Reagan Was No Neocon

Despite Reagan's "ringing speeches," he was "quite circumscribed in his efforts at democracy promotion," Colin Dueck writes in Hard Line, a new history of GOP foreign policy. Reagan viewed the U.S. as a city on a hill, a "model to other countries," not a crusader state with "an obligation to forcibly promote democracy overseas."

Most of all, what separates Reagan from his hawkish latter-day admirers was his optimism. He viewed the United States as dynamic and free — and, therefore, strong enough to outlast any enemy.

For the neoconservatives, however, it's always 1939, and the free world is always under siege, whether from a decrepit Soviet monolith of the 1980s or today's allegedly "existential threat" presented by several hundred cave-dwelling Islamists.

In the Gorbachev era, Norman Podhoretz accused Reagan of buying into "the fantasy of communist collapse." Some fantasy.