Ronald Reagans præsidentskab: en kritisk analyse

Among American Presidents, there are several that stand out. Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Barack Obama are usually on that list. There is one president however, that is one of the most controversial in history. His name was Ronald Reagan, a dictator to many and a hero to many others. I believe that Ronald Reagan was the worst President in US history, because of his interventionist foreign policy, his pro capitalist economic policies, and his extreme social conservatism.

Despite the reverence held for Reagan in the United States, he is not viewed as kindly in the many, many countries where he supported right wing rebel groups. As President, Reagan pursued aggressive support for right wing militias in many countries. A partial list of those nations includes conflicts in Angola, Libya, Indonesia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Grenada, and Afghanistan. While detailing all of these interventions would be an essay in and of itself, the pattern of intervention remains deserving of attention. In most of these cases, Reagan backed groups who committed heinous civil rights abuses. According to the 1984 Amnesty International Report on Torture, the Reagan backed El Salvadoran military used “beatings, sexual abuse, use of chemicals to disorient, mock executions, and the burning of flesh with sulphuric acid.” El Salvador suffered tremendously due to an American intervention ordered by Reagan. Nicaragua suffered even worse, after the Reagan Administration illegally sold weapons to Iran in order to raise funds for a right wing terrorist group fighting the legitimate government of the country. Indeed the International Court of Justice found the United States guilty on several infractions of international law, and recommending that the United States compensate Nicaragua. Their wording was scathing-- concerning the US mining of Nicaraguan ports, the ICJ declared that American actions were “not only an unlawful act but also a breach of the principles of humanitarian law.” These are only two examples of a pattern of extreme, violent, almost genocidal interventions supported personally and politically by Ronald Reagan. No President in history has advocated for the overthrow of so many democratic governments at once, and certainly not with such gusto for violence and terrorism.