THE SOVIET Empire had just collapsed and Americans were giddily wondering what might be next. Some were talking of a peace dividend that Democrats might spend on social programs dear to their hearts or Republicans might send back to the taxpayers who had financed the Cold War.

Others, however, were arguing that the world's sole remaining superpower should consider imposing Pax Americana on an unruly world. Even many conservatives who should have known better were beginning to contemplate a far more robust and aggressive foreign policy than they ever had supported before.

It was in this atmosphere that a number of neoconservative intellectuals, led by the pre-Weekly Standard Bill Kristol, began articulating something they called "national greatness conservatism." During this time, I remember attending a small private dinner where Bill argued that with the defeat of the Soviet Empire, the United States "needed" a new crusade to engage our nation's energies and interests, because, as he put it, a nation's "greatness" is measured not by the prosperity of its people, but by its actions on the world stage.

I challenged him, suggesting that while Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House may have thought the Great War was about redrawing the map of Europe and creating a "new world order", those who filed into the trenches fought to defend their nation, homes and families against our enemies' alleged desire to impose their vision on us. We went to war not to make a dangerous world safe for democracy, but to protect our own democracy.

Two decades later, we reluctantly became involved in another global war, when it was clear that events half a world away posed a real threat to us. And many Americans resisted the idea of going to war absent a direct threat to the U.S. homeland; it took the bombing of Pearl Harbor for families to throw themselves into the effort to defeat our enemies. When the war ended, they breathed a sigh of relief and soldiers came home to farm and take their places on our factory floors and in our executive suites. They were eager to marry, have families and return to what they considered important about their country.

During the Cold War, their sons and daughters responded when they believed our values and allies-and therefore our own security-were at risk. They paid for the Cold War without complaint. They went to Korea, Vietnam and most recently Iraq, not to seek glory, or to help establish their country as a hegemon or to remake the world in our own image, but because they felt it was in danger.

I told Kristol that if he thought the young men and women who fought our wars returned home to pine for new foreign crusades or adventures, he was wrong. They came home happy to trade their guns and uniforms for the way of life they believed, not inaccurately, that they had been called to defend.

THE FOUNDERS and their successors believed firmly that the nation they were creating was indeed John Winthrop's shining "City upon a Hill" that Ronald Reagan liked to describe. Others would emulate the freedom and limited government that characterized the new nation. Few of them believed, however, that it would be either proper or prudent to force others to copy the system they had created.

This view began to lose favor with the advent of the Hearst papers in the late 19th century, the aggressiveness of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and the emergence of the United States as a world power after World War I. Still, it wasn't until World War II, and the subsequent Cold War, that Americans began to accept the fact that, like it or not, they were going to have to play a permanently active role on the world stage and that this might well entail the use of force even absent a direct attack on us. While virtually all conservatives admired and continue to admire Bob Taft, most today would agree with the late Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg's decision after the conclusion of World War II that conservatives and Republicans could no longer afford to remain isolationist in an increasingly dangerous world.

Conservatives accepted this reality with reluctance, but eventually came around to the view that since Soviet communism represented an unprecedented existential threat to everything they valued, it would have to be confronted; no one thought that communists believed in "socialism in one country", but rather that they would seek to remake the entire world in their own image.

This is not to say that conservatives didn't care about the way the Soviet Union and other totalitarian or authoritarian nations treated their own citizens, but that they believed the prime imperative of U.S. foreign and defense policy should be to protect the United States and its interests. They were prepared to condemn the manner in which other nations acted at home and to support rhetorically and materially indigenous groups fighting for their own freedom, but few believed it wise to use American military power in support of others when American interests were not directly and materially involved. They believed that it was often wise to "keep one's powder dry" for the day when U.S. interests were at real risk.

Until very recently, few who called themselves conservatives would have argued, as the so-called neoconservatives do today, that the best way to guarantee our security at home would be to remake the rest of the world in our own image. During the Cold War, even though conservatives were prepared to fight if need be to prevent the Soviet Union from taking over friendly countries, there were few, if any, calls for U.S. military action to liberate either the Soviet Union itself or the nations it had occupied during and after World War II. At the same time, while American conservatives believed in providing aid to this country's allies, few ever accepted the idea that one could effectively counter Soviet expansionism through what is today known as nation-building.

There were and are sound conservative reasons for this view. Conservatives are by nature cautious about government's ability to change the way people live. We don't believe Washington, DC, for example, is capable of telling people in Peoria how to live their lives. It would stand to reason that reordering the way the citizens of Baghdad run theirs would be even more difficult, something that has been proven true in recent years.

Kristol and his "national greatness conservatives" shared the Founders' view of the United States as an ideal to be emulated but were convinced that, as the world's sole remaining superpower, the United States should become what Kristol termed a "benevolent hegemon", prepared to bully those rulers too ignorant or bullheaded to accept the U.S. economic and political model voluntarily.

