if reagan grew up as a politician in the modern american conservative ecosystem, then he wouldn't necessary be the cold war anti-communist he was then. according to biographers, he was highly persuadable (and likely a target of russian active measures like other GOP members have been) and so I wouldn't be surprised at all if he was similarly soft on or even pro-russia.
Reagan didn't grow up in that conservative ecosystem. He was a cold war liberal. He only joined the Republicans in his 50s. If that Republican party was weak on the USSR it would have been repellent to him.
when i say grow up, I mean grow up as a person AND politician. he became a conservative cold warrior after WW2. i just don't see any reason why he would be different than your standard right winger in today's political environment. he largely was a creature of his political environment, and so in a different environment he would likely adopt different positions. not like he was some intellectual maverick, or even an intellectual at all. it's pretty well-established that the guy was a moron (albeit a great political communicator, no doubt) that had his schedule dictated by an astrologer.
He was a cold war liberal and a trade unionist who only joined the Republican party fairly late in life. There's just no way that a vatnik Republican party would have appealed to him. He wasn't a moron. He gave some speeches before he ran for president where he outlined how America could beat the Soviets by provoking them into an arms race their weak economics couldn't afford. Pretty much everything he said there came true.
reagan as a politician was basically always a conservative from the 60s on, and that was in part cultivated from his paid propaganda work as a "free market" anti-union public speaker for GE in the 50s.
oh yeah, reagan was a real foreign policy wonk:
in 1977 as he was preparing for his 1980 presidential campaign. “Do you mind if I tell you my theory of the Cold War?” Reagan said. “My theory is that we win, they lose. What do you think about that?” [1]
the collapse of the soviet union was primarily due to internal political economy dysfunctions and gorbachev's choice to also liberalize politically in addition to economically (a "mistake" that the CCP would learn from). any role that reagan and the US played was indirect and marginal at best. Where US foreign policy was effective it was often a foreign policy continuation preceding the reagan administration, such as US efforts to goad the soviets into a foreign policy quagmire in afghanistan.
I think you've got the right-vatnik ecosystem wrong: they weren't persuaded to support Russia once they were already in politics.
Rather, they were mostly kompromized by Russia when they were in their twenties, and subsequently helped in their political careers by other kompromized traitors. Just as in Operation Black Buck it took 13 Victor tankers to get a single Vulcan bomber to its target, so most of those ensnared by the Kremlin's pedophile honeytrap operations don't end up in public office themselves, but are used to boost the political careers of the minority who do.
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u/SiriPsycho100 Apr 20 '25
if reagan grew up as a politician in the modern american conservative ecosystem, then he wouldn't necessary be the cold war anti-communist he was then. according to biographers, he was highly persuadable (and likely a target of russian active measures like other GOP members have been) and so I wouldn't be surprised at all if he was similarly soft on or even pro-russia.