Prewar, these people were called isolationists, during Vietnam they were called non-interventionists or doves when their opposites were called hawks and afterwards, neoconservatives.
The pendulum always swings with black swan events like the Alamo, the sinking of the Maine, the Lusitania, the Zimmerman telegram, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 and so on. Pat Buchanan makes very good arguments, for example, that World War I was folly as was America's involvement in it. He tries to make the same argument, unpersuasively, about World War II but more persuasively about Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
He's been a very insightful observer over the decades and one of the few to emerge unscathed from Nixon's inner circle. He is, of course, writing this article tongue-in-cheek. He is actually rueful that we would draw on our history to conduct an aggressive foreign policy yet he surely must know that aggressive progressives are determined to write American history in such a way as to so thoroughly discredit our story that we will withdraw from doing that which only we can do in and for the world. That is why, for example, President Polk, the author of the Mexican War which added the Southwest, is ranked so low on their list of good presidents.
To give a Paleo conservative perhaps more than is his due (a class in which I count myself), we understand that the law of unintended consequences applies to foreign interventions as well as to domestic social engineering but the alternative in a Hobbesian world is to turn the streets over to the thugs as and when America withdraws from its role as policeman. The balance is key, not whether never to intervene but when and why and how.
Those of us who fancy ourselves possessed of a realistic foreign policy approach ought to remind AOC and her gang that a nation's right to exist ultimately depends not on Wilsonian notions of self-determination (often imposed by elitist top-down) but on a nation's capacity to defend its geographical sovereignty. Israel is not a nation state today because of the Balfour Declaration but it is a nationstate because it won a series of wars. Manifest destiny did not extend our borders from sea to shining sea because of kismet, the continent was won by right of conquest.
When Benjamin Franklin observed that the constitutional convention had given us a Republic if we could keep it, his words applied to keeping it safe from foreign enemies no less than from domestic enemies.
