On Tuesday, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Fox News host Sean Hannity how he thought the United States should respond to a report that a Russian jet had collided with a U.S. drone sending it into the Black Sea.
It was typical Graham. “We should hold them accountable, and say that if you ever get near another U.S. jet flying in international waters, your airplane will be shot down,” Graham spat out, seemingly very eager to start World War III.
The reliably hawkish senator then behaved as if Ronald Reagan would have done the same. “What would Ronald Reagan do right now?” Graham asked. “He would start shooting Russian planes down if they were threatening our assets.”
“American foreign policy is in free fall,” Graham insisted.
He was right about that last part. American foreign policy is in free fall, but only to the degree that anyone in charge listens to people with the foreign policy views of Lindsey Graham.
Regarding Reagan and Reaganism as it pertains to foreign policy, Clinton era neocon-friendly politicians and pundits have long tried to co-opt the former president to promote their own hawkish agendas. John "100 years in Iraq" McCain used to say he represented the party of Reagan over that peacenik Rand Paul. Just last week, after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called the Ukraine conflict a “territorial dispute” that America shouldn’t be writing a blank check for, Liz Cheney shot back, “DeSantis is wrong and seems to have forgotten the lessons of Ronald Reagan.”
Perhaps it is Mrs. Cheney who has forgotten the lessons of Reagan.
Graham seems to have forgotten. Yes it is true that Reagan ordered airstrikes on Libya in 1986 but that was because he blamed the terrorist bombing of a German discotheque in which American soldiers were killed on Libyan president Muammar Qaddafi.
A head of state ordering a hit that killed and maimed many is slightly different than a downed drone, accidental or not.
But on Reagan’s specific policies toward Russia, his greatest foreign policy legacy was doing precisely what Graham and other hawks insist President Joe Biden never do — sit down with the Russian president and find diplomatic solutions. When Reagan first met with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, Republican Rep. Newt Gingrich said it was “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.”
As hawks often do, Graham likes to brandish the Munich analogy too.
But Graham’s use of Reagan for his own apparent bloodlust is even more ridiculous than that. Whereas Graham seems eager to start a war with a major nuclear power, Reagan came to fear the prospect of nuclear armageddon and many attribute his willingness to hold diplomatic talks to that concern.
When 1983 movie "The Day After" premiered on prime time television, Reagan wrote in his diary on Oct. 10 1983, “I ran the tape of the movie ABC is running on the air on Nov. 20. It’s called The Day After. It has Lawrence, Kansas wiped out in a nuclear war with Russia. It is powerfully done, all $7 million worth.”
Reagan was reportedly depressed by the movie and some biographers believe it fueled his desire to end nuclear proliferation.
We can’t speak for a fact as to what Reagan would do in 2023 about a U.S. drone getting hit by an Russian jet, but it’s hard to imagine a president so afraid of nuclear escalation trying to start a nuclear war over it. That’s not something any Western leader, past or present, should be reckless and stupid — and odious! — enough to do. It’s something no sane member of Congress or U.S. senator should ever suggest America do.
Yet, here we are.
