All Things Russia & Ukraine

[NattyBohChamps04]

Reagan was no neo-con? LMAO

One word: "Rollbacks"

Proto-neo-con at its finest. Along with many of the worst ideas of Republicanism in the past 50+ years. Yay for deficit spending.

Why do Republicans worship these b- to d-list hollywood celebs so hard?

[a fan]

The Shah of Iran was in power & a firm ally well before Reagan came into office.
Seizing the US Embassy & holding US citizens hostages is what Reagan inherited coming into office.
Saddam did counter Iran.

That's right.

...yet ten seconds ago, you were telling me I'm revising history by calling Reagan a neo-con. Now you're bragging about the results of mucking with countries overseas.

You keep yelling at me for wasting your time, yet here again, you're telling me that yep, Reagan is neocon.

Next time? Just write "yep, you're right, Reagan was a neo-con", and move on.

Again -- stop telling me what I think. Reagan was not a NeoCon.

https://www.cato.org/commentary/reagan-was-no-neocon

In foreign affairs, the Reagan legacy is one of realism and restraint

Oh, the CATO institute sez so. Well, what was I thinking.

-bombing Libya over a nightclub bombing that killed three? That's not neo-con?
-Iran Contra?
-bankrolling, arming, and training Saddam
-Grenada?
-Proxy war in Afganistan?

...and that's just off the top of my head. If that's not a neo-con? I don't CARE what your made up definition is. Make up more new definitions, by all means. Knock yourself out.

[a fan]

Reagan was no neo-con? LMAO

One word: "Rollbacks"

Proto-neo-con at its finest. Along with many of the worst ideas of Republicanism in the past 50+ years. Yay for deficit spending.

Why do Republicans worship these b- to d-list hollywood celebs so hard?

And we wonder why the Republican party has come completely unraveled.

Reagan was a Hollywood Union Rep. Two things Republicans claim to despise.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Reagan was no neo-con? LMAO

One word: "Rollbacks"

Proto-neo-con at its finest. Along with many of the worst ideas of Republicanism in the past 50+ years. Yay for deficit spending.

Why do Republicans worship these b- to d-list hollywood celebs so hard?

https://www.americanforeignrelations.co ... years.html

[old salt]

The Shah of Iran was in power & a firm ally well before Reagan came into office.
Seizing the US Embassy & holding US citizens hostages is what Reagan inherited coming into office.
Saddam did counter Iran.

That's right.

...yet ten seconds ago, you were telling me I'm revising history by calling Reagan a neo-con. Now you're bragging about the results of mucking with countries overseas.

You keep yelling at me for wasting your time, yet here again, you're telling me that yep, Reagan is neocon.

Next time? Just write "yep, you're right, Reagan was a neo-con", and move on.

Again -- stop telling me what I think. Reagan was not a NeoCon.

https://www.cato.org/commentary/reagan-was-no-neocon

In foreign affairs, the Reagan legacy is one of realism and restraint

Oh, the CATO institute sez so. Well, what was I thinking.

-bombing Libya over a nightclub bombing that killed three? That's not neo-con?
-Iran Contra?
-bankrolling, arming, and training Saddam
-Grenada?
-Proxy war in Afganistan?

...and that's just off the top of my head. If that's not a neo-con? I don't CARE what your made up definition is. Make up more new definitions, by all means. Knock yourself out.

Off the top of your head or out of you ass ?
No think tank has better bonafides on Reaganism than CATO. They rose to prominence with him.

You cite limited actions that lead to nothing further.
Saddam used Soviet & French supplied weapons.
Grenada was a rescue mission. We left quickly.
The Libya strike was a limited one time reprisal. It scared the sh!t out of Gaddafi. He behaved until Hillary & the EUroburghers convinced Obama to lead from behind to topple him.
The Iran Contra affair was an attempt to free US hostages being held in Lebanon. The missiles sold to Iran were used against Saddam's Iraq, who you claim Reagan armed.
The proxy war in Afghanistan worked. Operation Cyclone began in 1979 (before Reagan) & continued through 1992. We did not stop funding the Mujahideen until 1993 under Clinton. That's what Charlie Wilson attributes to the Muj turning on the US (along with Pakistani ISI meddling). OBL was still a nobody wannabe then.
Even NeoCon founders Kristol & Podhoretz criticized Reagan for not being assertive enough...but you know better than them.

When did you first become aware of the term "NeoCon" ? Like most of America, it was probably not until 2001-2003 when they made the case for invading Iraq.
Just more of your bogus partisan revisionist history. Tell us again how Trump caused Putin to invade Ukraine by giving them a few Javelins that he was impeached by the Dems for not sending as fast as they wanted them.

[OCanada]

The Shah of Iran was in power & a firm ally well before Reagan came into office.
Seizing the US Embassy & holding US citizens hostages is what Reagan inherited coming into office.
Saddam did counter Iran.

That's right.

...yet ten seconds ago, you were telling me I'm revising history by calling Reagan a neo-con. Now you're bragging about the results of mucking with countries overseas.

You keep yelling at me for wasting your time, yet here again, you're telling me that yep, Reagan is neocon.

Next time? Just write "yep, you're right, Reagan was a neo-con", and move on.

Again -- stop telling me what I think. Reagan was not a NeoCon.

https://www.cato.org/commentary/reagan-was-no-neocon

In foreign affairs, the Reagan legacy is one of realism and restraint

Oh, the CATO institute sez so. Well, what was I thinking.

-bombing Libya over a nightclub bombing that killed three? That's not neo-con?
-Iran Contra?
-bankrolling, arming, and training Saddam
-Grenada?
-Proxy war in Afganistan?

...and that's just off the top of my head. If that's not a neo-con? I don't CARE what your made up definition is. Make up more new definitions, by all means. Knock yourself out.

Off the top of your head or out of you ass ?
No think tank has better bonafides on Reaganism than CATO. They rose to prominence with him.

You cite limited actions that lead to nothing further.
Saddam used Soviet & French supplied weapons.
Grenada was a rescue mission. We left quickly.
The Libya strike was a limited one time reprisal. It scared the sh!t out of Gaddafi. He behaved until Hillary & the EUroburghers convinced Obama to lead from behind to topple him.
The Iran Contra affair was an attempt to free US hostages being held in Lebanon. The missiles sold to Iran were used against Saddam's Iraq, who you claim Reagan armed.
The proxy war in Afghanistan worked. Operation Cyclone began in 1979 (before Reagan) & continued through 1992. We did not stop funding the Mujahideen until 1993 under Clinton. That's what Charlie Wilson attributes to the Muj turning on the US (along with Pakistani ISI meddling). OBL was still a nobody wannabe then.
Even NeoCon founders Kristol & Podhoretz criticized Reagan for not being assertive enough...but you know better than them.

When did you first become aware of the term "NeoCon" ? Like most of America, it was probably not until 2001-2003 when they made the case for invading Iraq.
Just more of your bogus partisan revisionist history. Tell us again how Trump caused Putin to invade Ukraine by giving them a few Javelins that he was impeached by the Dems for not sending as fast as they wanted them.

I hate long quotes but here it is

Bear w me. One day i am called to drive to an unnamed airbase in DE to discuss a lease for a Spanish made plane to which the lessee wants to add $5 million in electronics. I artive and before i can enter i have to sign a non-disclosure agreement and agree not to fly to or over Cuba.

I ask about insurance? Given a card that has only a PO Box in the Shenandoah Valley? Financials and maintainance agreements? What do you want them to say? We will mail them. Back at the office we decided to pass

Not long after I learn a Spanish plane was down in Nicaragua. Same plane.

Iran Contra news emerges.while Reagan could have and maybe should have been impeached the consensus was the country coukd not weather another impeachment so soon after Nixon

[a fan]

Off the top of your head or out of you ass ?

Uhhhh. I cited historical events that actually happened.

You have two choice here:

1. tell the forum that the events I cited didn't actually happen, or,

2. STFU, and stop looking for arguments when there aren't any. These things happened. Period. Don't gaslight and tell
me I'm nuts and these events that EVERYONE remembers never happened.

