Ronald Reagan

While the crises Ronald Reagan inherited from his predecessors of Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford came nowhere close to the severity of the crises inherited by presidents like Zachary Taylor, James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and other presidents, he was elected to the helm of president during a difficult time. Tensions with the Soviet Union, which had been declining due to the detente policies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, were flaring up to its attack on Afghanistan. A horrific hydra of unemployment and inflation had decimated the economy. And his period as president-elect was marked by the closing days of the Iran Hostage Crisis, in which dozens of Americans were being held by zealots of the Iranian Revolution, outraged by Carter's decision to let the unpopular shah seek cancer treatment in the US. While the Iran Hostage Crisis ended with the Algiers Accords just before Reagan actually entered office, the stagflation crisis and tensions with Moscow were ongoing.

Reagan's first actions in office were imbued with the goal of tacking stagflation. Despite the cultural tendency to pit Carter and Reagan as total opposites, their methods to resolve stagflation were quite similar. Both instituted programs of deregulation and cut taxes in an attempt to boost production. And yet, Carter is shamed by the population for his supposed failure to quell stagflation, while Reagan is praised for supposedly solving the issue. If Carter gets no credit for the end of stagflation, neither should Reagan. Furthermore, Reagan dismantled necessary environmental regulations. Meanwhile, Carter lifted restrictions that legitimately served no real purpose. While Reagan allowed corporations dominated by lustful cupidity to disregard the most vital rules, Carter actually expanded liberty by removing such absurd laws as those allowing the government to dictate when plane flights began.

Stagflation was no longer an issue by 1982. However, Soviet troops were still present in Afghanistan by this period, and the Soviet leader who took office that year, Yuri Andropov, was further fanning the flames of geopolitical rivalry by canceling arms limitation talks and shooting down planes containing US Senators. The American economy was much better, but relations with the Soviet Union were worse than they had been in over a decade. Andropov died in February of 1984, being replaced by Konstantin Chernenko. Chernenko died a little over a year later on March 10, 1985, and was succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev. Fortunately, Soviet-American relations improved from here. Reagan gets a lot of praise for these reduced tensions. But in reality, relations would have continued to strain had Chernenko been replaced by another hawk. Gorbachev's progressivism and willingness to work with countries outside Soviet influence are what allowed for these developments. Reagan deserves very little credit.

Outside of his minimal role in improving Soviet-American relations throughout the late 1980s, Reagan's strategy regarding the Cold War was extremely flawed. In 1983, he manufactured an excuse about American medical students in Grenada - then ruled by a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship - to invade the country and topple its government. Of course, the government that existed in Grenada at the time was horrible, but Reagan's imperialist endeavors here were beyond his actual responsibility. In my view, it's similar to the Iraq War.

Actually, Reagan and George W. Bush share several other similarities. Both conducted brutal bombing campaigns in the Middle East. In Bush's case, the aforementioned Iraq was invaded on a bed of lies desperately attempting to justify the intervention. In Reagan's case, he launched an aggressive attack on Libya and then placed cruel sanctions on the country. In fact, in a cruel irony, the bombings only strengthened Muammar Gaddafi's hold over the country, as it caused his people to sympathize with him as a supposed victim of Western imperialist adventurism. Both also drastically increased the debt by, at the same time that they cut taxes, increasing spending on the military.

Perhaps Reagan's most vile deed was the Iran-Contra Affair. During Reagan's presidency, Hezbollah, an Islamic fundamentalist group with connections to the revolutionary government of Iran, was keeping a small group of Americans hostages. So, Reagan began selling weapons to the Iranian government in exchange for them working to convince Hezbollah to release the hostages. Then, Reagan used the money he received from the weapons sales to fund an anti-communist terrorist group called the Contras in Nicaragua. This atrocious activity simultaneously provided weapons to a totalitarian theocracy and enabled the actions of a literal terrorist group. In fact, the Iranian state didn't successfully convince Hezbollah to actually release all of the hostages. A few were released, and Reagan deserves credit for that, but they were eventually replaced by other hostages.

There are a few things that keep Reagan out of a lower position on the list. For example, he appointed the first female member of the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor. He also increased spending on a few social programs. And while, as previously explained, he didn't play as big a role in the improvement of Soviet-American relations as many say, he at least went along with Gorbachev's efforts. Ultimately, however, Reagan was a terrible president who played a minimal role in the end of stagflation, removed necessary regulations, engaged in imperialism in Grenada and Libya, caused the national debt to skyrocket, and enabled evil institutions in Nicaragua and Iran with the Iran-Contra Affair.