Elliott Abrams recalls Gingrich’s career during the Reagan years. According to his description, Gingrich was the Santorum of his day:

Gingrich scorned Reagan’s speeches, which moved a party and then a nation, because “the president of the United States cannot discipline himself to use the correct language.” In Afghanistan, Reagan’s policy was marked by “impotence [and] incompetence.” Thus Gingrich concluded as he surveyed five years of Reagan in power that “we have been losing the struggle with the Soviet empire.” Reagan did not know what he was doing, and “it is precisely at the vision and strategy levels that the Soviet empire today is superior to the free world.”

Abrams details Gingrich’s habit of taking a much harder rhetorical line on communism than the Reagan administration did and finding fault with Reagan’s anticommunist policies for being insufficient. This included mockery of the Reagan Doctrine as “pathetic” and criticism of Reagan’s first meeting with Gorbachev as something akin to the 1938 Munich conference. In other words, Gingrich was railing against Reagan for not being tough enough on communism and the Soviets, which was practically identical to what more than a few leading movement conservatives and neoconservatives said about Reagan at the time. Logevall and Osgood catalogued some of the accusations flung at Reagan because of his negotiations with Gorbachev in their article on America’s “appeasement complex”:

The conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. chimed in, alleging that Reagan fundamentally misunderstood the Gorbachev regime: “To greet it as if it were no longer evil is on the order of changing our entire position toward Adolf Hitler.” As early as 1983, when Reagan was embarking on the largest peacetime military buildup in U.S. history, Norman Podhoretz compared Reagan to Chamberlain and complained that “appeasement by any other name smells as rank, and the stench of it now pervades the American political atmosphere.” Reagan had become a “Carter clone,” Podhoretz later griped, warning—less than two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall—that “the danger is greater than ever.”

That is the problem that hawkish alarmists have. They always think “the danger is greater than ever,” and it doesn’t matter if the danger is growing or shrinking. What Abrams doesn’t mention in his criticism of Gingrich is that Gingrich was simply echoing complaints that many other hawkish Republicans were making during the ’80s. Because such hard-liners consistently overestimate the strength of adversaries and the size of foreign threats, they are frequently dissatisfied with the decisions of any administration, no matter how aggressive or confrontational they may be. The point here isn’t to excuse Gingrich for being wildly wrong about Reagan’s policies toward the USSR and its satellites, but to show that Gingrich’s criticisms of Reagan were shared by many other Republican hawks. Fortunately, Reagan didn’t heed their advice very often.