really awful

4/7/2014 6:56:12 PM

I'm willing to forgive a lot of foreign policy sins when those sins helped bring about the end of the Cold War. Our generation did not grow up with the very real fear of nuclear war nor a Soviet Union that seemed just as powerful as we were and did much, much more horrible things in pursuit of its goals. Ronald Reagan went a long way to ending that, and he did it without massive military conflict.

Iran-Contra -- As a crime, bad, but as a foreign policy move, actually kind of clever.

Central/South America -- Bad, but preferable to Soviet domination. Yeah, in retrospect our meddling there probably wasn't necessary to win the Cold War, but I can understand how it didn't look that way at the time.

Iran/Iraq War -- You've got two murdering assholes fighting each other. One of them explicitly hates us. We side with the other. Do people give FDR shit for allying with Stalin against Hitler?

Afghanistan -- This was fucking brilliant foreign policy that helped bring down our most powerful enemy without putting American lives at risk. The fuck ups happened over the subsequent decade and a half when we ignored Afghanistan and alienated them into thinking Osama would be a good pal.

Apartheid -- OK, bad, but not "enough said." It's easy now to think of Mandela as this sweet old peace loving man, but before he got arrested he was running around Africa, buddying up to some unsavory characters, getting support and training for the paramilitary/terrorist wing of the ANC, which had a Soviet bias in a region with Cuban-backed communist insurgencies.

Reagan's support for the regime is still unquestionably bad and, to my mind, the great black mark of his foreign policy record, but "enough said" makes it sound like he was just pro-white-supremacist.

And aside from all of that, I'm not sure it's a fair assessment that I'm trying to "crown" Reagan. Being better than Jimmy Carter at something barely deserves a pat on the back, let alone a crown.

4/8/2014 4:03:13 AM

wow, that's some terrible revisionist history right there

4/8/2014 8:33:05 AM

It's definitely true that I don't view the world through the communist boogeyman lens that was so prevalent at that time, and I think you are right, that would make a significant difference in how I view Reagan.

Its just that, from my modern perspective, I can draw a line from today's chest-beating, the ends justify the means, intelligence culture, which is the hallmark of modern foreign policy, directly to Reagan. Not so with Carter.

4/8/2014 8:52:57 AM

Quite a turn in this thread. First some far lefty decides to hate on Bush because he found a passionate hobby. And now people are saying Carter is a better president than Reagan. WTF

4/8/2014 10:06:42 AM

Rappin' Ronnie Reagan
http://vimeo.com/10985767

Saw this on my feed today


[Edited on April 8, 2014 at 10:17 AM. Reason : way too big]

4/8/2014 10:12:05 AM

That is a LOT of apologizing for Reagan there.

Every single one of those issues, except for apartheid, are triggers or causes for our biggest foreign policy issues today. The only thing it seems Reagan's "missteps" didn't help lead to are North Korea.

But our ongoing conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, which lead to our atrocious drone strike policies in Pakistan (although this is entirely on Bush and Obama--they didn't HAVE to go this route-- but we may not have been in this conflict not for reagan).

I don't excuse anyone for doing what "seemed right at the time" because the mid 80s were well enough into history to KNOW the side effects of those actions weren't going to be trivial. We already have another hundred years worth of enemies in Pakistan because of the drone strikes, this policy should have ended a LONG time ago, and the damage is done. Obama gets no credit for this because it "seemed right."

Carter knew this concept.

4/8/2014 1:07:39 PM

even war hawks shouldn't be happy with Reagan, the guy invaded Grenada because Marines were bombed in Lebanon

4/8/2014 1:16:56 PM

W. and Clinton were chilling last night




[Edited on April 8, 2014 at 1:24 PM. Reason : ]

4/8/2014 1:22:02 PM

this thread is about to get good:

1) dtownral is about to pretend to be smarter than GrumpyGOP, which hopefully will be the end of him in TSB

2) carter is only being spoken highly of here because comparisons between him and obama are pretty regular at this point

"well if we cant make obama NOT look like carter then we will just make carter look GOOD."

fucking simpletons.

4/8/2014 1:29:31 PM

you really sound like a very angry person

4/8/2014 1:32:49 PM

^^your continuing crush on me is adorable

[Edited on April 8, 2014 at 1:33 PM. Reason : ^accurate]

4/8/2014 1:33:00 PM

im flattered thats your go-to response whenever you have nothing else to say to me.

its becoming so common!

looks like i win.

4/8/2014 1:38:27 PM

Quote :

" Not so with Carter."

Because we went to great lengths to purge Carter's legacy from the office. That should tell you something right there.

