Reagan as President in 1976
* Those not yet around in 1976 may not realize just how close Reagan came to becoming president that election. Reagan came in a very close second to Ford in the Republican primaries. Ford had been badly weakened by his association with Nixon's unpopular presidency. Ford's pardoning of Nixon for his crimes during the Watergate Scandal, defended by Ford as best for the country, were seen by many as a quid pro quo, a payoff, with the pardon being exchanged for being appointed Vice President and then becoming President. Likely the incredibly unpopular pardon cost Ford the election. Had Reagan won the primaries, without public anger over the pardon he could very well have defeated Carter in the general election.
* Reagan as president in 1976 would have been objectively a disaster in terms of body counts of innocents. Reagan would never have a focus on human rights in foreign policy as Carter did. Thus dictatorships around the world would continue their actions unworried by concerns of an American government. The most obvious results:
* Reagan may choose to carry out Nixon and Kissinger's plans for the US-Vietnam War, using American bombing to weaken Vietnam. This would not stop the fall of South Vietnam, which had no popular support because its largely Catholic and French-Vietnamese ruling class were viewed as alien by most Vietnamese. There is also no way an American public or Congress would agree to sending US troops back to Vietnam.
* Reagan would likely have intervened in Angola with more aid, arms, and perhaps advisers and US bombing. If not direct bombing, Reagan may turn to South Africa and provide aid for the South Africans to carry out their proxy war. Apartheid in South Africa may last longer, and Reagan's failed and ultimately hypocritical and insincere policy of constructive engagement may not even be attempted as it was in the 1980s.
* Reagan would have ignored genocides in East Timor as Ford did, and in Cambodia as Carter did and Reagan later did anyway.
* Reagan certainly would not allow the Sandinistas to win their popular revolution in Nicaragua in the late 1970s. His administration would have sent US arms, advisers, money, and likely American bombers as they did in El Salvador in the 1980s. But Somoza was reviled by virtually all Nicaraguans, so Reagan may have to send 30,000 US troops to stop this uprising, much as Lyndon Johnson did in the Dominican Republic. The Somoza family dictatorship would continue, as would human rights violations. The US invasion of the Dominican Republic cost 2,000 lives on both sides. An invasion of Nicaragua would likely cost the same.
* Public pressure certainly would limit any long term occupation, and may cause his administration to concede the formality of some extremely limited appearance of a democracy, much as happened in El Salvador in the mid 80s and Guatemala in the late 80s. But the military would continue to run the country, blocking or even killing any real opposition, again as in El Salvador or Guatemala in the 1980s.
* Reagan would not have allowed the return of the Panama Canal to Panama. He campaigned strongly against its return under the slogan, “We built it, we paid for it, it's ours.” (None of the three claims are true. West Indian laborers built it. The land was taken after the US Navy helped Panama break away from Colombia. The canal treaty was signed by a Frenchman, with no say from Panamanians. Most payments went to a French company, not Panamanians. And the US Supreme Court ruled early on the Canal Zone is not US territory.) It is possible the canal could be sabotaged by terrorism. At the very least there would continue to be massive protests against the American occupation.
* Most important of all, Carter's focus on human rights played a direct role in weakening the Soviet Union, both in their own nation and in Eastern Europe. Dissidents, after the fall of the Soviet Union, frequently pointed to the human rights policy as not only a great source of strength and moral support for them, but also as pressure that in many cases was the only thing keeping them alive. The Soviet Union likely lasts longer, as does their presence in Eastern Europe, as does the Cold War, because of Reagan in office earlier.
* Should Reagan win re election in 1980, all these practices continue. Reagan would certainly support genocide in Guatemala and terrorism against Salvadorans fighting against the military's dictatorship, as he did in our own time. The fall of the Soviet Union would certainly happen while a different man is president. *
* Perhaps the only positive thing to come out of Reagan being president four years earlier is no one would make the unsustainable claim that Reagan ended the Cold War. Most historians and other scholars, as well as most people outside of American conservatives, know the truth, that the Cold War was ended by very brave people in Eastern Europe, Soviet dissidents, and Gorbachev's reforms.