Neoconservatives argued, in fact, that this nation not only had a moral obligation to do all in its power to spread the benefits of liberal democracy, but that doing so would serve its own national-security interests. "Democracies do not make war upon each other" became almost a neoconservative mantra, adopted after 9/11 by a president who campaigned promising to forgo the ambitious nation-building favored by his predecessor.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks of 2001, many conservatives-along with the president and most Americans-seemed to accept this argument. But the realities confronted since have caused many, like National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr., to revert to a more traditional conservative view of the circumstances that might justify the use of force against actual and prospective enemies.

Thus, many-and perhaps even most-conservatives supported the initial U.S. decision to remove Saddam Hussein because they, like the president and just about everyone else at the time, accepted the intelligence reports on WMD. The need to strike against someone who might attack our regional allies or was working with our enemies was far more justifiable than an attempt to rebuild Iraq as a quasi-Western democracy.

That was a far more problematic task given the history of the region, the hatreds dividing the secular factions within Iraq and our track record of failure in accomplishing such things. We had parted company with George H. W. Bush's desire to create a New World Order because it smacked of Wilsonianism. We were quick to condemn what most of us saw as Bill Clinton's foolishness in attempting to transform Somalia and Haiti into liberal democracies at the point of a sword.

Moreover, in the post-invasion controversy over whether Iraq was a pre-war threat, many conservatives realized that they shouldn't have relied so heavily on what amounted to guesses about the enemy's armaments and intent to justify a pre-emptive strike.

Pundits and even a few serious analysts like to categorize the differences within the conservative movement as divisions, pitting what they call "paleoconservatives" like Pat Buchanan against the neoconservatives. In fact, there aren't many pure "paleos" or "neos" within the movement, which may explain why both sides keep attempting to identify with Ronald Reagan.

Reagan was the quintessential Cold War conservative. He was both a nationalist and a believer in the dreams of the Founders. He believed in the U.S. model's superiority and in an ultimate victory over his generation's existential enemy-a triumph made inevitable by the American system's pre-eminence. When he summed up his view of how he would like the Cold War to end by saying simply, "We win; they lose", he was reflecting the feelings of his fellow conservatives. Reagan wasn't interested in "peaceful coexistence" or in managing the decline of U.S. power and prestige, but in restoring U.S. strength and making clear to the world that we believed in ourselves and weren't interested in caving in to political correctness, multinationalism or Soviet power.

But Ronald Reagan was not, to use a term his adversaries liked to toss around, a warmonger. He was idealistic, intractable and optimistic, but he knew where to draw the line. He resorted to military force far less often than many of those who came before him or who have since occupied the Oval Office. He believed, like the Founders, that in the end ideas are more powerful than guns and bombs, and while the United States must be strong enough to resist any enemy and defeat aggression, we should resist the temptation to use our power aggressively.

What's more, he harbored few illusions about the world beyond our shores or our ability to remake it in our own image. He encouraged those fighting our enemies, but wasn't about to send U.S. forces to places like Angola, Poland, Afghanistan or Nicaragua to assist them. He knew that freedom must be won by those who want it and that democracy can't be force-fed to nations and people who neither understand it nor are prepared to exercise it.

Those who see an extension of Ronald Reagan's policies in the willingness to use American power to create a world in our own image are imagining things. His sympathy for those seeking freedom and his willingness to help them was tempered by his realization that there are things we can and cannot do, as well as things that we should and should not do.

The Reagan Doctrine was not a license for adventurism, but a doctrine based on a cautious idealism that forced policymakers to consider the legitimacy of international action and the potential costs of committing U.S. blood and treasure.

In her posthumously published book Making War to Keep Peace, Jeane Kirkpatrick summarizes the guidance the doctrine provided policymakers. "It did not address the question of U.S. military involvement or involvement of U.S. forces in any particular contest", she wrote, recognizing that reasonable men and women could differ even while accepting the same general framework. She continued, "Policy under the Reagan Doctrine was established by prudential determination of the national interest in particular context [emphasis in the original]."

Kirkpatrick also suggests that under Reagan, even when the mere fact was that U.S. involvement might be morally or even legally justifiable, there were times when holding back was the wiser decision, especially after giving weight to "the long term costs and benefits of such action."

After the assault on the Marine barracks in Lebanon, it was questioning the wisdom of U.S. involvement that led Reagan to withdraw our troops rather than dig in. He found no good strategic reason to give our regional enemies inviting U.S. targets. Can one imagine one of today's neoconservative absolutists backing away from any fight anywhere?

The fact is, of course, that there are very few pure isolationists, neoconservatives, realists or idealists running around. What really exists is a sort of continuum, and most of those in each group share many values and goals. Most conservatives backed the Iraqi enterprise at the outset because they believed that a blow to Al-Qaeda and an Iraqi despot believed to be in league with Osama bin Laden would serve our interests. It was, in short, a prudential decision, but they weren't buying into a crusade to create a world in our own image.

