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When the technical analysis of Reagan's foreign policy philosophy and execution is laid aside, perhaps the more fundamental difference between him and today's neoconservatives is one of temperament. As Shultz records, Reagan was optimistic, he "appealed to people's best hopes, not their fears." His was a confidence rippling from the Declaration of Independence -- that America was attractive in and of itself and that American ideals had an intrinsic appeal. By contrast, the neoconservative vision is one that has mobilized fear as a binding political adhesive in support of a one-dimensional approach to global affairs.

We detect a deep pessimism among neoconservatives about human nature and human society -- and one which is much darker than the skepticism about human perfectibility often found in conservative thinking. The here-and-now world in which neoconservatives see themselves is a world of Hobbesian state-of-nature primitivism and conspiracy where perpetual, militarized competition for ascendancy is the norm and moderation -- even of the sort envisioned by Hobbes -- by the community of nations is impossible, where the search for a social contract à la Locke or Rousseau is illusory, where trust (even Reagan's "trust but verify") among human beings is elusive, and where adversaries (defined as defeatist and more broadly as anyone who does not share the neoconservative worldview) must be preemptively crushed lest they crush you. Domestically, they believe America is well along the path to perdition, with education, sexual mores, morality and the judiciary all in grip of an alien modernist and secular culture.

In many important respects, they still inhabit the gunpowder-impregnated sixteenth-century world of one of their love-hate icons, Machiavelli, escape from which formed so much of America's early founding philosophy, which looked optimistically to the future and understood that progress lies in bringing out the best in people, not forever expecting the worst. Gliding past a long-established body of international relations thinkers and practitioners, they seem never far from Hobbes's doomsday vision of man in his primitive state. They reject the notion -- implicit in Reagan's striving for accord with the Soviet Union -- that democracy can be brought to non-democratic countries other than at the point of the bayonet or on the back of a Tomahawk cruise missile.

Thus, it is very hard to argue that there is a direct line of descent from Reagan's foreign policy to modern neoconservatism. Reagan was a conservative but never a neoconservative -- either in content or in personality. Reagan had presented the conflicts of international politics in essentially moral terms, and for this reason he looked like the president whom neoconservatives had long hoped for. But as his declaratory policies gradually moved toward pragmatism, those events, for example Poland, that seemed to be disasters in foreign policy to neoconservatives, appeared as major achievements to the moderates who were making the key decisions in the administration.

Furthermore, the Reagan defense establishment remained dominated by these moderates -- Shultz, Clark, Weinberger, Taft, Eagleburger -- to the utter disappointment of the hard-line ideologues. By Reagan's second term, many neoconservatives were disenchanted with the direction of American foreign policy. Despite the presence of individuals such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Elliott Abrams, and Richard Perle, Reagan put a firm cap on neoconservative influence over his policy.

MODERN NEOCONSERVATISM WAS BORN after Reagan left office during the administrations of the senior Bush and Clinton. These were years in exile for the emerging neoconservative Young Turks. One commentator argued that the neoconservative journey from origin to Soviet collapse was a transition "from Trotskyism to anachronism." This was premature. A fierce internal debate took place in which the main ingredients were a deeply negative reaction to the 1992 decision not to remove Saddam at the end of Desert Storm, disgust at Clintonite vacillation and U.N. and EU weakness in the Balkans, and the emerging U.S. military predominance.

What emerged from this was a theory that, in the post-Cold War era, the U.S. should make an armed, preemptive crusade for global democracy the organizing principle of its foreign policy. Because of their discontent with Clinton, neoconservatives like William Kristol looked back at the Reagan era as a golden age of American foreign policy constructed on neoconservative lines. But we can see, this interpretation owes much more to nostalgia and marketing savvy than to the real characteristics of the Reagan approach.

The bloodline for the neoconservative model (which has the editorialists of the Wall Street Journal waxing enthusiastic about using taxpayer money for electricity and water services in Iraq) may be traced from Wilson via FDR, Kennedy, and Johnson to the "democratic enlargement" of the Clinton administration on which the same editorialists poured so much scorn. Indeed, some neoconservatives now openly admit that they are, in essence, Wilsonians with guns. A word of warning, however: the fact that neoconservatives advocate the use of power to achieve their ends does not thereby turn a Clintonesque policy -- one involving social engineering and which, predictably, is looking exceedingly fragile -- into a conservative one.

The Wilsonian heritage is not an ignoble lineage, but it has little to do with mainstream conservatism. If the neoconservatives wish to adopt Wilsonianism as the conservative orthodoxy, and send the nation to further adventures in its name, it would become them better and would make for better public policy if they did so openly and honestly, rather than falsely calling on Reagan's name. Neoconservatism is not updated Reaganism. It is a new political animal born of an unlikely mating of humanitarian liberalism and brute force. The neo-Reaganite foreign policy drawn up by Kagan and Kristol is vastly more "neo" than it is "Reaganite." And certainly no service to the cause of true conservatism.

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Foreign Policy, Education, Trade, Environment, Law, Military, Iraq, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Communism, Conservatism, Neoconservatism