Twenty years ago this Saturday, President Ronald Reagan used the "e" word, ushering in a new era of American foreign policy making.

Reagan's strong rhetoric worked well enough in his time, but today, as President George W. Bush tries the same 200-proof talk in totally different circumstances, it's boomeranging. And that's a lesson for all time: The strategy that succeeds in one era can fail in the next.

Speaking to the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, 1983, the 40th president denounced the Soviet Union as the "evil empire." The Christian audience loved it, of course, but critics loathed it. Amherst College's Henry Steele Commager snapped, "It was the worst presidential speech in American history, and I've read them all." The fear was that Reagan's seemingly apocalyptic rhetoric, plus his Pentagon buildup, was taking the world toward war. The dovish Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of its nuclear "doomsday clock" to just three minutes to midnight, the most ominous "time" in three decades.

But then something happened that few had foreseen: The Berlin Wall fell, peacefully, in 1989. And two years after that, the evil empire itself imploded, without America's firing a shot. Many hailed these events as proof that the Gipper's "moral clarity" had done the trick. Others noted that during the entire eight years of Reagan's presidency, tough talk notwithstanding, America undertook little direct military action -- and none against the Soviet Union.

Indeed, starting in 1985, Reagan decided that he could work with the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. The two chiefs of state signed a nuclear missile reduction treaty in 1987. So the lesson to be taken away from the '80s might be that under certain circumstances, sharp rhetoric, a big military -- and, just as important, a willingness to talk and negotiate -- can succeed in peacefully bringing down a rotten regime.

Unfortunately, some on the right took away only part of that lesson. They embraced Reagan's idea of sticks, but neglected the point about carrots. Indeed, giddy ideologues, drunk on their own triumphalism, spoke grandiosely of "the end of history," as if the collapse of one noxious ideology, communism, was going to cause everyone in the world to want to be just like Americans.

And if foreigners didn't want to be like us? Well, then, the new right-wing thinking held that we should force them to be free. These new ideologues were much different from traditional conservatives -- hence the term, "neoconservative." They had the word "neo" on the brain, as they searched the globe looking for enemies that would bring back to them the thrill of past wars, hot and cold.

In 1996, prominent neoconservatives William Kristol and Robert Kagan published an article in Foreign Affairs titled "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy," in which they praised Reagan for his "moral clarity" and demanded an end to the "tepid" spirit of the times. It was as if the neocons wanted enemies to smite, a struggle for the sake of struggle.

But what if the American people simply wanted to be left in peace? Well, they had a plan for that: Turn up the neo-Reaganesque rhetorical volume. "History shows," Kristol and Kagan wrote, "that the American people can be summoned to meet the challenges of global leadership if statesmen make the case loudly, cogently and persistently."

The neocons finally found their president in Bush. After Sept. 11, 2001, Bush was seized with the idea that America was in a showdown with "evildoers" -- not just Osama bin Laden, but also Iraq and the rest of the "axis of evil" -- and that all the nations of the world had better get on board with the United States. Or else.

Once again, many Americans cheered, but this time most other countries booed. Bush's response was to become even more bombastic. Now the president has talked the United States into a corner; and the only way out is war. Which, of course, is what Reagan avoided, even as he got what he wanted.

More than a decade after Reagan left office, he still has plenty of detractors. But as Bush & Co. prove, the greatest threat to the Gipper's good memory is the crude attempt to duplicate his success, using a lot more rhetoric -- and a lot less common sense.