Daniel Ortega will be inaugurated as the president of Nicaragua on Wednesday, and if a report in Prensa Latina, a state-controlled Cuban wire, is true, President Reagan’s old foe is already up to his old tricks. The Cuban agency reported that on the guest list for the inauguration is none other than the Holocaust-denying, terrorism-sponsoring, nuclear bomb-building president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

It was during Mr. Ortega’s rule in the 1980s that Nicaragua served as a forward operating base for the Soviet Union, violating the doctrine of President Monroe that powers from the other side of the planet shouldn’t meddle in our hemisphere. With the Soviet Union defunct, the next worst thing going is the global jihadist network funded in part by Iran. So there’s something of a familiar pattern at play in the Iranians seeking influence in Central America, and in Mr. Ortega receiving their overtures.

A friendship would be part of Iran’s wider strategy to gain anti-American allies within striking distance of our shores. So far, Iran has found its most reliable allies in Cuba and Venezuela, both of which voted against the United Nations resolution to refer Iran and its nuclear weapons program to the Security Council. Iran’s relationship with Cuba has been described by the Cuban press as “brotherly,” and the Venezuela-Iran connection has included trade deals, numerous photo ops, and the exchange of national decorations between the two presidents. The head of Iran’s Export Development Center, Mehdi Ghazanfari, yesterday was quoted by the official Islamic Republic News Agency announcing a conference in Tehran next month on “Trade and Investment Opportunities in Latin American Countries.”

Mr. Ortega squeaked by with 38% of the vote in November’s election by embracing Catholicism and rejecting his Marxist past. As president-elect, he’s gone out of his way to calm the fears of the private sector, nominating a former Contra leader as his vice president and coming out in support of a law passed in October banning abortions of any kind. But many Americans are old enough to remember him from Reagan’s address to the Joint Session of Congress in 1983, in which the Gipper spoke of the strategic importance of Central America in respect of the Panama Canal and said, “Nicaragua is just as close to Miami, San Antonio, San Diego, and Tucson as those cities are to Washington, where we’re gathered tonight.”

The prospect of Iranian missiles aimed at those cities from Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua, or Iranian submarines operating from a deep-water Caribbean port built by Warsaw Pact engineers, targeting American cities, is a Cold War flashback combined with a contemporary nightmare. The Bush administration’s influence over Iranian behavior is limited, but it’s been bipartisan American policy dating back to Monroe and Theodore Roosevelt — and on through President Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis — that the Western Hemisphere is our own backyard.

The veterans of the 1980s battles with Mr. Ortega are to this day in important jobs in Washington, from old Ortega foes John Negroponte at the State Department and Elliott Abrams at the National Security Council to old Ortega friends Christopher Dodd and John Kerry holding sway on the Democratic side of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Perhaps a Managua-Tehran axis would be more than even Senators Dodd and Kerry could stomach, though the prospect of a Soviet-dominated Central America never seemed to bother them much. If it falls to President Bush to act, he’ll be able to do it on Monroe’s authority.