You cite limited actions that lead to nothing further.

Right. Bankrolling Saddam and Training AlQ ".lead to nothing further."

The annoying thing about dealing with you is that if we were sitting in Grad School seminar you would NEVER make these patently incorrect statements, because you'd be far too embarrassed to tell the class that you're sooooooo stupid, that you think that arming and bankrolling Saddam "lead to nothing further". You'd be laughed out of the class.

Instead? You tell me that arming and training Saddam, and pumping him full of cash didn't lead to freaking Gulf War. Oh yeah sure, one had nothing to do with the other.

We argue because I respected your posts in the past, and know doggone well you're gaslighting here, and aren't this stupid.

Should I give up, and treat you like Pete Brown, and other posters of the past who are indeed idiots?

Saddam used Soviet & French supplied weapons.

Wowee, the CIA really fooled us with that trick. SOOPER complicated master spywork there. "Oh, those weapons didn't come from the American CIA! Nothing to see here". Derp.

Grenada was a rescue mission. We left quickly.

So what? Did it happen under Reagan's direction, or not? Yes. It did. And guess what? That's all I'm claiming. You're the one trying to add strawmen to my simple statement of "this happened", so you can knock down a strawman.

The Libya strike was a limited one time reprisal. It scared the sh!t out of Gaddafi. He behaved until Hillary & the EUroburghers convinced Obama to lead from behind to topple him.

So what? Did both events happen, or not?

The Iran Contra affair was an attempt to free US hostages being held in Lebanon. The missiles sold to Iran were used against Saddam's Iraq, who you claim Reagan armed.

Now we're back to Reagan didn't arm Saddam. You know we've discussed this before, and you told me that yep, Reagan armed and funded Saddam, right? F'ing wasting your time and mine with more gaslighting because you're bored, and are trolling.

And then when I do as you want, and react to the trolling, you act like I"m the problem.

The proxy war in Afghanistan worked.

Sure did, short term. Which is why A. Reagan is a neo-con, and B. Biden is a neo-con who thinks that if a proxy war vs. Soviet worked in Afghanistan, surely it would work against a lesser Russia in Ukraine.

You know: neo-con thinking. Biden is one, and apparently, you're gonna wet your pants if I dare call Reagan what he is, so....I guess Reagan isn't a neo-con. Oh, and the key component to Neo-Con thinking, which you are espousing here is: "blowback? What blowback? There were no long term negative consequences to Reagan's choice to back Saddam? Anything that happened after Reagan left the Iran/Iraq mess to the next POTUS is "someone else's fault".

How about we call Reagan what YOU want him to be: instead of Neo-Con, from now on, we'll call Reagan's overseas adventures "Sooper-Sparkle-Awesome-Perfect-Hooray".

How's that? That way, you can tell the Forum that anyone with a R by his name is the bestest-most-awesome-guy-ever, who made no mistakes, and made America flawless.

And then you'll shut up, and stop whining anytime anyone anywhere says something bad about Republicans, or worse still, anything good about a Democrat. Can't have that, can we? So yep, you're right Clinton showed up and ruined everything. You're TOTALLY right.

Tell us again how Trump caused Putin to invade Ukraine by giving them a few Javelins that he was impeached by the Dems for not sending as fast as they wanted them.

This is YOUR theory, you blathering idiot. Your partisanship makes you so freaking stoopid, that you can't even remember what you lectured me about in the past

You told me that if we want to prevent an invasion, we need to arm said country to the point where they are a "porcupine", and make it so that an invasion is SO PAINFUL, that the invasion doesn't happen.

Yet you're on here telling me the above bolded theory ONLY works in Taiwan, but somehow doesn't work in Ukraine.

And once again, you would NEVER make a claim this stupid if we were in a room with your peers. Why do you do this?

We discussed this before: if Putin put Old Salt in charge of invading Ukraine, and you say that America was slowly turning Ukraine into an un-invade-able porcupine, you wouldn't care, and you'd sit there as Biden promised more arms, and do nothing.

GTFO of here with this stupidity. You'd get on the phone with Putin the second Biden announced more military aid was coming, and tell Putin "if you want to own Ukraine, the window to invade is closing as this new President Biden is sending even MORE arms to Ukraine, and at some point, they'll be a porcupine, and we won't be able to invade.

Just...stop with the gaslighting.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Grenada was a rescue mission. We left quickly.

This was over quickly too…

The 1967 Six-Day War: New Israeli Perspective, 50 Years Later
Introduction [1]
Fifty years ago, war transformed the Middle East. Six memorable days, known to Israelis as the Six-Day War and to Arabs and others as the 1967 War, redrew the region’s landscape in fundamental ways. In those six days, Israel defeated three Arab armies, gained territory four times its original size, and became the preeminent military power in the region. The war transformed Israel from a nation that perceived itself as fighting for survival into an occupier and regional powerhouse.

The consequences for the Arab coalition were similarly transformative. For those “on the line of confrontation,” as Arab states bordering Israel were called, the war brought the loss of vast territories and crushing humiliation, all the more so for the Palestinians. Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt and the most prominent Arab leader at the time, survived the war but his leadership never recovered. The stunning defeat initiated the demise of his brand of secular pan-Arabism that was once an assertive ideological force in the Arab world.

The 1967 Six-Day War is probably the most important and most researched event in the Middle East since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Volumes of studies have been produced over the five decades since. Yet, one important aspect remains obscure and untold: the crisis’ nuclear dimension. On this issue, both sides remain bonded together by layers of taboo, silence, and secrecy.

On this 50th anniversary of the 1967 war, the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project (NPIHP) has released historical testimonies and documents revealing that the crisis had an underlying twofold nuclear dimension. First, Israel’s nuclear program played a vital role on the threat perception of both sides. Second, and more significantly, those testimonies reveal now that Israel, during the May–June 1967 crisis, first assembled its first rudimentary nuclear devices. Furthermore, at that same juncture, some senior Israeli officials even considered how to detonate a nuclear explosive for demonstrative purpose in the unlikely case of a “doomsday” scenario. It was fifty years ago that Israel first crossed the nuclear threshold, making the 1967 crisis a landmark in global nuclear history.

Old and New Narratives of the 1967 Crisis
While potential for renewed Arab-Israeli hostility simmered in early 1967, most regional actors neither expected nor sought a new military confrontation. This is particularly true for the leaders of Israel and Egypt: Levi Eshkol and Gamal Abdel Nasser. How, then, did a major war erupt seemingly against the wishes of both sides?

The conventional wisdom among historians is that a series of mishaps and missteps —deceptions, miscalculations, misperceptions, and the like—led each party into a war that neither leader planned for nor desired.[2] Israeli-inspired narratives typically cite false Soviet intelligence reports of imminent Israeli attack on Syria as the trigger that launched Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser on a series of miscalculated decisions (massing troops in the Sinai, removing the UN Emergency Force deployed there after the 1956 Suez crisis, and closing the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping) that ultimately made war inevitable.

Meanwhile, Arab-inspired narratives assert that Israel’s provocative statements against the Syrian regime induced Nasser’s reaction. Other narratives divide responsibility between various players—Arabs, Soviets, Israelis, and even the United Nations. Yet all these narratives share the fundamental idea that the crisis sprung from a series of miscalculations that ultimately led to the failure of conventional deterrence.

These narratives also tend to shy away from the nuclear issue; the Israeli nuclear program plays almost no role in those narratives. When the nuclear issue is mentioned, it is in passing and treated as anecdotal rather than essential. This is not surprising given a tendency on both sides to look the other way on the relevance of nuclear weapons to the Arab-Israeli conflict.[3]

This aversion is in part due to a lack of public information, but can be seen also in classified testimonies of Israeli military leaders taken shortly after the war. For example, Yitzhak Rabin’s lengthy, top-secret testimony from 1969 refers only three times—all in passing—to his serious concerns that the Dimona nuclear site might be a target for Egyptian attack. Nor does Rabin directly mention his own real-time concerns over attack on Dimona during the build-up to the war, despite the fact these concerns can be found explicitly and extensively in the original Israeli documentation of the crisis.[4] This omission is likely a manifestation of the deep-seated taboo on the topic of Dimona. On the nuclear issue, both sides are bonded together by layers of silence and secrecy.

