Our tolerance for ambitious dictators is substantially lower than it was pre WWII. Hitler invaded Poland, and several other countries, and still the United States did not enter the war. I suppose we didn't see Germany as much of a threat to us specifically, and we did not want to become entangled in another European war. It took a direct military attack from Japan to bring us in to the war. Now lets skip ahead about 50 years. Saddam Hussein has just invaded Kuwait. Saddam is no threat to us, nor is he a threat to our European allies. It's debatable whether or not he was capable of or even wanted to become a threat to Israel. But in this instance, we did not wait. We (and a substantial coalition) responded, and pushed Saddam back in to Iraq. Obviously, we have had other dealings with Saddam since the first Iraq war. This despite the fact that (some would argue this point) he still posed no threat to the United States or its allies. Even since then, while there is still work to be done in Iraq, there have been rumblings of a possible war with Iran, and to a much lesser extent, North Korea.
Is this, in a way, Hitler's doing? Is it because of him that that our new doctrine focuses on "fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here" and pre-emptive strikes?
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I think that through our study of history we have really tried to learn from our past mistakes. One of the United States biggest mistakes during WWII was not noticing or taking action against the atrocities early enough. We as a country try to notice bad things happening before they pose a problem for our country.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was another pre-emptive action since they viewed war with the US as inevitable.
Hussein was a threat to Israel and did fire rockets at them in GW1.
I wouldn't characterize Hitler's attacks as pre-emptive in the sense that you describe them here. His motivation was expanding the German empire. Tactical pre-emptive strikes predate Hitler considerably.
I think the main point to take from your post is that military intervention is much easier when the opponent is relatively week like Iraq in GF1. As we've talked about in class, the French and British underestimated their own capabilties while overestimating Germany's, so military intervention wasn't such an easy decision and a protracted war was seen as inevitable and costly once it began.
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