Conservatives know that we cannot create a democratic world by snapping our fingers; they also know that sending armies out to convince others by force to adopt our ways won't prove much more effective. I'm not even sure I've met many neoconservatives who really believe we ought to do that.

During the run-up to the Clinton Administration's decision to go into the Balkans, I remember Charles Krauthammer saying that while he believed we should act as an international policeman, every cop knows there are some neighborhoods he ought to avoid. Although Richard Perle argued that we should use force to "inject" democracy into the Middle East, he doesn't see any need to do the same in Zimbabwe.

My point is that there is a bit of the neocon and the realist in all of us.

The hard choices one is confronted with in the real world make it difficult to say in the abstract when the use of force is and is not justifiable. Given the historically fractious nature of the Balkans, Krauthammer was wondering whether we were going to accomplish much at a reasonable cost by going in when our direct interests weren't threatened; Perle was consciously or unconsciously reflecting on the extent to which our national interests would be at stake in Iraq as compared to Zimbabwe.

Although Jeane Kirkpatrick was eulogized after her death as the "queen" of neoconservatives, she shared the traditional conservative doubt that democracy can either cure all ills or that its spread should be the prime imperative of U.S. foreign policy. After all, she came to Ronald Reagan's attention arguing that the magnitude of the threat we faced from the communist world in the 1970s and 1980s justified alliances with authoritarian as well as Jeffersonian states. In her final years, she took exception to the neoconservative impulse to make democracy promotion, rather than our national-security interests, the rationale for our use of military force in the Middle East.

Kirkpatrick argued that U.S. foreign policy should be based first on the protection of this nation's security and economic interests, and secondarily on promoting free institutions at a reasonable cost, without jeopardizing our primary objective. She may have been a neoconservative in some ways, but she was also a realist. In that sense, she was much like the president who recruited her to public service.

Kirkpatrick was profoundly troubled by the Bush Administration's decision to invade Iraq, although she had wholeheartedly supported the decision to send U.S. troops into Afghanistan. She didn't believe for a minute that it would be possible to create a democracy in Iraq because the nation lacked the prerequisites. She also felt that the fall of Saddam Hussein would not produce leaders willing to undertake the hard work involved in preparing their country for democracy. She knew that had George W. Bush subjected his decision to go into Iraq to the Reagan Doctrine's criteria, it would have come up short.

Ronald Reagan was a believer in freedom and democracy and, at a moral level, never hesitated to align himself with those here and abroad who shared his beliefs. But he never opted for military force when alternatives were available.

Kirkpatrick, as Reagan's un ambassador and in her retirement, was perhaps the one person who understood and best articulated his approach to foreign policy. Her book strikes me as a must-read for anyone with even a passing interest in understanding the shape of a conservative foreign policy in the modern world.

Conservatives believe today, as they have in the past, in a strong America prepared to fight when necessary to protect its just interests, but they don't believe it wise or moral to shed the blood of their sons and daughters to impose our views on others. Their belief in American exceptionalism is deep, but most do not see the wisdom or practicality of forcing the rest of the world to accept U.S. values. They harbor a profound belief in morality and human rights, but do not under most circumstances believe American blood should be shed because of the way other nations treat their citizens.

They aren't isolationists, but U.S. nationalists who believe strongly not only in the values articulated by the Founders, but in the need to safeguard the moral and geographic integrity of the nation in which those values have flourished. They are therefore rightly skeptical of multinational agreements that might undermine the sovereignty they consider so central to the successful defense of the country. They believe, like Reagan and the Founders, that ours is a nation that must survive and prosper not only for the benefit of those lucky enough to have been born or moved here, but as an example others might emulate.

As a young conservative, I-like many of my contemporaries-read and digested the wisdom of William Graham Sumner's The Conquest of the United States by Spain, an anti-imperialist, anti-war tract penned as we careened down the road to the Spanish-American War. His point was a simple one. He asked what benefit there would be if in defeating our enemies we became little better than they. It is a question conservatives have asked time and again as we've conducted wars abroad and prepared for them at home.

Today we are told we are involved in a clash of civilizations. Some suggest that the nature of the struggle is such that we can only win by vanquishing our foes militarily while remaking the world around us in our own image and accepting that the values that have guided us in the past may no longer be valid.

Maybe, but we've been through this before. Without surrendering our values, we survived the Cold War against an enemy philosophically committed to a world in which most of what we stand for would have been obliterated. Sometimes our adherence to those values made competing with the Soviets more difficult than some thought necessary, but in the end it was those values and the ideas behind them that made all the difference. We made mistakes then and will in the future, but even as we face a new enemy, most conservatives are as convinced today as Ronald Reagan was in his day that our values and ideas will ultimately prevail.

David Keene is the long-time chairman of the American Conservative Union. He has worked in every Republican presidential campaign since 1964, serving as Ronald Reagan's southern political director in 1976.