However, recent Israeli-based historical research has shed new light on the obscure nuclear dimension of the 1967 crisis. Over the last two decades, more evidence on the role Dimona played in shaping Israeli and Egyptian perceptions of each other has surfaced. This introductory essay utilizes this recent historical material to further revisit and clarify the significance of Dimona and provide greater context to the crisis and war of 1967.[5]

[old salt]

Off the top of your head or out of you ass ?

Uhhhh. I cited historical events that actually happened.

You have two choice here:

1. tell the forum that the events I cited didn't actually happen, or,

2. STFU, and stop looking for arguments when there aren't any. These things happened. Period. Don't gaslight and tell
me I'm nuts and these events that EVERYONE remembers never happened.

You cite limited actions that lead to nothing further.

Right. Bankrolling Saddam and Training AlQ ".lead to nothing further."

The annoying thing about dealing with you is that if we were sitting in Grad School seminar you would NEVER make these patently incorrect statements, because you'd be far too embarrassed to tell the class that you're sooooooo stupid, that you think that arming and bankrolling Saddam "lead to nothing further". You'd be laughed out of the class.

Instead? You tell me that arming and training Saddam, and pumping him full of cash didn't lead to freaking Gulf War. Oh yeah sure, one had nothing to do with the other.

We argue because I respected your posts in the past, and know doggone well you're gaslighting here, and aren't this stupid.

Should I give up, and treat you like Pete Brown, and other posters of the past who are indeed idiots?

Saddam used Soviet & French supplied weapons.

Wowee, the CIA really fooled us with that trick. SOOPER complicated master spywork there. "Oh, those weapons didn't come from the American CIA! Nothing to see here". Derp.

Grenada was a rescue mission. We left quickly.

So what? Did it happen under Reagan's direction, or not? Yes. It did. And guess what? That's all I'm claiming. You're the one trying to add strawmen to my simple statement of "this happened", so you can knock down a strawman.

The Libya strike was a limited one time reprisal. It scared the sh!t out of Gaddafi. He behaved until Hillary & the EUroburghers convinced Obama to lead from behind to topple him.

So what? Did both events happen, or not?

The Iran Contra affair was an attempt to free US hostages being held in Lebanon. The missiles sold to Iran were used against Saddam's Iraq, who you claim Reagan armed.

Now we're back to Reagan didn't arm Saddam. You know we've discussed this before, and you told me that yep, Reagan armed and funded Saddam, right? F'ing wasting your time and mine with more gaslighting because you're bored, and are trolling.

And then when I do as you want, and react to the trolling, you act like I"m the problem.

The proxy war in Afghanistan worked.

Sure did, short term. Which is why A. Reagan is a neo-con, and B. Biden is a neo-con who thinks that if a proxy war vs. Soviet worked in Afghanistan, surely it would work against a lesser Russia in Ukraine.

You know: neo-con thinking. Biden is one, and apparently, you're gonna wet your pants if I dare call Reagan what he is, so....I guess Reagan isn't a neo-con. Oh, and the key component to Neo-Con thinking, which you are espousing here is: "blowback? What blowback? There were no long term negative consequences to Reagan's choice to back Saddam? Anything that happened after Reagan left the Iran/Iraq mess to the next POTUS is "someone else's fault".

How about we call Reagan what YOU want him to be: instead of Neo-Con, from now on, we'll call Reagan's overseas adventures "Sooper-Sparkle-Awesome-Perfect-Hooray".

How's that? That way, you can tell the Forum that anyone with a R by his name is the bestest-most-awesome-guy-ever, who made no mistakes, and made America flawless.

And then you'll shut up, and stop whining anytime anyone anywhere says something bad about Republicans, or worse still, anything good about a Democrat. Can't have that, can we? So yep, you're right Clinton showed up and ruined everything. You're TOTALLY right.

Tell us again how Trump caused Putin to invade Ukraine by giving them a few Javelins that he was impeached by the Dems for not sending as fast as they wanted them.

This is YOUR theory, you blathering idiot. Your partisanship makes you so freaking stoopid, that you can't even remember what you lectured me about in the past

You told me that if we want to prevent an invasion, we need to arm said country to the point where they are a "porcupine", and make it so that an invasion is SO PAINFUL, that the invasion doesn't happen.

Yet you're on here telling me the above bolded theory ONLY works in Taiwan, but somehow doesn't work in Ukraine.

And once again, you would NEVER make a claim this stupid if we were in a room with your peers. Why do you do this?

We discussed this before: if Putin put Old Salt in charge of invading Ukraine, and you say that America was slowly turning Ukraine into an un-invade-able porcupine, you wouldn't care, and you'd sit there as Biden promised more arms, and do nothing.

GTFO of here with this stupidity. You'd get on the phone with Putin the second Biden announced more military aid was coming, and tell Putin "if you want to own Ukraine, the window to invade is closing as this new President Biden is sending even MORE arms to Ukraine, and at some point, they'll be a porcupine, and we won't be able to invade.

Just...stop with the gaslighting.

After your lengthy cut & paste chop job of my list of facts, you can only respond with snark. ...then you accuse me of gaslighting.

You call Reagan a NeoCon. The term wasn't even in use during his term & you clearly don't know what it means. You just use it to criticize anyone you disagree with. You didn't answer when you first heard the term.

I used the term "porcupine" to describe Taiwan. You seized the term & used it to argue about Ukraine. The limited military aid given to Ukraine before the invasion was not enough quills to make them a porcupine & we still can't manufacture enough specifically needed military aid fast enough to make Ukraine a porcupine. There's not enough time & Ukraine was in too sorry a state to be equipped to porcupine status. They have a 800 mile land border to defend. Taiwan has the straits that China must cross to invade. Taiwan has their own defense industry & have been preparing for decades. Ukraine did little to build their defense, even after surrendering Crimea in 2014 without a fight. Its not worth the time to counter such stupid arguments.

What US weapons did Saddam use to fight Iran ? I saw the gaping hole in the USS Stark & the wounded sailors who survived the Iraqi attack using 2 French Exocet missiles fired by a French made aircraft...& the caskets of the 37 sailors who did not survive the attack. You think the CIA provided those French made weapons ? Iraq was receiving them from France before the war. When Iran began winning the war & threatened to cut through Iraq, attack Kuwait, Saudi Arabia & our other Gulf Arab allies, Reagan reluctantly (& covertly) did what he had to do to prevent Iran from choking off the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf. It prevented another global energy crisis.
Iran remains a threat but Iraq remains a tenuous ally & other Gulf Arab nations remain our allies, hosting our forces. That all traces back to Iraq preventing Iran from overrunning the entire Persian Gulf region. Reagan was not on a NeoCon mission to change the world. He was a pragmatist & realist who acted to protect & maintain US interests. He did what he had to do, not by choice or in pursuit of the NeoCon vision to remake the world in our image.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Dissent and its circle, in the early 1970s, invented the term to denigrate the right-moving intellectuals who wrote in Commentary and the Public Interest. The name first appeared in print here, in a Fall 1973 article by Michael Harrington entitled “The Welfare State and Its Neoconservative Critics.” The neocons, it is said, resisted the designation at first and began to use it only after it had gained wide acceptance.
This history can be found in dozens of books, articles, and Web postings; the best-annotated version is in S. M. Lipset’s 1996 book American Exceptionalism. But—you’re reading Dissent, after all—the story really is more complicated. Norman Podhoretz, in his 1996 Commentary essay “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” gives glimpses of this prehistory. Podhoretz himself in 1963 had called Walter Lippmann and Clinton Rossiter neoconservatives, and he gives earlier citations from George Lichtheim and Dwight MacDonald.
The word neoconservative has (Internet search tools now reveal) a long prehistory of use in academic and quasi-academic writing to describe any new….

