America should violate international law to begin World War III, or as Senator Lindsey Graham worded it: “We should hold [Russia] accountable and say that if you ever get near another U.S. asset flying in international waters, your airplane would be shot down.” Graham suggested last year that we simply assassinate President Putin, so this was not in response to a Russian jet clipping an unmanned US drone. Graham is so invested in destroying Russia that he has been the only Republican senator to visit Ukraine since the war began.
All the Neocons point to Ronald Reagan. In this same interview, Graham asked, “What would Ronald Reagan do?” Liz Cheney recently criticized DeSantis for saying Ukraine should not be a priority by invoking the Reagan card. Her dad even ran on a platform of wanting to exemplify Reagan’s policies as his own. Reagan was against communism, but the current conflict has absolutely nothing to do with communism or a fallen empire.
Ronald Reagan was the most respected Republican president since Abraham Lincoln. The Neocons, like Graham, effectively stand for everything that Reagan rejected. When I wrote to Reagan warning in 1985 that the formation of what became the G5 would lead to a crash by 1987, he ordered the Chief Economic Adviser Mr. Sprinkle to respond to me directly.
Reagan initiated the arms race to outspend the USSR during the Cold War. This too was a proxy war against the generally democratic Western bloc and the Communist Eastern bloc. He tried to avoid direct battle with the USSR as he was said to be fearful, rightly so, of nuclear war. Senators were not advocating shooting down planes, and causalities remained minimal as far as war is concerned.
Jonathan Clarke and Stefan Halper wrote in “America Alone: The Neoconservatives and the Global Order” that Republicans have “attached a Reagan bumper sticker to their motorcade [but they] ignore much of the substance: the intense arms control commitment, the summitry, the minimal use of direct American military power.” Gene Healy published an article for the CATO Institute: “Reagan Was No Neocon.” Reagan wanted to protect American democracy, but he did not want to act as a missionary spreading democracy to foreign countries.
Margaret Thatcher famously said that Reagan won the Cold War without firing a single bullet. When reading his eulogy, Thatcher did not describe a warmonger.
"Yet his ideas, so clear, were never simplistic. He saw the many sides of truth. Yes, he warned that the Soviet Union had an insatiable drive for military power and territorial expansion, but he also sensed that it was being eaten away by systemic failures impossible to reform. Yes, he did not shrink from denouncing Moscow’s evil empire, but he realized that a man of good will might nonetheless emerge from within its dark corridors. So the president resisted Soviet expansion and pressed down on Soviet weakness at every point until the day came when communism began to collapse beneath the combined weight of those pressures and its own failures. And when a man of good will did emerge from the ruins, President Reagan stepped forward to shake his hand and to offer sincere cooperation. Nothing was more typical of Ronald Reagan than that large-hearted magnanimity, and nothing was more American. Therein lies perhaps the final explanation of his achievements. Ronald Reagan carried the American people with him in his great endeavours because there was perfect sympathy between them. He and they loved America and what it stands for: freedom and opportunity for ordinary people."
Ronald Reagan would be appalled to see how his own party tosses around his name to promote murder. Reagan would not sacrifice domestic policy, send “blank checks” to Ukraine, or push America into a global war with nations that have comparable nuclear capability. So what would Reagan do? He would prioritize his own nation and end this complete nonsense.
The post What Reagan Would NOT Do first appeared on Armstrong Economics.
