When President Ronald Reagan led America throughout most of the 1980s, his administration was fond of remarking that it had not lost territory to the Soviet Union or its communist surrogates.
Reagan countered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by financing the guerrilla forces that turned what was supposed to be a simple regime restoration into a miserable decade-long occupation that became for the USSR what Vietnam turned out to be for the United States.
In Central America, Reagan undermined the brutal Sandinista regime in Nicaragua by supporting the anti-communist contras and starving the regime of credibility.
That is what is so reassuring about Secretary of War Pete Hegseth outlining the Trump administration’s emerging national defense strategy at the Reagan National Defense Forum. For Hegseth to channel Reagan as his inspiration for military preparedness is to demand that America promulgate a defense posture that not only emphasizes peace through strength but articulates a policy that is actually in sync with American interests and not globalist whims.
That is precisely what Hegseth was alluding to when he dismissed the "so-called Republican hawks" who are incapable of assessing when and where American military resources should be deployed and whether they should be deployed at all.
For President Donald Trump’s critics, even within the MAGA movement, who wonder if the president has lost his way on eschewing endless foreign wars that devour American lives and capital, Hegseth is defining just how Trump "has inherited and restored President Reagan's powerful but focused and realistic approach to national defense."
Reagan’s approach to defense was constructed on the objectives of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger – dubbed the Weinberger Doctrine – that America should only be sending troops to foreign lands if it was in line with American interests and if the objective was clear and winnable and if diplomacy had failed.
It seems like such common sense, and it was. It’s not so difficult to imagine the American psyche in 1981 when Reagan was inaugurated. America had barely exited Vietnam in the most humiliating of withdrawals; the US had literally abandoned its embassy in Saigon with overloaded helicopters. It was a scene that looked terribly familiar decades later when then-President Joe Biden evacuated US troops from Afghanistan and left billions of dollars in arms for the Taliban to confiscate.
Biden, of course, was a one-term president who left America in tatters from an incoherent defense policy to a horribly determined immigration policy that literally created an open border and an invasion by tens of millions of illegals, criminals and terrorists.
Reagan had defeated another one-term president in the 1980 presidential election. President Jimmy Carter may be remembered as a man who brokered peace in the Middle East but by the time he left the presidency, America was not only seen as an economic basketcase and the home of stagflation but also as a hapless and has been military power that couldn’t defeat North Vietnam because its mission in Southeast Asia violated most of the tenets of the Weinberger Doctrine. Neither the administrations of President Lyndon Johnson or President Richard Nixon had any real plan to win the war but just to prolong it. There was never any clear exit strategy in Vietnam, probably because the entrance strategy was based on the false flag of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, where an enemy attack was fabricated.
Carter is also remembered for the Iranian hostage crisis, where not only 52 American embassy staff but the entire country were held captive by militants who seemed to advertise how febrile American resolve had become. America looked and felt helpless and inadequate.
In eight glorious years, Reagan canceled American depression and defeatism with sound economic policy and a defense strategy that was stunningly realistic and enormously effective. Reagan did not invade Nicaragua but he contained the Soviet threat there, in keeping with the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary. He did invade Grenada, and the operation was effectively accomplished in days. Throughout the world, Reagan’s military operations were largely surgical strikes that prevented costly military commitments and brought only success.
And as Reagan refashioned US military policy and rebuilt the armed forces, he created a standard that the Soviets were unable to replicate. In the process, Reagan won the Cold War and forced the imploding Soviet Union to the nuclear arms negotiating table.
Trump’s first term as president was marked by Reaganesque military prowess, never being cavalier about sending troops into war but carefully choosing his altercations and ensuring that America’s military was not foolishly employed in operations that seem comprehensible at the beginning but soon begin to shatter as the body bags return home. His order to strike Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani was one such example of this kind of precision attack.
So as much as Hegseth is drumming the legacy of Ronald Reagan, he is also promoting a truly America First military strategy that demands to know “What’s in it for the United States” before one soldier, sailor, marine or airman perishes in an ill-conceived foreign war.
It is too easy to start a war. It is never easy to finish one and that is why you have to be sure about whether conflict advances your interests or those of somebody else.
In Hegseth’s world, war had better make an abundance of sense and satisfy the necessary criteria – or it is not worth pursuing at all.