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://theweek.com/articles/528827/rise-neocons

[old salt]

Dissent and its circle, in the early 1970s, invented the term to denigrate the right-moving intellectuals who wrote in Commentary and the Public Interest. The name first appeared in print here, in a Fall 1973 article by Michael Harrington entitled “The Welfare State and Its Neoconservative Critics.” The neocons, it is said, resisted the designation at first and began to use it only after it had gained wide acceptance.
This history can be found in dozens of books, articles, and Web postings; the best-annotated version is in S. M. Lipset’s 1996 book American Exceptionalism. But—you’re reading Dissent, after all—the story really is more complicated. Norman Podhoretz, in his 1996 Commentary essay “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” gives glimpses of this prehistory. Podhoretz himself in 1963 had called Walter Lippmann and Clinton Rossiter neoconservatives, and he gives earlier citations from George Lichtheim and Dwight MacDonald.
The word neoconservative has (Internet search tools now reveal) a long prehistory of use in academic and quasi-academic writing to describe any new….

When did you first hear the term NeoCon & in relation to what ?

[old salt]

https://theweek.com/articles/528827/rise-neocons

Though Reagan himself was not a neocon...

[a fan]

After your lengthy cut & paste chop job of my list of facts, you can only respond with snark. ...then you accuse me of gaslighting.

Facts? Right. Your OPINIONS, sure.

I'm the one who handed you one word facts. Big ones like. "Grenada"? What did you come back with? Your toddler "that's revisionist history".

Right. The one. single, solitary. word: GRENADA is "revisionist". GTFO of here with your gaslighting.

How the F is the word "Grenada" revisionist history. Go ahead and explain that one to the class, OS.

You call Reagan a NeoCon. The term wasn't even in use during his term & you clearly don't know what it means.

Nope. Not only do I concede he's not a neo-con, I'm with you: that term doesn't exist at all, and A Fan, TLD, and even the National Review is making stuff up.

I told you: Reagan is a "Sooper-Sparkle-Awesome-Perfect-Hooray". Can we move on now, and start calling him St. Reagan, and tell the forum that Reagan was magic, never did anything wrong, and Iran-Contra was SO cool, nothing to see here?

Can we get Trump back in the White House so you can get back to drooling in your shoes, and telling the forum that everything overseas is perfect and flawless, and brilliant? Oh yeah: REAL insightful and helpful stuff from you where no matter what a D does, it's wrong, and what a R does isn't awesome. Why do you even bother? Total waste of your time to come on here and tell us Biden is bad, and doing it all wrong, yet with Reagan? Oh, he just "did what he had to do".

Brilliant insight. I could get a wiser response from two or three kindergarteners, who hash out their observations in committee.

You just use it to criticize anyone you disagree with. You didn't answer when you first heard the term.

No. I use the term describe nutjobs like you who took our Constitutional concept of letting Congress wage war and empower allies overseas, threw it away, and replaced it with a bunch of policy wonks who will never see a day of combat who use the CIA to decide who to arm, which foreign governments to prop up, and which ones to overthrow.

Not only do you think the above is an awesome way to run the Executive branch, you are 100% unable to see one single solitary downside to playing the above games. You'll NEVER admit it, just like allllll the neo-cons we've been dealing with since WWII ended.

I used the term "porcupine" to describe Taiwan. You seized the term & used it to argue about Ukraine.

Of course you think this way. You desperately want your support of Taiwan to apply to Taiwan, and Taiwan alone.

So you invent this idiocy where you're claiming that Putin's Generals don't care if America "has sent them a few javelins", vs. ongoing armaments and US training over many years.

Pay attention: they wanted to invade BEFORE Ukraine turned into a porcupine. Because unlike you, Putin's generals aren't pretending that they are SO STUPID, that they'd rather invade a relatively unarmed Ukraine, and instead, wait for Trump and Biden

If you're REALLY this incompetent at military strategy after your career? I want my tax dollars back, please. So do my fellow Americans.

Naturally, you're NOT stupid, and would OBVIOUSLY rather invade a country before America arms the sh(t out of them.

.....all this nonsense so you don't have to concede a single point. It's so stupid.

Reagan was not on a NeoCon mission to change the world. He was a pragmatist & realist who acted to protect & maintain US interests. He did what he had to do, not by choice or in pursuit of the NeoCon vision to remake the world in our image.

So did Nixon, Clinton, Bush, Bush, Obama, and Trump.

You don't get this, and I frankly don't care that you don't.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Good history:

Norman Podhoretz is the editor of Commentary and author, most recently, of ''Why We Were in Vietnam.'' By Norman Podhoretz The night Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States, I watched the returns in the company of a group of intellectuals who were so jubilant at the news of the mounting landslide that a passing stranger might have taken them for professional Republican Party workers or perhaps for fervent ideological conservatives.

In fact, however, most of them were registered Democrats. Some had never before voted for a Republican; or if they had, it would have been in a local race and for a liberal of the species, such as Jacob Javits or John Lindsay in his original political incarnation. Others had voted for Richard Nixon in 1972, but only because as compared with George McGovern he seemed the lesser evil; most of them had gone for Hubert Humphrey against Nixon in 1968. In voting for Nixon even against McGovern they felt uneasy, not merely because they had always disliked Nixon, but also because in deserting the Democratic Party they were breaking with a tradition to which they had been loyal all their political lives. On the other hand, they felt that in nominating George McGovern, who stood for values that departed in almost every respect from that tradition, the Democratic Party had deserted them. They would certainly have supported any of McGovern's Democratic rivals - Humphrey, Henry Jackson, Edmund Muskie - and when in 1976 the Democrats nominated Jimmy Carter, a candidate who seemed closer to the central tradition of the party than to the McGovernite wing (now led by Edward Kennedy), most of them supported him over his Republican rival, Gerald Ford.

Why then, less than four years later, were so many of them cheering for Ronald Reagan? And why, less than two years after that, are so many of them sinking into a state of near political despair?

The label that has come to be attached to the people I am talking about - and I myself am definitely one of them - is ''neoconservative.'' Like all labels, including ''liberal,'' this one can be misleading. Consequently only a few to whom it has been applied have happily embraced it. The most notable of these is Irving Kristol, who edits The Public Interest, one of the two magazines usually identified as the main centers of neo-conservative thought (the other being Commentary, of which I am the editor). On the other hand, Daniel Bell, who collaborated with Kristol in founding The Public Interest and is still associated with it, indignantly denies that he is a conservative, ''neo'' or any other kind. So too, though less indignantly, does Daniel P. Moynihan. Since becoming a United States Senator, Moynihan has been moving away from neo-conservatism in substance and is more and more frequently referred to nowadays as a ''neo-liberal.''
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A few other members of the group, such as the philosopher Sidney Hook and the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, also bridle at being called neo-conservative. But the rest of us - including such scholars, journalists and editors as James Q. Wilson, Michael Novak, William Barrett and Hilton Kramer - have surrendered, more or less peaceably, to the label after a period of fruitless struggle against it: fruitless in the sense that no matter how much we protested against being called neo-conservative, the label kept being affixed to our names.

A great deal of what has been written about the neo-conservatives has come from hostile quarters and is even more misleading than the label itself. But on at least two major points there has been little or no disagreement. The first is that the emergence of a significant group of dissenters from the leftist orthodoxies (nowadays usually called ''liberal'') prevalent in the leading universities and the more sophisticated media of communication have contributed greatly to a change in the general climate of opinion in the United States over the past few years. In the writings of these ''neo-conservative'' dissenters, the conventional ''liberal'' wisdom has been challenged in one area after another and ideas which had been automatically dismissed as self-evidently wrong or wicked have been given a new respectability in the world of argument and hence a new legitimacy in the world of political action.

