In December 1986 the public intellectual Christopher Hitchens returned to the New Statesman as a bi-weekly columnist on US politics. His first column was a sharp judgement on just what Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy really involved. According to a 1986 New York Times/CBS News Poll, approximately half the US public thought that Reagan was “lying” when he asserted “that he had no knowledge that funds from the sale of arms to Iran were being diverted to Nicaraguan insurgents”. Lying is one thing; a president’s supposed ignorance is far worse, suggests Hitchens, who writes that if Reagan “says he didn’t know about the blood-money bank in the White House basement, he is saying that he didn’t know about his own foreign policy”. The affair most embarrassed the former Democrat politicians who had moved to stand behind Reagan. “Are they really saying, as they seem to be, that they willed the end and not the means?” asks Hitchens. “Or are they saying, as the president seems to be, that they mandated the policy and didn’t want to know the details?”
We’re delighted that we have tempted back Christopher Hitchens from our rival, the Spectator, as our regular US columnist. Hitchens is among the most incisive and elegant dissectors of US politics now writing. He joins us at a critical time for the Reagan presidency. In the first of his bi-weekly columns, Hitchens reports that below the tumult of “Irangate” we are witnessing true Reaganism abroad.
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