they can claim his successes for their sort of foreign policy. It isn’t just that Reagan didn’t make policy in the way that so-called “neo-Reaganites” want to do today, but that when it came to foreign policy Reagan received harsh criticism from the “neo-Reaganites” when they believed him to be going “soft” on this or that issue. Alex Massie recounted some of the instances when neoconservatives accused Reagan of things that they reserve for abusing Obama today:

Norman Podhoretz published a famous essay in the New York Times titled “The Neoconservative Anguish Over Reagan’s Foreign Policy” while in Commentary, Podhoretz’s magazine, Robert Tucker denounced Reagan’s approach to the Middle East as “Carterism without Carter”.

I dug up the old Podhoretz article in the NYT archives, and it makes for amusing reading. Bearing in mind that it was written in May 1982, we already encounter the familiar refrain that the administration inexplicably squandered golden opportunities to undo evil, oppressive systems through the power of wishing (and, of course, more sanctions):

Of the many ironies involved here, none is more biting from a neoconservative point of view than the contrast between what is happening in Central America and what is happening in Eastern Europe. A democratic movement develops in Poland; the Soviet Union, acting through local puppets, suppresses it; and despite crocodile tears and a few rhetorical gestures, the members of the Western alliance – some explicitly, some implicitly – acquiesce on the ground that Poland is in the Soviet sphere of influence and that the Russians have a ”right” (supposedly recognized by the Yalta agreements of 1945) to friendly regimes on their borders.

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Of course the Reagan Administration does not agree with this view of the world. On the contrary, the President has even said that he welcomes the signs of an impending breakup of the Soviet empire from within and he has looked forward to a time when Communism itself will disappear. Yet presented with an enormous opportunity to further that process, what has President Reagan done? Astonishingly, he has turned the opportunity down. This is all the more astonishing in that the risks of seizing that opportunity were and are minimal.

It is a useful reminder that neoconservatives are rarely satisfied with any U.S. administration response to a foreign government’s crackdown. Reading Podhoretz on Reagan’s response to the crackdown in Poland is instructive. Podhoretz attacked Reagan’s response on the crackdown Poland as weaker than Carter, and suggested that the Reagan administration (quoting George Will, whom he then dubbed as a “neo-conservative by doctrinal affinity”) “loves commerce more than it loathes Communism.” After considering Will’s accusation, Podhoretz finds it to be an incomplete explanation. It was something much worse than that. Podhoretz identified the real problem:

There is a strategy being pursued and it bears a surprisingly close resemblance to the original strategy of detente as conceived by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in 1972.

Reagan had scarcely been in office for a year, and he was already being accused of embracing the policy that he has been denouncing for the previous six! At least this time Podhoretz thought Reagan compared favorably to Carter:

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.

According to such people, there is always more that could be done to change other governments’ behavior, and it is something the U.S. can do at very low risk. This is worth remembering now when there is a strongly-held belief among adherents of the same ideology today that Obama has been “turning down” similar opportunities in Iran in 2009 and in Syria today.

Reagan was supposedly guilty of “acquiescing and even cooperating” in stabilizing Soviet control over Poland. Naturally, all was not lost. There was still a chance for Reagan:

Is it too late for the President to put a classically Reaganite stamp on the foreign policy of his own Administration? I do not think it is, but I do think that time is running out, and we neoconservatives are not the only group in the Reagan coalition growing daily more anguished over the slipping away of a precious political opportunity that may never come again.

Note that neoconservatives tried to argue that Reagan’s actual conduct of foreign policy while in office could be something other than “classically Reaganite,” as if the substance of Reaganism in foreign policy were somehow separable from the Reagan administration’s foreign policy. Little wonder that Podhoretz’s successors have no problem appropriating Reagan’s name for policies he would not have supported. Neoconservatives have been doing that for thirty years, and they have even done it when in opposition to Reagan himself.