As remarkable as Obama’s behavior has been by the standards of international-relations theory, what’s just as remarkable is that most of his domestic political opponents agree with him. Some on the right have tried to shoehorn Obama’s refusal to stand by Mubarak into the “Democrats are soft radical Islam” meme. But Republican Party foreign policy remains dominated by intellectuals who believe in the possibility, and necessity, of democracy’s spread. In recent days we’ve been hearing a lot about Jimmy Carter’s refusal to back the Shah of Iran, yet that trauma, which exercised such power over Jeane Kirkpatrick and an earlier cohort of neoconservatives, means little to a newer generation, composed of people like Elliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz and Robert Kagan, who came of age watching Ronald Reagan help usher out pro-American dictatorships from the Philippines to El Salvador.

When it came to Egypt, in fact, the relevant divide wasn’t between neoconservatives and liberals, both of whom generally supported the folks in Tahrir square. It was between neoconservatives and Islamophobes, the kind of folks who think the real problem with the Middle East is the Koran itself. The other divide was between the neoconservatives and Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government yearned for Mubarak to stay. The parting of ways between the American and Israeli right over the past few weeks should end once and for all the canard that neoconservatism is a creed hatched in the Knesset. For all its flaws, contemporary neoconservatism is a deeply American doctrine, very different from the more pessimistic worldview that dominates Likud.