Nikki Haley is accusing Donald Trump of “trying to buddy up with dictators.”
The former president has been accused time and again by both Democrats, such as President Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, and hawkish Republicans, such as Haley, of being too friendly toward authoritarian regimes such as Russia and North Korea.
The same criticism was leveled at Ronald Reagan.
When Reagan decided to meet with Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, Republican Rep. Newt Gingrich slammed the president’s “weak policies” and called it “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.” (Where else have we heard that?)
Obviously, Gingrich was fantastically wrong.
Conservative activist Howard Phillips said back then that Reagan was ”fronting as a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda.” Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz called Reagan’s foreign policy “appeasement.”
Many today might consider Reagan’s diplomatic efforts to reduce nuclear weapons his greatest legacy.
Reagan was beloved by most of the Right and simply ignored his hawkish critics. Trump seems to be in the same position within his party and has similar impulses regarding foreign policy.
Whereas Haley seems to subscribe to the black-and-white George W. Bush slogan, “You’re either with us or against,” that wrought so much devastation in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond, Trump’s inclinations appear closer to Reagan’s.
For starters, when Trump is ever asked about the Ukraine-Russia or Israel-Hamas conflicts, one of the first things he says is that they would have never happened if he were still in the White House. He has even claimed he would end Russia’s war on Ukraine within 24 hours.
Such claims might be impossible, just Trump being Trump. But if Biden’s position for months was to continue sending U.S. aid to Ukraine, and Haley’s was that Biden wasn’t doing enough, Trump went in the exact opposite direction.
When asked last year if Russian President Vladimir Putin was a “war criminal,” as GOP candidates Haley and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) had already declared, Trump replied, “If you say he’s a war criminal, it’s going to be a lot tougher to make a deal to get this thing stopped.”
Trump said of Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, “They both have weaknesses, and they both have strengths, and within 24 hours, that war will be settled. It’ll be over. It’ll be absolutely over.”
No one knows if this could be true. Nor could Reagan have predicted the outcomes of his peace talks, but he thought it was the right path. Thankfully.
Haley says of Trump and dictators today, “When you’ve got wars all over the world now and the instability that we have, our goal is to prevent war, and we can’t do that by trying to buddy up with them.”
Actually, Haley, that’s exactly how Reagan prevented the Cold War from becoming a hot one.
“To jaw-jaw is better than to war-war,” Winston Churchill famously said.
When Trump met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in 2019, becoming the first sitting U.S. president to do so, his critics in both parties wailed. How dare he buddy up to such a ruthless authoritarian?
There’s absolutely no defending that brutal regime and Kim’s evil. But given what North Korea is, where do things stand for American foreign policy and the world order?
Politico reported in December that if Trump is reelected, he’s “considering a plan to let the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea keep its nuclear weapons and offer its regime financial incentives to stop making new bombs, according to three people briefed on his thinking.”
The story added, “The move would mark a sharp departure from his past stance on the issue and a shift toward accommodating the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, with whom Trump developed an unusually friendly relationship during his time in office.”
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Responsible Statecraft’s Doug Bandow observed, “Donald Trump’s foreign policy mistakes were many, but on the North’s nuclear challenge he has been farsighted compared to most foreign policy analysts. That continues with his reported willingness to deal with the DPRK as it is, not how everyone wishes it were. North Korea is a nuclear state. It is time to confront that reality.”
Time indeed. You can scream about buddying up to dictators, or you can pursue realpolitik diplomacy. See which one brings more peace. Ronald Reagan saw.
Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.