I just finished reading James Mann's new book, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War, and it naturally made me think about how to use our history to approach our present international conflicts.

Mann's basic thesis is that while Reagan & Gorbachev were able to shift with the times, their opponents were caught in the thinking that the status quo was both permanent & acceptable.

Ironically enough, today's neoconservatives were firmly behind that status quo in the 1980s and yet their approach to the War on Terror was basically that Islamic terrorism was unacceptable, was not something the U.S. was going to learn to live with and that we were going to change the world to try get rid of it. It's almost as if, gasp! they learned something from the Cold War.

Obama, on the other hand, seems to be about guiding the U.S. to live in a world of Islamic fundamentalism, much like Reagan's opponents were focused on coexisting with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. We're not really going to do anything other than try to be nice so they won't bug us. If we have to debase ourselves to make that happen, so be it.

What's missing, at least to me, is the idea that there's something fundamentally wrong with that - that we have a moral obligation to stand up for freedom and for what's right. Reagan's stance towards the Soviet Union shifted with the times, but his ideals didn't. He was always a champion for freedom and only started to soften towards the Soviets when they proved they had made a commitment to greater freedom too.

So, to me, the sad thing about these comparisons are that it seems like both approaches are flawed today. I think Obama's foreign policy is morally flawed and short sighted. I think the neocons tried to change the world and build nations without partners in the Muslim world - like if Reagan tried to free Eastern Europe without a willing Gorbachev on the other side.

I know that no one in Washington really cares about foreign policy right now, but I do find it disheartening that for all of his talk about diplomacy and engagement, I hear absolutely nothing about Obama talking to moderates in the Arab world. Shouldn't he be seeking the Muslim Gorbachev, or at least the Muslim Lech Walesa or Vaclav Havel? We had to wait for a Gorbachev to reach the top of the Soviet monolith, but the Muslim world is luckily more diverse - they've gotta be out there somewhere.

Or maybe that's not the real missing link. What's missing is that we don't have a Reagan.