Mehdi Hasan: Ronald Reagan Was No Hawk – and Certainly No Neocon

Mehdi Hasan is senior editor (politics) at the New Statesman and a former news and current affairs editor at Channel 4. His New Statesman blog is here. He is co-author of Ed: the Milibands and the Making of a Labour Leader.

Ronald Reagan is back. Today more than a thousand people crowded into London's Grosvenor Square to celebrate the centenary of the birth of the former US president. The ceremony, held a few metres from the US embassy, saw the unveiling of a 10ft bronze statue of Reagan, who died in 2004 at 93.

A hundred years on from his birth, seven from his death, and 22 years after he left the Oval Office, the Gipper remains a towering figure in American politics. In recent weeks Republican presidential candidates have been falling over each other to invoke his name and wrap themselves in his mantle, as Bushes I and II are quietly airbrushed from the party's history. Even Barack Obama, after his "shellacking" in November's midterm elections, made it known to reporters that he was reading a biography of Reagan. Oh, and liberal icon John Lennon was, according to his assistant, a secret supporter of America's 40th president.

But which Reagan is being commemorated? The man or the myth? Conservatives, and especially neoconservatives, have deified him as the warrior president who won the cold war with a combination of a muscular foreign policy and a well-funded military. Progressives have dismissed him as a cowboy president, hellbent on confrontation with the Soviet Union and itching to nuke Moscow. (His humorous asides didn't help: on one occasion Reagan leaned into a microphone and joked: "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.")

But have both his supporters and his critics got him wrong?..