Just more than 25 years ago, on March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan asked Americans a simple question: “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation … [but instead] that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?”

The weeks surrounding the quarter-century anniversary of that Reagan speech have provided ample proof that his hopes were well-founded and that the sneers of his liberal critics were undeserved. Missile defense works, it will be deployed to Europe, and Russia is tacitly accepting both its inevitability and even its potential benefits. All of which makes it even more essential that our next president be fully supportive of missile defense. John McCain strongly supports such defenses, while Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both want to scale them back severely. The positions of the latter two are reckless.