Nearly lost amid the frenzy that engulfed the White House as Egypt erupted was President Barack Obama's Wednesday signing of a nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia, clearing the way for its implementation.
The so-called New START treaty, negotiated by Mr. Obama early last year but only recently ratified by the U.S. Senate and Russian parliament, is the foreign-policy file that has most consumed the American President – or at least it was until unloved Arab autocrats suddenly started toppling over.
The treaty is a concrete (albeit modest) step toward the President's goal – formally articulated by Mr. Obama in a Prague speech in 2009 – of a world free of nuclear weapons.
Is this a fanciful objective? Or simply a naive one?
Mr. Obama need not heed the skeptics. A quarter-century ago, the same questions were being derisively asked of Ronald Reagan when he called for "the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth."
Trumped-up parallels between the 40th and 44th presidents are all the rage these days. This is partly owing to Mr. Obama's own handlers, who have cast their boss in a Reaganesque light as America embarks on a year of "celebration" in honour of the 100th anniversary of the Gipper's birth.
There is no word on whether the White House is channelling Mr. Reagan in its handling of Egypt. But of all the analogies between the two presidents, the most worthy is perhaps the most overlooked. It is in his ambition to render nuclear weapons extinct that Mr. Obama truly is Reagan's child.
"I personally came of age during the Reagan presidency," Mr. Obama recounts in The Audacity of Hope. "I understood his appeal. It was the same appeal that the military bases back in Hawaii had always held for me as a young boy, with their tidy streets and well-oiled machinery, the crisp uniforms and crisper salutes."
Mr. Obama also understood Mr. Reagan's legacy. The Great Communicator fundamentally altered Americans' view of their government and themselves.
Mr. Obama, too, aspires to be transformational. His election, he proffered shortly afterward, signalled "an end to the knee-jerk reaction toward the New Deal and big government." If Mr. Reagan shifted the terms of political debate to the right, Mr. Obama seeks to move them back.
So far, however, his intellectual honesty has hobbled him.
"Even though he has passed a lot of liberal legislation, he hasn't offered a very strident defence of liberalism," Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer explains. "Reagan was very comfortable in his own arguments and his own rhetoric. Obama is more elusive. He tends to avoid grand proclamations about what ideas are right and what ideas are wrong."
Mr. Obama has only entered the third year of his presidency. At this point in Mr. Reagan's first term, transformational was not a term being applied to a president with a 35-per-cent approval rating.
Think back to early 1983. Gandhi was on its way to sweeping the Oscars while the president of the United States, a former actor, was asking Congress for an unprecedented peace-time increase in defence spending. Mr. Reagan addressed the nation to call for a futuristic space-based nuclear defence system to intercept and destroy Soviet missiles.
"Historians write about 1983 as being a very dangerous year, when many Americans are nervous that nuclear war is a real possibility," Prof. Zelizer notes. "Many people thought Reagan was being careless with some of that [anti-Soviet] rhetoric."
One of them was a 21-year-old student at Columbia University, who first outlined his vision for "a nuclear-free world" for an article, in a campus magazine, titled "Breaking the War Mentality."
Yet, even then, Mr. Obama and Mr. Reagan were not as far apart as his young critic surmised. Mr. Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative was a tactic aimed at rendering nuclear weapons obsolete. "It wouldn't militarize space," he insisted in his second inaugural address, "it would help demilitarize the arsenals of Earth."
In late 1986, Mr. Reagan holed up with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik to negotiate the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. It was Mr. Reagan's personal initiative; his closest advisers and supporters on the right thought him delusional.
Mr. Reagan, conservative columnist George Will later wrote, had "accelerated the moral disarmament of the West …by elevating wishful thinking to the level of political philosophy."
Mr. Obama faced the same derision as he sought ratification of his renewed Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty aimed at slashing U.S. and Russian arsenals of deployed nuclear weapons. Republican Senator John Cornyn accused him of indulging in "a fantasy world that's nuclear free."
Of course, Mr. Obama faces a much tougher task than Mr. Reagan ever did. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, vast quantities of enriched nuclear material have become poorly secured, an open invitation to terrorist organizations seeking to build a dirty bomb. North Korea and Iran, meanwhile, make Mr. Reagan's adversaries look reasonable by comparison.
But like 40, 44 aims high. "This goal will not be reached quickly – perhaps not in my lifetime," Mr. Obama conceded in Prague. "But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us the world cannot change."
The Gipper himself would not have said it better.
The Ronald Reagan Centennial Conference will examine the 40th president's foreign-policy legacy in Washington on Feb. 11. Former prime minister Brian Mulroney is the keynote speaker.
Konrad Yakabuski