Daniel Larison wants to retire Reagan’s slogan “peace through strength”:
The most common abuse of Reagan’s legacy is the rote recitation of [this slogan]. Originally, the phrase implied support for creating a strong defense as a deterrent to aggression. As the threat of aggression by other states has receded, it has come to mean something very different. Many Republican hawks rely on this phrase to describe their foreign-policy views, but they long ago dismissed the importance of deterrence when dealing with states much weaker than the Soviet Union. It is common now for advocates of regime-change and preventive war to profess their commitment to “peace through strength,” but the substance of the policies they prefer shows that they reject the concept as Reagan understood it both in principle and in practice. Instead of deterring aggression to protect international peace, the new “peace through strength” often serves as rhetorical cover for the violation of that peace through acts of aggression.
Another dubious lesson from Reagan’s foreign policy:
The idea that Reagan “won” the Cold War is one of the more pernicious and enduring distortions of Reagan’s real success, which involved both opposing and engaging with the Soviet Union as its system collapsed from within largely on its own.
The claim of winning the Cold War greatly exaggerated the ability of the U.S. to shape events in other countries. That in turn has inspired later generations of conservatives and Republicans to imagine that they can successfully promote dramatic political change overseas in order to topple foreign regimes. As Kennan said in the same op-ed: “Nobody—no country, no party, no person—‘won’ the cold war. It was a long and costly political rivalry, fueled on both sides by unreal and exaggerated estimates of the intentions and strength of the other party.”
Congratulating Reagan for winning the Cold War is one more form of widespread abuse of Reagan’s legacy that has adversely affected how conservatives think about foreign policy and the proper U.S. role in the world. This has warped how the right understands American power and U.S. relations with authoritarian and pariah states for the last two decades. It also blinds many conservatives to the fact that other nations resent and reject American interference in their political affairs. In spite of the failures of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan and the collapse of the so-called Freedom Agenda, this myth continues to make many on the right overly confident in our government’s ability to influence overseas political developments to suit American wishes.
It’s called hubris. Peter Beinart made the definitive case for it after the end of the Cold War.
The Dish 