I can speak best about Reagan's foreign policy, so that's what I'm going to stick to for the most part. As a sidenote, my response is going to be by and large an amalgamation of previous questions I've answered regarding Reagan, so there will be some overlap. This will be a series of posts that will reflect on the prominent historical arguments about Reagan's presidency, particularly through the lens of the two subjects I am most well versed in--Reagan's Cold War foreign policy and his counter-terorism policy. My post on Reagan's role in the Cold War is generally just going to be a summary of what historians have argued. In my last post, I'll take a more activist stance, attempting to refute the popular notion that Reagan's counter-terrorism policy was one of the administration's greatest successes. I'll begin, though, with a general summary on Reagan's legacy, taken from a previous question asked on this sub-reddit.

Reagan's Legacy: An Overview

Reagan is one of the "great" presidents from which you can really kind of define an era around him. I'm not saying his policies were good, but I am saying that he was highly influential. Sean Wilentz, who is perhaps the most prominent political historian in the United States today, argues that Reagan deserves to be listed among Jefferson, Jackson, and the Roosevelts as one of the most influential presidents in history. This is particularly notable because of Wilentz's self-professed liberalism. (If you can, check out his book, The Age of Reagan. It, along with Lou Cannon's Role of a Lifetime are the most even-handed, analytically thorough accounts about the Reagan era.)

To a large degree, Reagan is so mythologized by both conservatives and liberals because he embodied the transition into a new era of politics for the United States, an era in which liberalism was dying and a more hard-line form of conservatism was rising. If the 1940s-1970s were the heyday of American liberalism, the 1980s-2000s was the heyday of American conservatism. Even Bill Clinton took many of his economic ideas from Reagan. We see this transition from liberalism to conservatism in the mid-1970s. Contemporary Republicans like Nixon and Ford were, in comparison to Reagan, moderates. Moderate republicans by the 1970s had eschewed for the most part their segregationist beliefs and their foreign policy focused on detente, or the lessening of tensions with the Soviet Union. Hard-line conservatives, as part of what is called the New Right, viewed moderate Republicans as too weak on both domestic and foreign policy issues. This New Right movement arose largely for the same reasons as the New Left in the 1960s. Specifically, it was a counter-cultural revolution against the gains made by the New Left. It was also, perhaps above all, an attack against the New Deal liberalism espoused by FDR, Kennedy, and Johnson who each instituted sweeping federal programs over civil rights, women's rights, and welfare. This is probably why you see liberals vilify Reagan so much.

The mythology of Reagan also comes from his foreign policy outlook. Throughout the 1970s, it seemed to Americans that detente was simply not working, as the Soviet Union made gains throughout the Third World. Couple that with the embarrassments of the Vietnam War, the Iran Hostage Crisis, and a series of oil shocks brought about by OPEC in the 1970s, and Americans quickly arrived at the notion that the U.S. had become weak. Reagan wanted to reverse that notion.

The election of Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980 appeared to usher in a new, more assertive era of American foreign policy. In his acceptance speech as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 1980, Reagan urged Americans of the need to “recapture our destiny” by rejecting the “weakness, indecision, mediocrity, and incompetence” of President Jimmy Carter. Two months later, during a speech delivered at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention, Reagan put forth a plan in which the United States could stop its moral, political, and military decline and become a respected superpower once again. Stressing that “promoting the general welfare and providing for the common defense” were “one and the same,” Reagan emphasized the need to drastically increase American military power. The only way to ensure American security toward the international Communist threat would be to “convince them that they could not win at war.”

Despite Reagan's bellicose rhetoric, this desire to reclaim American global prestige through a militaristic foreign policy didn't really pan out. In 1982, Reagan sent U.S. Marines to Lebanon in the midst of a civil war. The goal was ultimately to keep the peace, although there wasn't any peace to keep. A year after the Marines arrived in Lebanon, a truck bomb went off at the Marine Barracks at Beirut International Airport and killed 241 Americans. In the aftermath of the attack, the press brutally criticized Reagan, arguing that he didn't understand the nature of the increasingly multi-polar international order and that the U.S. no longer had the capabilities to assert itself militarily abroad. (Reagan's encounter with Islamic terrorism is the subject of my Master's thesis and I'm taking this from my own work. If you'd like sources let me know). The criticism Reagan faced for his policies in Beirut--and in Grenada in late 1983--eventually led to a turn away from overt militarism and toward covert support for rebel groups. This "Reagan reversal" soon laid the foundation for what would become the Iran-Contra affair, in which the administration illegally provided arms to Iran in order to free American hostages taken in Lebanon. The money gained from these arms transactions were then used by the administration to funnel money to the Nicaraguan contras, another illegal action. Obviously, Reagan’s foreign policy initiatives didn’t exactly square with his overly-patriotic, aggressive rhetoric. This disparity is really important to your question, I believe, and gets at the heart of how Reagan became so mythologized by conservatives. Many conservatives of today look at Reagan’s rhetoric, not his policies. They see him as a president that lifted the United States out of a freefall--both domestically and internationally--that began with Nixon and became exacerbated under Jimmy Carter. Many liberals, on the other hand, see Reagan as the embodiment of everything that is wrong with American society—arrogance, elitism, hypocrisy, and militarism. Which side is correct? Perhaps both, at least to an extent.