The second point on which there is little disagreement is that the influence of the neo-conservatives contributed to the election of Ronald Reagan. This was not a matter of numbers. As a movement of dissident intellectuals, the neo-conservatives were (and are) a minority within a minority. Nevertheless, if the grip of the conventional liberal wisdom and the leftist orthodoxies in the world of ideas had not been loosened by the criticisms of the neoconservatives; if a correlative willingness to entertain new ideas had not thereby been created; and if these new ideas had not been plausibly articulated and skillfully defended in the trials by intellectual combat that do so much to shape public opinion in the United States -if not for all this, Ronald Reagan would in all probability have been unable to win over the traditionally Democratic constituencies (blue-collar workers, white-ethnic groups like the Irish and the Italians and a surprisingly high percentage of Jews) whose support swept him into the White House.

It is, then, a fact of some political consequence that so many neo-conservatives have moved in less than two years from enthusiasm to disappointment in their feeling about Reagan.

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Since they by no means constitute a homogeneous movement, it is almost impossible to generalize with any great precision in accounting for the disappointment of the neo-conservatives in Reagan. That most of them are disappointed is undoubtedly true, but this disappointment has not yet been expressed systematically in print; it has been coming out in an occasional article, in numerous private conversations and at gatherings like the conference held by The Committee for the Free World - an organization made up mainly of neo-conservatives - in Washington this past January.
Moreover, the reasons for neo-conservative disappointment in Reagan vary and are not always consistent with one another. My own case, I think, is representative in its general outlines and less so in particular details. In general, the high hopes I entertained for Reagan were stimulated by his evident conviction that the decline of American power - American military power, American economic power, American political power -was neither inevitable nor irreversible. We had, Reagan suggested, lost or forgotten the principles through which we had become the most productive, the most prosperous, the strongest and the most respected nation on earth; it was up to us to rediscover and rededicate ourselves to them, and he proposed to lead us in this adventurous undertaking.

Carter's message, delivered for the most part subliminally or by implication but still unmistakable, was just the opposite. American decline, he told us, was the result of inexorable historical forces; to attempt to reverse it was to invite economic disaster, social disruption and war; the best and safest course was to adjust like a mature people to our diminished condition, and on this course he offered to keep us.

Since I believed and continue to believe that the survival not only of the United States but of free institutions everywhere in the world depends on a resurgence of American power, I considered the attitudes embodied in the Carter campaign a guarantee of future disaster. Conversely, I was heartened by the rise of a political leader who seemed to understand the nature of the great historical crisis we were in and who, better still, seemed capable of mobilizing popular support for a national effort to begin dealing with it.

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Unlike Irving Kristol and a few other neo-conservatives, I did not attach these high hopes to a particular set of economic policies. In short, I was not a great believer in ''supply-side'' economics. What I did believe, in common with almost all neo-conservatives (whatever their ideas about tax cuts, monetary policy, deficits and other such issues), was that the lost or forgotten principle which had to be rediscovered and reanimated in this area was to promote economic growth through the encouragement of investment, enterprise, risk and the quest for wealth. In a word: capitalism.

The fact that this is still a dirty word to so many liberals suggests that the rhetorical professions of devotion to economic growth on the part of the left are not to be taken at face value. Indeed, in recent years most liberals have been far more preoccupied with how to redistribute wealth than with how to create it; with how to protect the environment against the depredations of industrial enterprise than with how to foster technological development; with how to make people more secure than with how to encourage them to take risks, and liberals have denigrated the ambition for wealth as nothing more than a form of selfishness and antisocial greed.
To the extent that the supply-side theory represented a reversal of those attitudes, I liked it; and in asserting that the necessary incentives could best be created by cutting the taxes of those in the upper income brackets (since they are the only people with money to invest), the theory seemed to me plausible. But for all I knew, there might be other and better methods of stimulating investment and encouraging entrepreneurial venturesomeness. The main point was the goal, not the technique.

Similarly with the budget cuts, the ''new federalism'' and the other elements of ''Reaganomics.'' I supported the effort to bring capitalism back to life in the United States, but I was not wedded to Reagan's program for doing so. If it seemed to be working, I would be happy; if not, I would just as happily favor trying something else.

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This is why my own disappointment in President Reagan is not centered on his economic program. Obviously it has not been working according to plan. Instead of growth, we have a recession; instead of an enthusiastic rush by the business community to invest, we have a declining stock market and rising interest rates; instead of a balanced budget, we have the biggest projected deficits in history.

On the other hand, inflation has been coming down, the rate in the growth of Federal spending has been arrested and the effects of the tax cut on savings and investment have yet to be felt. It is still too early to say whether the Reagan Administration will have succeeded or failed in the great objective of reversing the decline of American economic power.

It is not too early to say, however, that this is his strategic objective and that he has worked very hard and very effectively on the tactics which he believes - rightly or wrongly remains to be determined - will move the country toward it.
I wish I could say something similar about another major goal of President Reagan's domestic policies - to reverse the drift of the past decade or so toward the establishment of a quota system under which individuals are judged not in accordance with their merits as individuals but in terms of their membership in various racial, ethnic, or sexual groupings.

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This is an issue about which such neo-conservatives as Nathan Glazer of Harvard and The Public Interest, Diane Ravitch of Columbia Teachers College and John H. Bunzel of the Hoover Institute have been writing for a long time. The position they have taken was echoed by Mr. Reagan and his people during the campaign and has been reaffirmed since the election. In brief: ''affirmative action,'' in the sense of good-faith efforts to recruit and if necessary to train members of formerly excluded groups so that they can compete as individuals on an equal footing, is clearly legitimate. But affirmative action defined as ''quotas or any other numerical or statistical formulas designed to provide ... preferential treatment based on race, sex, national origin, or religion'' is ''unsound as a matter of law and unwise as a matter of policy.''

The words I have just quoted were spoken before a Congressional subcommittee by William Bradford Reynolds, President Reagan's Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, and they could easily have been spoken by most neo-conservatives. Many of us would even go further in identifying the principle of equal opportunity for individuals without regard (in the traditional formulation) to ''race, creed, color, or country of national origin'' as one of those lost or forgotten secrets of American energy and productivity that President Reagan has said we must rediscover if we are to reverse our national decline. Yet, in a judgment that most of his fellow neoconservatives would surely endorse, Chester E. Finn Jr. of Vanderbilt University writes that during the past year ''the nation's long slide into color-coded policies and group entitlements was somewhat slowed but hardly stopped by an Administration that seemed uncertain whether it really wanted to apply the brakes and not altogether sure where to find them.''

Disappointing though the record in this area is from a neoconservative perspective, what is even more distressing is the way the President has gone about trying to realize his other great strategic objective: to reverse the decline of American power in the world.

To be sure, on one component of this strategy Mr. Reagan has performed in office exactly as I had hoped he would. He has proposed a program of rearmament and he has fought with great determination against cutting back on the necessary expenditures. If he does nothing else as President during his term of office than preside over the refurbishing and modernization of a badly deteriorated military capability, he will have taken the first step toward a resurgence of American power in the world. Rearmament is the necessary minimum, the indispensable foundation; without it, nothing else we do will be effective. This President Reagan obviously understands, and this he can be trusted to uphold.
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But military power, although indispensable, is very far from sufficient. Unless we rearm we will be unable to keep the peace or to win if we should have to go to war. Arms alone, however, do not and cannot tell us what it is we are trying to accomplish in the world; on the contrary, it is only if we know what we are trying to do that we can know what kind of military arsenal we should build. And it is only if we know what we are trying to do that we can decide on the political tactics that are likely to move us toward the objective.

This would seem self-evident to the point of being tautological. Yet judging by the discrepancy between the stated objectives of the Reagan Administration in foreign policy and the actions it has so far taken, I am driven to one of two conclusions. Either this Administration does not in fact know what it wishes to do, or what it really wishes to do does not correspond to what the President himself has said.

Like almost everyone else in the world, I expected the Reagan Administation to change the direction of American policy toward the Soviet Union, and like most neo-conservatives I welcomed the prospect. I for one did not agree with the endlessly reiterated charge that Mr. Reagan was ''simplistic'' in seeing the Soviet Union not only as the central problem we face in the world but as implicated in almost every other troublesome situation confronting us.

