Check out this must-read article by Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post. It’s a response to a recent piece by the notorious and increasingly irrelevant realist, Brent Scowcroft. Krauthammer’s rebuttal is, quite simply, devastating.

Krauthammer reminds readers why Scowcroft’s outdated realism is (thankfully)dead in most conservative foreign policy circles, and why we cannot simply settle for “stability” at the expense of freedom in the Middle East. He reminds us that President Reagan defeated the Soviet Union with a similar policy of “regime change.” Reagan, like President Bush today, understood that the internal conditions of authoritarian societies directly threaten American national security. America has a duty then to push for reform in such countries. Reagan was right to pursue such a “neorealist” strategy in the Cold War, and we are right to fight for these same principles today.

This is the best part. It doesn’t get any better than this:

“Even today Scowcroft says, ‘I didn’t think that calling the Soviet Union the `evil empire’ got anybody anywhere.’ Tell that to Natan Sharansky and other Soviet dissidents for whom that declaration of moral — beyond geopolitical — purpose was electrifying, and helped galvanize the dissident movements that ultimately brought down the Soviet empire.

It was not brought down by diplomacy and arms control, the preferred realist means for dealing with the Soviet Union. It was brought down by indigenous revolutionaries, encouraged and supported by Ronald Reagan, a president unabashedly dedicated not to detente with evil, but its destruction — i.e., regime change.”