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President Reagan and a young Congressman Newt Gingrich.

Elliot Abrams, the former assistant secretary of state for Ronald Reagan and an advisor to George W. Bush is taking issue with Newt Gingrich’s claims that he was a Reagan supporter.

Abrams’ outlines his concerns in a recent issue of the online National Review. According to Abrams, Gingrich’s claims of being a loyal Reaganite are misleading and inaccurate.

He notes:

The claims are misleading at best. As a new member of Congress in the Reagan years — and I was an assistant secretary of state — Mr. Gingrich voted with the president regularly, but equally often spewed insulting rhetoric at Reagan, his top aides, and his policies to defeat Communism. Gingrich was voluble and certain in predicting that Reagan’s policies would fail, and in all of this he was dead wrong.

Abrams quotes Gingrich as accusing President Reagan of “clearly failing” to stop Soviet expansionism. He also claimed that Reagan’s policies were “weak” “inadequate” and “will ultimately fail.”

Abrams also points out that Gingrich was also critical of George W. Bush over his surge plan for Iraq. He labeled this plan as “inadequate,” and “very disappointing.”

He writes:

Today it is fair to look back and ask who had it right: Gingrich, who backed away from and criticized Republican presidents, or those chief executives, who were making difficult and consequential decisions on national security. Bush on the surge and Reagan on the Soviet empire were tough, courageous — and right. Newt Gingrich in retrospect seems less the visionary than the politician who refused the party’s leader loyal support on grounds that history has proved were simply wrong.

Read his full essay at National Review.