America didn't forget. America changed and the world changed. And we can define those changes.
The world shifted from the Cold War Period to the Post Cold War Period. Foreign policy is framed by the foreign policy period. Foreign Policy is organized around external threats.
The cusp of the change was under GHW Bush and there emerged two competing ideas: the Powell Doctrine and the Wolfowitz Doctrine which would also be called first the NeoCon Doctrine and then the Bush Doctrine.
The Hart-Rudman Commission and the Gilmore Commission were convened to determine how the US would shift to the Post Cold War Period, which led to a major re-organization of the govt and creating DHS. The external threat shifted from the Soviets to the terrorists, which resulted in the "War on Terror". And we would win the war on terror the same way we won the cold war, demographically, or outlasting them.
The Cold War created a bi-polar world: Soviets Vs America. So in the post cold war period are we in a uni-polar world where the US is last remaining superpower and world hegemon, or is it now a multi-polar world. So the question becomes Unilateralism vs Multilateralism?
America changed in the sense that Foreign Policy Doctrines shifted. Under Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and GHW Bush, the Realists were most influential but the Liberal Interventionists rose to power under Clinton and the NeoCons rose to power under GW Bush. Under Obama the Realists have had the most influence. But Obama has framed everything as multilateral. And if you had to use one word to describe Obama's foreign policy, it would be multilateralism.
I get the same arguments from Friedman’s Flat Earth proponents. I read the book and finally realized it was largely based on interviews and works of NYT and similar journalists who want to blame everything on conservatives.
You can just bark that stuff up another tree or teach it to your junior college mush minds. I don’t really care.