No doubt it was an exaggeration to say that the Soviet Union was behind every crisis everywhere on earth; no doubt there were indigenous local factors that would come into play even if the Soviet Union did not exist; no doubt Soviet involvement in some cases was minimal. Granting all this, Mr. Reagan's ''simplistic'' view still seemed to me closer to the truth and a better general guide to policy than the equally exaggerated ''localitis'' of so many of his critics. Closer to the truth because the Soviets were more often than not to be found fishing in troubled waters or trying to roil the waters up; and better because it helped to concentrate the mind on the global reach that Soviet imperial power has acquired in recent years through its relentless military build-up.

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Accordingly, some of us expected the Reagan Administration to move quickly and decisively in shoring up the American position on the two fronts most vulnerable to the new Soviet offensive: the Persian Gulf and the Caribbean. We expected this because it followed logically from the Reagan view of the Soviet threat; and we expected it all the more because the President himself and several of his top people had explicitly promised to take such action.
With regard to the Persian Gulf, during the campaign, Mr. Reagan's main spokesman on foreign policy, Richard V. Allen - later to serve for a time as national security adviser -had said that a sea-based Rapid Deployment Force would not be enough to secure the oilfields against either a direct or an indirect Soviet move. In his judgment, it would be necessary to station American ground forces somewhere in the region which would, like our troops in Europe, act simultaneously as a deterrent and as a ''tripwire.''

This might have been dismissed as campaign rhetoric if not for the fact that the same determination was expressed after the Administration took office - this time by the President himself, seconded both by his Secretary of State, Alexander M. Haig Jr., and his Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger. The Secretary of State in particular spoke of forging a new policy in the region: a ''strategic consensus'' that would unite the moderate Arab states and Israel into a de facto alliance made possible and credible by the presence of American troops to hold the line against the growing danger of Soviet power.

In spite of the fact that Saudi Arabia itself had been exhorting the United States to do something about this danger, the Saudis immediately voiced their opposition to the introduction of an American military presence into the region, and no sooner did they do so than this new idea was dropped. In its place an old idea came rushing back - the idea that we could rely on surrogates to protect our vital interests in various parts of the world. The surrogate on which we had previously relied in the Persian Gulf was Iran under the Shah; the surrogate on which we now proposed to rely was Saudi Arabia.

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Yet if Iran, which seemed a monument of strength and stability in comparison with Saudi Arabia, had proved to be a pillar of sand, what could we expect of Saudi Arabia? In spite of this obvious consideration, the decision was made to supply the Saudis with advanced weaponry, including the Awacs planes, on the theory that such weapons were necessary to defend the oilfields.

Thus, far from changing the direction of American policy in the Persian Gulf, the Reagan Administration was continuing along the path of its immediate predecessors. As I myself pointed out at the time in a newspaper article, in arming the Saudis and depending upon them to police the region on our behalf, the Reagan Administration was resurrecting the Nixon Doctrine, even though it had already been overtaken by the fall of the Shah. More distressing still, in giving in to Saudi demands without a quid pro quo in the form of support for American policy - for not only did the Saudis refuse to join in the ''strategic consensus'' we were trying to forge as a bulwark against Soviet expansion in this vital region but they even tried to prevent other states like Oman from cooperating with us - the Reagan Administration was falling into the same habit of appeasing Saudi Arabia which had afflicted the Carter Administration. Indeed, Robert W. Tucker of Johns Hopkins, writing in Commentary, went so far as to describe the Reagan Administration's policy in the Middle East as ''Carterism without Carter.''
For me, and for most other neo-conservatives, this policy, bad as it was on its own terms, was all the more disturbing in its implications for the American connection with Israel. While the general impression that all neo-conservatives are Jewish is false, it is certainly true that all neo-conservatives are strong supporters of Israel. This has as much - and in many cases more - to do with the fact that Israel is a democratic state as that it is a Jewish one. For whereas neo-conservatives may differ among themselves over the extent and nature of American commitments abroad, they would all agree that at a minimum the United States has a vital interest in the survival of the relatively few democratic states already in existence. Israel, in particular, is seen by neo-conservatives as the most exposed of the democracies - the loneliest outpost of what they insist on calling (in deliberate defiance of the ridicule that has been heaped on the term in recent years) the free world.

Hence, most neo-conservatives would agree with Senator Moynihan's belief that the relentless ideological assault on Israel in the United Nations and elsewhere is more than a matter of calling the legitimacy of Israel itself into question; it also represents by extension a covert attack on the political culture of the United States and of the entire democratic world. In this perspective, the willingness to defend Israel (ideologically and politically no less than through military aid) becomes a subtle measure of our willingness to defend ourselves.

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This is why, in the opinion of many of us, the slippage of support for Israel in Western Europe has gone hand in hand with the fading determination of the Europeans to defend themselves against the spread of Soviet power. And it is also why the continuing tilt in American policy toward the enemies of Israel in the Middle East is so worrisome to neo-conservatives. Does the American reliance on Saudi Arabia mean that we will gradually join in its demand for a Palestinian state on the West Bank ruled by the Palestine Liberation Organization, even though the P.L.O. is sworn to the destruction of the only democratic nation in the region and is in addition bound by hoops of ideology and arms to the Soviet Union? How is it that an Administration so determined to prevent the establishment of another Cuba or Nicaragua in Central America, one of the two vulnerable fronts of the new Soviet offensive, seems so much less determined to prevent an analogous outcome on the other?

Or is it - some of us of the neo-conservative persuasion are beginning to wonder - that there is as little true determination to hold the line in Central America as there seems to be in the Persian Gulf?

During the campaign Mr. Reagan enthusiastically endorsed an article published in Commentary by a leading neo-conservative intellectual, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, entitled ''Dictatorships and Double Standards,'' which sharply criticized the Carter Administration for allowing the Soviet Union, operating through Cuba, to establish yet another outpost in Nicaragua and warning of a similar danger ahead in El Salvador and other Central American countries. In view of the fact that Mr. Reagan then appointed the author of this article as his representative to the United Nations, and given also that his new Secretary of State expressed an equally strong concern over developments in Central America, some of us expected decisive action to be taken. Instead, at the first stirrings of domestic protest over Secretary Haig's stated policies, the Administration grew alarmed and drew back. It thereby forfeited the initiative at a moment when it commanded maximum political support, allowing the opposition both in El Salvador and in the United States to gather much greater strength than it could muster a year before.
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. (The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan two years earlier was justified in the same terms, even without benefit of a Yalta-type agreement.) Yet some of the very same people who invoke Yalta to rationalize Soviet intervention deny the United States the same ''right'' to friendly regimes in its own ''sphere of influence,'' and demand that the United States accept (and even sponsor) Communist regimes in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

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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.

In 1956, when the Hungarians rose up in rebellion against their Soviet masters, the only help the United States could have given was military, and not even the then Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, the great apostle of ''rollback'' and liberation, was willing to court the danger of nuclear war that a military response would have entailed; and so the United States did nothing as Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest. In 1968 when the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, hoping to create a new kind of Communism, ''Communism with a human face,'' went further in the direction of liberalization than the Kremlin considered proper, the United States under Lyndon Johnson again did nothing as Soviet tanks rolled into the streets of Prague. For, again, the only significant response would have been military and again a military response was rightly deemed to be too dangerous.

But when, in 1981, the troops (wearing Polish uniforms but clearly acting at the command of the Soviet Union) were called out against the people of Poland for the crime of having challenged the Communist Party's monopoly of power, there was a significant nonmilitary response available to the United States. As the Committee for the Free World declared in a public statement all we had to do was to stop helping the Soviets and their Polish quislings. This would have entailed such measures as cutting off credits and other forms of economic aid, making an all-out effort to halt the construction of the natural-gas pipeline from Siberia to West Europe and possibly reinstating an embargo on grain and technology.

