Conservative Enough? Ronald Reagan in the Age of Détente

As Ronald Reagan positioned himself on the national stage in the 1970s, he personified the New Right critique of American foreign policy, hammering the moderate and conciliatory approaches that characterized Nixon, Ford, and Carter’s administrations. But after he won the presidency in 1981, his support among ideological conservatives slowly deflated, and he encountered increasingly public criticism that his administration—particularly his foreign policy—was “not conservative enough.” On the anniversary of his first year as president, old-line conservative and New Right leaders issued a joint-critique of Reagan that accused him of continuing to pursue the “illusions of détente,” and refusing to cleanse the “relics of the Kissinger era and the Carter administration” from the State Department. Claiming that he “loves commerce more than he loathes Communism,” conservative critics argued that Reagan had either compromised his conservative principles or did not exercise control over his own foreign policy. Either way, in failing to surround himself with sufficiently ideological conservatives, they maintained that he had become too moderate, too unwilling to intervene militarily or increase sanctions when necessary. By the 1984 election, they threatened to discontinue their support and even run a “more vigorous conservative challenger” if he refused to step up and assert American power internationally.

In this paper, I will discuss the conservative defection from Reagan’s camp, linking it with earlier misgivings expressed during the 1970s within the heterogeneous conservative movement over the depth of Reagan’s conservatism and the internal debate within the movement over whether he could be trusted to take a hard line on American foreign policy. This research connects the conservative incongruity on foreign policy in the 1980s to the conservative discontent with Nixon and Ford’s détente model in the prior decade.