It's not 2000 anymore...

A thought that's been trickling about my brainstem....

Progressives often decry (correctly) conventional GOP formulations on economic recovery because "it's not 1979 anymore."  Tight money is antithetical to what we need.  I think there's a similar moment emerging on foreign policy with the shoe on the other foot.  The following idea is still deeply embryonic, so bear with.

The last decade+ has seen a significant rise in liberal advocacy for isolationism masquerading as realism and retrenchment.  The idea that there's an emergent multipolar world and that the US has no choice but to retrench for its own sake and take advantage of its own natural cover.  This foolishness amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As the police stop walking the beat, crime rises.  As crime rises, you need more cops to walk the beat.  As the US retrenches from hard and soft power projection, international lawlessness spikes.  As the Obama administration turns its head towards myopic Pollyannas like Mearsheimer, America is losing its natural alliances with Westernized democracies and the soft power projected from its role as global hegemon.  Because of some bizarre, fetishized devotion to an Eisenhower presidency that never existed (mimicking the right's own Reagan fetishism), the Obama administration has successfully completed the task started by the Bush 43 administration by drawing down the US' role after bungling imperial wars that have confused a public that probably still broadly supports their more righteous cousin, liberal interventionism.

And so, it's 1979 all over again.  It's not 2000.  We've drawn down to the field and made ourselves small enough to be sniffed.  For once, the right is at least a little right.  The US must return to projecting power in a meaningful way, to abandoning counterproductive detente policies, and to buttressing liberal democracy the world over against its pernicious foes.

The world's gone multipolar, and the tonic is Reagan-era neoconservativism.