The purpose would not have been to force the Soviet leaders to relent, but rather to make it harder for them to stabilize the situation in Poland in particular and to deal with their economic problems in general. The purpose, in other words, would have been to make them pay the full price for the consequences of the Communist system they have imposed by domestic force and terror upon their own people and by imperial force and terror upon the peoples of Eastern Europe.
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A policy serving such a purpose would have been fully consistent with President Reagan's ideas about the disintegration of the Soviet empire from within, and it would have carried with it no risk of military confrontation. Yet what did he do? Like Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson in the face of the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, he protested, and like Jimmy Carter in the face of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he announced a program of sanctions. Yet unlike Eisenhower and Johnson, he had options other than verbal denunciations, and although those options were more farreaching in their potential effects than Carter's, he could not bring himself to go even as far as Carter had gone. One remembers easily enough that Carter instituted a grain embargo and a boycott of the Moscow Olympics, but one is hard-pressed even to remember what the Reagan sanctions were.

What one does remember, however, and with never failing amazement, is that the United States Government under Ronald Reagan paid the interest due on the Polish debt only a short time after martial law had been declared in Poland and while it remained fully in effect.

To say that neo-conservatives were disappointed by all this understates the case to an incalculable degree. Walter Laqueur, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University, spoke for most neo-conservatives when he made the mordant observation that even Lenin, who allegedly predicted that one day we capitalist countries would out of the lust for profits compete to sell the Communists the rope with which to hang us, could never have imagined that we would rush to give them the money to buy the rope. George F. Will (who is not a neo-conservative by historical pedigree but who, like two other columnists, William Safire and R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., may be thought of as neo-conservative by doctrinal affinity) put it more succinctly. This, he said, is an Administration that loves commerce more than it loathes Communism.

This love of commerce undoubtedly accounts for a great deal of what the Reagan Administration has done in the field of foreign policy. Or, to make the same point in another way, this is an Administration whose ruling passion is concern for the domestic economy and which conducts foreign policy with that concern chiefly in mind. For example, it was largely because the Saudis might have done something to damage the Reagan economic program that the idea of a strategic consensus had to be shelved when they objected to it. Similarly with the Awacs deal, which was rationalized by a national security argument so weak that one had to conclude it had more to do with the balance of payments than with the balance of power.

With regard to Central America, too, the interests of the domestic economy were given precedence over the interests of national security. Thus the reason the White House in the early days of the Reagan Administration instructed Secretary Haig to tone down his warnings to Nicaragua and Cuba and to stop harping on El Salvador was its fear that attention would be distracted from the President's economic program. And where Poland was concerned, the Administration seemed more worried about hurting a few bankers than about hurting the Soviet empire.
But the love of commerce, while a necessary part of the explanation, is not sufficient to account for the foreign policy of the Reagan Administration. 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.

Detente in this original form was based on the idea that the Soviet Union could be induced to behave moderately and responsibly by means of a structure of incentives and penalties. The incentives were economic benefits; the penalties were the withdrawal of such benefits. Implicit in the arrangement was the willingness of the West to accept an indefinite continuation of Soviet control over its East European empire in exchange for a tacit Soviet willingness to give up any further imperial ambitions, at least in areas where the pursuit of those ambitions might lead to confrontation with the United States.

Neither Nixon nor Kissinger was so naive as to expect that the Soviet leaders would practice such restraint if they thought they could score gains without running any risks. Therefore the successful implementation of the strategy called not only for economic pressures but also for maintaining American military power at levels high enough to deter Soviet adventurism. Beyond this, it required a readiness to threaten the deployment of that power in certain circumstances (as indeed the Nixon Administration did in response to Soviet provocations during the Yom Kippur war of 1973).

Henry Kissinger now argues that the successful implementation of this strategy was frustrated by the impairment of executive authority as a result of Watergate and by the Congressional opposition both to defense spending and the use of American power as a result of Vietnam. But even Kissinger acknowledges that detente in practice has worked to inhibit and restrain the West much more than it has the Soviet Union.

Certainly this has also been the view of Ronald Reagan. Indeed, it would be hard to think of a more consistent and more forceful critic of detente than Mr. Reagan. Yet it is equally hard to think of a term that more accurately describes his own foreign policy. 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. Like Nixon and unlike Carter, President Reagan believes that military power and the nerve to use it are an indispensable foundation of detente. Nor does he accept the notion that the Soviet Union has given up its revolutionary ambitions and has become or is on the way to becoming a status quo power with, as Carter's first Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, once put it, ''dreams and aspirations'' similar to our own for stability and peace.
Nevertheless, what President Reagan's response to the Polish crisis reveals is that he has in practice been following a strategy of helping the Soviet Union stabilize its empire, rather than a strategy aimed at encouraging the breakup of that empire from within. He has said that the disintegration of the Soviet empire may have begun and that the world can take heart from that prospect. Yet instead of adopting tactics that would further the process, such as sending more and better arms to the Afghans who are resisting the Soviet colonization of their country, or providing more political support for the Angolan guerrillas trying to expel the Cuban troops who have helped turn their country into a Soviet satellite -he has allowed himself to be thrown onto the defensive in Central America.

Worse still, he has in effect been acquiescing and even cooperating in Soviet efforts to stabilize the situation in Poland. Even the sanctions he has enforced are to be withdrawn - and replaced by economic aid - when the rigors of martial law in Poland are relaxed. But since this will happen only when the Jaruzelski regime is confident that the forces of democratization have been completely crushed, President Reagan's policy for all practical purposes will reward the Polish quislings for winning the war they have launched against their own people.

Finally, he has been shaky and uncertain on the issue of controlling nuclear weapons. On the one hand, he has responded to the upsurge of antinuclear hysteria both in Europe and the United States by explaining why the hopes of a ''freeze'' or an immediate reduction of all nuclear arsenals are illusory and dangerous. But on the other hand, he has also desperately sought refuge from the political pressures generated by the antinuclear movement in his own version of the same illusory goal. Thus to head off the immediate freeze proposed by Senators Edward Kennedy and Mark Hatfield, he has endorsed the Henry Jackson-John Warner idea of a freeze in the future, after the Soviet margin of superiority has been eliminated and parity restored. Yet accommodating the antinuclear movement in this way is less likely to defuse it than to intensify demands for deeper cuts in his defense budget and for unilateral concessions in arms-control negotiations that will jeopardize his effort to restore parity, let alone the ''margin of safety'' to which he has long been committed.

Many of us, after having voted for Carter in 1976, came to despair of him and his policies, but we did not despair of the country because in Ronald Reagan we thought we had found a political force capable of turning things around. If President Reagan fails, however, where will we find a more promising alternative? For those who see the world as I and so many of my neo-conservative friends do, there is no one else in sight.

This is why we are hoping against hope that the President is not in fact fully aware that the tactics he has adopted serve a very different strategy from the one he professes to believe in. And it is also why we are hoping against hope that he will recognize the discrepancy soon and move to correct it with the same pertinacity he has shown in fighting for his economic program.
As Mr. Reagan has discovered in the course of that fight, it is very hard to turn this country around. The forces of inertia, the political interests, the bureaucratic habits which together mount an enormously powerful resistance to change of any kind have to be confronted and contended with. The objective has to be clear, the determination to pursue it has to be unrelenting and there has to be a willingness to pay the necessary political price. Yet while all this has been characteristic of President Reagan in his attempt to turn the economy around, he has yet to address himself with an equivalent seriousness and energy to the international situation. The inevitable consequence has been a vacuum into which have come pouring all the old ideas and policies against which Ronald Reagan himself has stood for so many years.

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.
A version of this article appears in print on May 2, 1982, Section 6, Page 30 of the National edition with the headline: THE NEO-CONSERVATIVE ANGUISH OVER REAGAN'S FOREIGN POLICY. Order

[old salt]

Yep. Reagan welcomed the support of the NeoCons but he kept them in check. The NeoCons were not shy about voicing their displeasure when Reagan did not go far enough to satisfy them.

[old salt]

After your lengthy cut & paste chop job of my list of facts, you can only respond with snark. ...then you accuse me of gaslighting.

Facts? Right. Your OPINIONS, sure.

I'm the one who handed you one word facts. Big ones like. "Grenada"? What did you come back with? Your toddler "that's revisionist history".

Right. The one. single, solitary. word: GRENADA is "revisionist". GTFO of here with your gaslighting.

