if you deny that, or disagree with it, you have, somewhere along the way, lost the plot.
"splendid isolation", "non-interventionism" and "isolationism" are ideas that are historically associated with the political right.
and, this is the irony everybody misses - hitchens was wrong, because he misinterpreted the facts in front of him. i offer no defense of his conclusions or deductions at all. but, he represented the left in almost every debate i've seen him have regarding the topic - and his opponents, who opposed intervention on ideological grounds, were almost exclusively ideological conservatives. in the sense that this debate represents the left v the right on ideological grounds of intervention v non-intervention, the spectrum has entirely reversed.
so, something happened to the spectrum in those years, but it wasn't a rightwards movement of christopher hitchens, it was much more of a broader shift of forces on the ground to the right. reagan famously said that the democratic party left him. and, this is much closer to the truth: hitch didn't leave the left, so much as the left left him behind.
and, today, we have fake leftists everywhere we turn, that think the left is about ensuring equal pay for upper middle class employees of non-unionized corporations and revolution is an idea that belongs to the uneducated poor people on the political right.
for that reason, a part of me wants history to prove hitchens right. i prefer his argument, on a purely aesthetic basis.
but i know better, when he so obviously and so tragically didn't, as a consequence of his disastrous americanization.