The anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall was two days ago, granted, but I keep rereading Reagan speechwriter Anthony Dolan’s Sunday op-ed in the Wall Street Journal for its relevance to the political correctness exhibited this week toward enemies of the state. Dolan recounts the fierce battle among the State Department, National Security Council (in the form of then-deputy adviser Colin Powell), and others to get the offending sentence “Tear down this wall” stripped from the president’s Berlin speech of June 1987.

The advisers little understood that the line was Reagan’s own, and came not simply from a provocative whim but from Reagan’s “caring about larger ideas” and a recognition that communist regimes weren’t simply “other”; they were also criminal.

Reagan had the carefully arrived at view that criminal regimes were different, that their whole way of looking at the world was inverted, that they saw acts of conciliation as weakness, and that rather than making nice in return they felt an inner compulsion to exploit this perceived weakness by engaging in more acts of aggression. All this confirmed the criminal mind’s abiding conviction in its own omniscience and sovereignty, and its right to rule and victimize others.

The players have changed, but the morality play at work in the run against Islamic regimes and their terrorist offspring is very similar.