Quote :

"I don't excuse anyone for doing what "seemed right at the time" because the mid 80s were well enough into history to KNOW the side effects of those actions weren't going to be trivial. "

Knowing that there would be side effects is not the same as knowing what those side effects would be. American understanding of the Muslim and Arab world then was even weaker than it is now, and it's plenty weak now. It seems a little bit silly to me to expect that any entity should be able to predict, 10 or 20 years in advance, anything like 9/11. The Iraq Wars I'm more inclined to give you, we knew Saddam was an asshole, but even so...FDR and Truman knew pretty early that the postwar balance with Stalin would be scary. A lot scarier than all the terrorist organizations in the world today, combined. They sent him guns and help anyway to deal with the most immediate threat. Reagan did fundamentally the same thing. Why is everyone blaming him for our problems today? You want to draw a straight line to the modern world's woes, you can start with Gavrilo Princip.

Reagan was faced with what appeared to be an existential crisis -- with what the Soviets had good reason to present as an existential crisis. He fixed that problem, something which FDR, Truman, Ike, JFK, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and certainly Carter had failed to do.

And let's look at some of these guys, shall we? Everyone loves JFK, and I will agree that he handled the missile crisis well, but otherwise he was a foreign policy nitwit who ensured Castro's enduring power and helped get us into Vietnam, a policy enthusiastically expanded by that other favorite of the left, Johnson. Here are two guys who got us into a war we couldn't win. Say what you will about Reagan, he at least picked wars that were slam dunks from a military perspective.

4/8/2014 2:46:09 PM

Quote :

"Because we went to great lengths to purge Carter's legacy from the office. That should tell you something right there."

Who is we? The only people purging his legacy were the war-mongers, CIA directors, and CFR d-bags because he reigned their bullshit in. These are the same folks (in general) propagating the torture culture and above-the-law mindset of the intelligence community today.

I'm also a little confused as to whether Reagan single-handedly collapsed the USSR or if communism is inherently unsustainable and it collapsed in on itself. I've heard folks claim both.

4/8/2014 4:00:36 PM

Quote :

"I'm also a little confused as to whether Reagan single-handedly collapsed the USSR or if communism is inherently unsustainable and it collapsed in on itself."

Haha. This is a good line of argument and I can appreciate that, but I can also happily say "Both."

Communism is unsustainable and unstable and doomed to collapse with the humans we currently have at our disposal. What the Reagan/Bush administrations did was to make sure that the collapse was primarily inward-focused (rather than some death throes lashing out at other people) and for making it happen fast. And though I wouldn't say anybody did anything "single-handedly," I would say that Carter's contribution was negligible -- was, indeed, less than Nixon's, who brought over China and further isolated the USSR. And even I'll agree Nixon was an ass.

Quote :

"Who is we?"

The nearly 44,000,000 people who voted for Reagan compared to 35,500,000 for Carter. That 44 million encompassing a majority in every state except Georgia (I'll give Carter that, at least he carried his home state), Hawaii, Maryland, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and West Virginia. These amounted to a total of less than 10% of electoral votes.

Now, maybe the majority of Americans alive at the time were war mongers, CIA directors (though I should point out that Carter was a big fan of using the CIA for ops and I believe I read he used an unprecedented number of them), and CFR douchebags, but if so...sorry, it's democracy.

4/8/2014 6:23:57 PM

Mmm, I wouldn't exactly say that voting for someone else means you want to "purge" the incumbents legacy. Of course, you are also Leaving out the epic stagflation that Carter's administration was fighting against. Plenty of people would agree that it had more to do with Reagan's landslide than Carter's foreign policy screw ups.

4/8/2014 7:35:42 PM

You elect a guy whose whole platform is, "I will be the opposite of Jimmy Carter," I call that purging him. Also the part where we spent the subsequent 34 years pointing out what a terrible president he was, even if it was with the nice "He's a much better man than a president" line or the "he's done really good work since being president one." Honestly, until this thread I had never encountered a person who made any effort whatsoever to defend the presidency of Jimmy Carter. But I digress. The word "purge" is not central to my ideas here, so if it will prevent you from continuing a semantic discussion we can replace it with "epic, nearly unprecedented ass-whooping"

And sure, the economy is always a bigger decider than foreign policy. Carter was bad at both.

4/9/2014 3:53:41 AM

If the election happened today, I'd choose Carter every time (on much more than foreign policy too).

When you unwrap the "legend of Reagan," there are a few really great achievements (many he is unfairly credited with, that happens to a lot of presidents though) and a whole lot of bad IMO.

-he shoulda been impeached after Iran-Contra
-he shoulda been in a nursing home by his second term



[Edited on April 9, 2014 at 6:43 AM. Reason : History would be so much different, if only]

4/9/2014 6:18:39 AM

Well, we won't get anywhere arguing counterfactuals. I will rest content in the certainty that if you polled Americans today -- particularly those who remember Carter's term -- they'd be on my side.

4/9/2014 8:57:13 PM

Quote :

"particularly those who remember Carter's term"

That demographic fits perfectly with your user name


But you're right, this is probably an "agree to disagree" moment.

4/9/2014 10:24:09 PM