Thirteen years after America’s victory in the Cold War, a group credited with hastening the Soviet Union’s demise is forming again to take on the threat of radical Islamic terror.

Senator Lieberman, a Democrat of Connecticut, and Senator Kyl, a Republican of Arizona, are expected to announce today in Washington the third incarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger, an organization founded in 1950 with an aim to triple American defense spending and reinvented in 1976 to oppose America’s negotiation of the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with Moscow.

This time, the focus of the committee will be the global terror network and those rogue regimes that support them.

Its mission statement, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Sun, commits its 43 members to “resisting and defeating terrorist organizations, ending collusion between rogue regimes and terrorists, and supporting reform in regions that threaten to export terror.”

The announcement to revive one of the pillars of the Reagan revolution in foreign affairs comes as both parties are divided on America’s role in the world.

Delegates on the Democratic Party’s platform committee this month, for example, clashed on whether to include language calling the Iraq war a mistake.

Meanwhile, in the GOP, many traditional conservatives, such as William F. Buckley and the CNN commentator Tucker Carlson, have said they would not support the war today if they knew then what they know now.

In 2002, one-time presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan launched a magazine aimed at rescuing the Republicans from the so-called neoconservatives.

Today’s inter-party disputes echo the policy squabbles during the 1970s when the then-editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, and strategic analyst Paul Nitze helped remake the Committee on the Present Danger.

At that time, both major parties believed a detente or accommodation with the Soviet Union would enhance American national security. The panel disagreed and pushed a hard line on Moscow, striving to defeat the communist empire.

Eventually, many members of the new committee, such as Richard Perle, joined the Reagan administration and implemented a policy to outspend the Soviet military, reasoning that the Kremlin would ignore its social infrastructure to keep up in an arms race its economy could not bear.

The critics of that committee accused them of scare-mongering and distorting intelligence to make the Soviet Union appear more menacing than it was. Those barbs resemble the ones hurled at political appointees in the Bush administration dubbed as neocons.

And while some of the intelligence proffered by the old committee on the present danger did not turn out, some of it did, such as its insistence the Soviets had stockpiled a secret biological weapons program that the CIA confirmed after the Cold War was over.

The new committee, like its predecessor, remains devoted to strategic victory over tactical accommodation.

The mission statement says that it seeks to educate the public and policymakers to “build support for a strategy of decisive victory against the menace not only to the United States, but to democracy and freedom everywhere.”

The new panel, to be headed by President Clinton’s first director of central intelligence, James Woolsey, and will include both Democrats and Republicans.

The group also will include former ambassador Mark Palmer, whose book “Breaking the Real Axis of Evil” outlines a strategy for ridding the world of its remaining dictators through nonviolent political action, as well as former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who has recently blasted the foreign service for failing to seek out dissidents in authoritarian and totalitarian countries.

Former Ambassador Max Kampelman, Mr. Podhoretz, and his wife, Midge Decter – all prominent members of the 1976 iteration of the panel -will also be members of this one.

Absent from the list are some prominent conservative supporters of the Iraq war,such as the editor of the Weekly Standard, William Kristol. The committee’s executive director, Peter Hannaford, told the Sun he had a “good meeting with him” several weeks ago, but has yet to hear back whether he will lend his name to the mission statement.

“The first committee was created for the purpose of defeating SALT II. It had a focused purpose and that is why it succeeded,” Ms. Decter said. “This time, the present danger is not Soviet missiles but terrorism. And we are committed to attempting to influence government and public opinion on the dangers of terrorism and what needs to be done to continue this fight.”

Ms. Decter said this fight on the one hand meant a defense of the USA Patriot Act.

“There is a tremendous amount of irresponsible resistance to the measures taken to protect us here,” she said. “That makes it difficult for the government to protect us.”

Ms. Decter also said she hopes the committee will stress that Iraq is only one front in a larger war against terrorism and the regimes that support them. “It would be very bad for us to decide Iraq was a little adventure and now we are finished,” she said. “Being the greatest power in the world, we can’t be finished.”

The two-page statement of its mission and purpose does not advocate any policies toward specific countries as the president did in his 2002 State of the Union speech, when he said Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Iran, and North Korea comprised an “axis of evil.”

Mr. Hannaford said that in the coming weeks the new committee would form policy groups to hash out specific positions on countries like Iran or Syria. “It’s much easier to get a broad range of people to sign on to a principle than a set of specific policies,” he said.

When the new committee gets down to hashing out those policies there may be disagreement. For example, former Rep. Stephen Solarz has signed his name to a Council on Foreign Relations task force report on Iran that pushes for selective engagement with the ruling mullahs there.

Another member of the panel, the author Laurie Mylroie, has said on many occasions that the Iranian regime has not attacked Americans since the days of Ayatollah Khomeini. The chairman of the new committee, Mr. Woolsey, on the other hand has said America’s war with the organized terrorist groups and states like Iran that support them amount to World War IV.

Speaking from his summer home in France, Mr. Perle told the Sun he plans on joining the committee when he returns to America. He said the real rift within the Republican Party today was with what he called “paleoconservatives.”

“They are reverting to a brand of isolationism. If they understood the danger, they would be prepared to make a more robust effort to counter it. The emphasis of the Democratic party is on easy ways of providing security like signing agreements. They don’t like taking risks or resorting to the use of force,” he said.