FROM MARCH 2016
Unlike the fear of Islam, which is a rational response to Islamist violence across the world, the fear of Donald Trump really is a phobia. There is a precedent for this: the panicked Reaganphobia that preceded the 1980 election. We heard that Ronald Reagan was a member of the John Birch Society—whose essential creed was “Better Dead Than Red.” He therefore rejected “mutual assured destruction,” the bedrock strategy of the liberal consensus to guarantee coexistence by nuclear deterrence. Reagan, it was said, believed in “counterforce,” that is in a disarming first strike to win a nuclear war.
Mr. Trump irritates many with his vulgarities but Reagan was insistently depicted as a threat to human survival, so that most of the columnists and editorial writers of the quality press reluctantly called for Jimmy Carter’s re-election, despite the clamorous failures of his hopelessly irresolute administration. In Europe there was no reluctance. In London, Paris and Bonn, then the capital of West Germany, the re-election of Jimmy Carter was seen as a necessity to keep the bomb-thrower Reagan out of the White House, and well away from the nuclear button.
So many eminent people, including W. Averell Harriman, adviser to five U.S. presidents and chief negotiator of the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, asserted that Reagan wanted to start a nuclear war that the KGB went on maximum alert from inauguration day for more than two years, forcing its officers around the world to take shifts on 24-hour watches of all U.S. strategic air bases to detect the telltale simultaneous launchings of a nuclear first strike.
In 1983, two years into his first term, Reagan did send U.S. troops into action to fight a war . . . in tiny Grenada, whose 133 square miles was the only territory that Reagan invaded in eight years. As for nuclear weapons, Reagan horrified his advisers at the 1986 Reykjavik Summit with Mikhail Gorbachev with his eagerness for nuclear disarmament, thereby disclosing that he didn’t even believe in strike-back, let alone in attacking first. He wanted ballistic-missile defenses, not ballistic missiles.
Mr. Trump’s lack of good manners may be disconcerting, but as president his foreign policies are unlikely to deviate from standard conservative norms. He would only disappoint those who believe that the U.S. should send troops to Syria to somehow end a barbaric civil war, or send troops to Libya to miraculously disarm militias, or send troops back to Iraq to preserve its Iran-dominated government, or send more troops back to Afghanistan where the Taliban are winning because of the government’s incapacity and corruption.
President Trump would do none of the above. He will send troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq, while refusing to intervene in Libya or Syria, or anywhere else in the Muslim world, where U.S. troops are invariably attacked by those they are seeking to protect. Real conservatives want to conserve blood and treasure, not expend them lavishly to pursue ambitious political schemes.
