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Gingrich Was a Typical Republican Hawk When He Was Bashing Reagan in the ’80s (II)

Jeffrey Lord digs up the original context for one of Gingrich’s hard-liner attacks on Reagan and quotes from a Gingrich speech in 1986: The fact is that George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Irving Kristol, and Jeane Kirkpatrick are right in pointing out the enormous gap between President Reagan’s strong rhetoric, which is adequate, and his administration’s […]

Jeffrey Lord digs up the original context for one of Gingrich’s hard-liner attacks on Reagan and quotes from a Gingrich speech in 1986:

The fact is that George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Irving Kristol, and Jeane Kirkpatrick are right in pointing out the enormous gap between President Reagan’s strong rhetoric, which is adequate, and his administration’s weak policies, which are inadequate and will ultimately fail.

The intra-party feuding over who is the most slavishly loyal to Reagan (or the idea of Reagan) doesn’t interest me, but it’s nice to have what I was saying about this confirmed elsewhere. As I said earlier this week, Gingrich’s criticisms of Reagan’s “weak” policies were typical of Republican hawks of that time. Mind you, that’s not a compliment. Contra Lord, putting Gingrich’s remarks in context doesn’t make Gingrich look better. It just serves as a reminder that there were a lot of other movement conservatives and neoconservatives who were very wrong in their assessment of Reagan’s policies toward the USSR. Gingrich thought that Will, Krauthammer, Kristol, and Kirkpatrick were right in seeing Reagan’s policies as doomed to failure, but later events showed all of them to be wrong. This doesn’t matter so much in the current presidential race, but it is a useful reminder that many Republican hawks are always complaining about “weakness” in foreign policy regardless of the party in power or the policy in question, and they have a history of badly missing the mark.

Update: Alex Massie wrote on this subject yesterday:

The Cult of Reagan is a tedious thing but I submit that while you can be many kinds of Republican and hope to become the party standard-bearer you cannot be the type of Republican who encourages folk to think Ronald Reagan was a kind of Californian Neville Chamberlain and still expect to win the presidential nomination.

Notice that Lord doesn’t even try to excuse or defend Gingrich’s Chamberlain references when talking about Reagan’s summit meeting with Gorbachev. Even he must know that there is no recovering from that.

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