I remember reading Rachel Maddow's foreign policy book "Drift" sometime last year I think - written back when Rachel was decent on foreign policy obviously - and the book is just filled with anecdotes of hideous incompetence from that foreign policy era, and scaremongering about
completely fictitious Soviet aggression. By the 80s, almost all that shit was purely invented fearmongering from US conservatives for electoral purposes. The stage of the cold-war where war was a legitimate possibility had long-since passed at that point - the Soviets were far more concerned with internal affairs and their own foreign embarrassments that war with the US was never going to happen. Saying "all those nukes were for our defense!" is fanciful to put it mildly. How many times do you need to be able to destroy the planet to feel secure?
And yet we've objectively created the most peaceful time in human history. That's in an inarguable, incontrovertible fact. The US Navy protects international trade and are literally a day away at most for aid and disaster relief around the world. We stopped Europeans from engaging in pointless wars and conflicts.
We're not perfect by any means, but our two closes replacements should we fall on the global stage (China, and Russia) are so far beyond the pale, that if you're such an isolationist that you'd be willing to cede world influence to these regimes, you're fucking batshit crazy.
I'm no isolationist, but the argument that we need a military anywhere near the scale that it is right now is completely insane, and seeing people who present as left-of-center join the fucking Reagan Battalion in piling on Bernie for saying an irrefutable fact - that the US in the 80s was unquestionably ramping up arms manufacturing explicitly to aggressively posture to the USSR - is a bummer and also kind of unsurprising, is all I'm saying.
The US military can be a force for good in the world if led by the right people. It often was used for totally pointless conflicts in the cold-war era however. It's depressing that a lot of this history is erased.
