Trevor Thrall reaches a questionable conclusion:

The fact that the Reagan Doctrine is alive and well seems inarguable. The judgment that it will be just as difficult to implement also seems difficult to escape. The question that remains is: How do we feel about this?

I won’t argue that there are many people arguing for doing something like Reagan’s Nicaragua policy in Syria, but I don’t think I would be alone in disputing the idea that “Obama and his foreign policy team are ideologically committed to helping opposition movements working to overthrow authoritarian governments in the Middle East.” If they are “ideologically committed” to doing this, they have an odd way of showing it. Libya appears to be the one instance so far where the administration has done this, but overthrowing the Libyan government appears to have advanced no U.S. strategic goals and may have undermined a few. If we look around the rest of the region, there are many opposition movements, and little or no U.S. support for any of them. If the Reagan Doctrine is “alive and well,” it is not to be found at the White House. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

If we take Reagan’s 1985 statement that “[s]upport for freedom fighters is self-defense” as the central argument for the Reagan Doctrine, there is not much evidence that the Reagan Doctrine is “alive and well.” There is no credible argument available that backing insurgents against minor and medium-sized authoritarian states in the Near East has anything to do with self-defense. It was also a far-fetched claim when Reagan made it, but at least he was making it in the context of a rivalry with another superpower that threatened the security of the United States. Today there is no threat that is even remotely comparable. Were Obama to say something similar about supporting Syrian rebels as a form of American self-defense, he would be ridiculed for weeks and properly so.