How the F is the word "Grenada" revisionist history. Go ahead and explain that one to the class, OS.

You call Reagan a NeoCon. The term wasn't even in use during his term & you clearly don't know what it means.

Nope. Not only do I concede he's not a neo-con, I'm with you: that term doesn't exist at all, and A Fan, TLD, and even the National Review is making stuff up.

I told you: Reagan is a "Sooper-Sparkle-Awesome-Perfect-Hooray". Can we move on now, and start calling him St. Reagan, and tell the forum that Reagan was magic, never did anything wrong, and Iran-Contra was SO cool, nothing to see here?

Can we get Trump back in the White House so you can get back to drooling in your shoes, and telling the forum that everything overseas is perfect and flawless, and brilliant? Oh yeah: REAL insightful and helpful stuff from you where no matter what a D does, it's wrong, and what a R does isn't awesome. Why do you even bother? Total waste of your time to come on here and tell us Biden is bad, and doing it all wrong, yet with Reagan? Oh, he just "did what he had to do".

Brilliant insight. I could get a wiser response from two or three kindergarteners, who hash out their observations in committee.

You just use it to criticize anyone you disagree with. You didn't answer when you first heard the term.

No. I use the term describe nutjobs like you who took our Constitutional concept of letting Congress wage war and empower allies overseas, threw it away, and replaced it with a bunch of policy wonks who will never see a day of combat who use the CIA to decide who to arm, which foreign governments to prop up, and which ones to overthrow.

Not only do you think the above is an awesome way to run the Executive branch, you are 100% unable to see one single solitary downside to playing the above games. You'll NEVER admit it, just like allllll the neo-cons we've been dealing with since WWII ended.

I used the term "porcupine" to describe Taiwan. You seized the term & used it to argue about Ukraine.

Of course you think this way. You desperately want your support of Taiwan to apply to Taiwan, and Taiwan alone.

So you invent this idiocy where you're claiming that Putin's Generals don't care if America "has sent them a few javelins", vs. ongoing armaments and US training over many years.

Pay attention: they wanted to invade BEFORE Ukraine turned into a porcupine. Because unlike you, Putin's generals aren't pretending that they are SO STUPID, that they'd rather invade a relatively unarmed Ukraine, and instead, wait for Trump and Biden

If you're REALLY this incompetent at military strategy after your career? I want my tax dollars back, please. So do my fellow Americans.

Naturally, you're NOT stupid, and would OBVIOUSLY rather invade a country before America arms the sh(t out of them.

.....all this nonsense so you don't have to concede a single point. It's so stupid.

Reagan was not on a NeoCon mission to change the world. He was a pragmatist & realist who acted to protect & maintain US interests. He did what he had to do, not by choice or in pursuit of the NeoCon vision to remake the world in our image.

So did Nixon, Clinton, Bush, Bush, Obama, and Trump.

You don't get this, and I frankly don't care that you don't.

Grenada. Reagan's greatest NeoCon conquest. That's why we stayed there for so long.

The Javelins helped in defending against the Russian invasion, but the overwhelming majority of weaponry the Ukrainians used to repel the invasion was their Soviet legacy stuff, which still makes up the bulk of their weaponry. Since then, we've given Ukraine just enough military aid to not lose.
Ukraine is a long, long way from porcupine status.

You still won't admit when you first heard the term NeoCon & what it was in reference to.

[a fan]

You still won't admit when you first heard the term NeoCon & what it was in reference to.

Because it's immaterial to the discussion, and I already conceded Reagan isn't a neocon.

But I'll tell you what: give me your definition of socialism, and I'm happy to answer.

Now you're stuck. Good luck coming up with your made-up and entirely incorrect definition of socialism that doesn't rope you and your alma mater in.

....I'll wait.......

[a fan]

The Javelins helped in defending against the Russian invasion, but the overwhelming majority of weaponry the Ukrainians used to repel the invasion was their Soviet legacy stuff, which still makes up the bulk of their weaponry. Since then, we've given Ukraine just enough military aid to not lose.
Ukraine is a long, long way from porcupine status.

So what?

You ran away from my point, which is what you do when you agree that I'm right, yet don't want to say it out loud.



No military man would EVER want to sit around and let the US military arm and train a country for years, and THEN invade. And the country getting arms is ENTIRELY immaterial to this simple point.

A military mins is gonna invade it BEFORE a country is fully armed and trained by America. Because: duh. See: Israel or ANY NATO country to reinforce this "duh".


That's why I believe Putin invaded when he did: becuase he may be stupid, but he's not dumb. He invaded BEFORE it was too late, or even just too painful. As we've seen? He should have invaded before Trump gave them even minimal help.


You're welcome to give a different reason for Putin's invasion, and you may be right.

But what you're not allowed to do is tell me that my logic above doesn't perfect sense, and isn't an entirely reasonable explanation for WHEN Putin invaded, not why.

Took us MONTHS to get here, and to get you to cede even one single solitary point to me in what's SUPPOSED to be a discussion between adults. All you had to say was "yeah, that's a decent explanation for why Putin invaded, yet i disagree and think I have a better explanation, and here's why".

Instead? You label me as naive, ridiculous, and any other epithet that came to mind, all because you can't stand having anyone here having better ideas than you. it's tiring, and you didn't use to do this. Now you're this guy who tells everyone here that you have all the answers, and the rest of us are stupid. Even when you're proven to be hilariously wrong....you gaslight, and pretend it never happened.

[old salt]

The Javelins helped in defending against the Russian invasion, but the overwhelming majority of weaponry the Ukrainians used to repel the invasion was their Soviet legacy stuff, which still makes up the bulk of their weaponry. Since then, we've given Ukraine just enough military aid to not lose.
Ukraine is a long, long way from porcupine status.

So what?

You ran away from my point, which is what you do when you agree that I'm right, yet don't want to say it out loud.
No military man would EVER want to sit around and let the US military arm and train a country for years, and THEN invade. And the country getting arms is ENTIRELY immaterial to this simple point.

A military mins is gonna invade it BEFORE a country is fully armed and trained by America. Because: duh. See: Israel or ANY NATO country to reinforce this "duh".


That's why I believe Putin invaded when he did: becuase he may be stupid, but he's not dumb. He invaded BEFORE it was too late, or even just too painful. As we've seen? He should have invaded before Trump gave them even minimal help.


You're welcome to give a different reason for Putin's invasion, and you may be right.

But what you're not allowed to do is tell me that my logic above doesn't perfect sense, and isn't an entirely reasonable explanation for WHEN Putin invaded, not why.

Took us MONTHS to get here, and to get you to cede even one single solitary point to me in what's SUPPOSED to be a discussion between adults. All you had to say was "yeah, that's a decent explanation for why Putin invaded, yet i disagree and think I have a better explanation, and here's why".

Instead? You label me as naive, ridiculous, and any other epithet that came to mind, all because you can't stand having anyone here having better ideas than you. it's tiring, and you didn't use to do this. Now you're this guy who tells everyone here that you have all the answers, and the rest of us are stupid. Even when you're proven to be hilariously wrong....you gaslight, and pretend it never happened.

I don't even understand what you are trying to say. There was no guarantee that Biden was going to continue to arm Ukraine. He advocated against it when he was VP. He said he'd tolerate a limited incursion & offered to evac Zelensky, family & govt to exile. Putin invaded when the Minsk process fell apart, Zelensky was elected & he vowed to take Ukraine into NATO.

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topi ... 0in%20NATO.
In June 2017, the Ukrainian Parliament adopted legislation reinstating membership in NATO as a strategic foreign and security policy objective. In 2019, a corresponding amendment to Ukraine's Constitution entered into force.
In September 2020, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy approved Ukraine's new National Security Strategy, which provides for the development of the distinctive partnership with NATO with the aim of membership in NATO.

To answer (again) your question about socialism, I linked an article quoting self-proclaimed Dem Socialists like AOC & other squad members.
I said that was good enough for me. Did you bother to read it ?
This is my final answer --> https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/8 ... acobin-dsa