Isolationism, in the traditional American sense, concerned avoiding foreign entanglements. This means alliances.

It does not mean sending troops off to occupy other nations for their own good.

In the case of Iraq, we sent troops off to occupy another nation for its own good in spite of some of our allies.

But be that as it may: The occupation of Europe and Japan after the Second World War is not comparable to the occupation of Iraq. Europe and Japan were a mess after a war that the US was drawn into, not one we started. The US was the only combattant left standing. Our grandparents, acting through our parents, were determined not to withdraw again into the isolationist shell that followed the First World War, a shell which some people blamed for the onset of the Second.

And then there was the Cold War, which was not so cold in some regions of the world. It was not fought on the land occupied by the principles, but those proxy wars got plenty hot.

The United States is teetering on the brink of empire. We already have the land mass, though that was gathered in a unique enough way to have avoided many of empire's traditional trappings. (Not all: under the heading "Subject Peoples", see also "Native Americans".)

We are exerting our military influence in ways that are not part of the citizen-soldier tradition that supports a republic. We are concentrating our wealth in a tiny portion of our upper class. We are allowing the state more and more liberties with our liberties because we are afraid of the people who criticize our culture, even though most of them are not like the criminals who attacked us on our own land.

Absent the daggers and the poison, we are looking at a similar pattern as the decline of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Empire. Incidentally, a similar thing happened in France between 1789 and 1801, but they had a more extreme Revolutionary experience than the US had. (We had more merchants and no dukes.)

The irony of a poem that mourns the loss of imperial prestige being mistaken for a protest against isolationism is not lost on me.