The last time America heard from Liz Cheney, she was fending off charges that she’d lied on a fishing license application and was fighting with her sister, Mary, about gay marriage. Those issues—along with an embarrassing squabble with former Senator Alan Simpson—dominated her disastrous and short-lived campaign for the U.S. Senate in Wyoming, which she abruptly abandoned in January owing to the “serious health issues” of one of her five children.

It was a humbling experience for Cheney, who’d moved from Virginia to her family’s ancestral home of Wyoming in order to challenge the three-term incumbent Mike Enzi. And although people close to Cheney say those health issues were very real and upsetting, the perception outside her inner-circle is that she was driven from the race. Among the political cognoscenti, Cheney was damaged goods.

But today, Cheney has reemerged with both guns blazing from her secure, undisclosed location. She’s on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page—with her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney—attacking President Barack Obama’s foreign policy and accusing him of being “determined to leave office ensuring he has taken America down a notch.” And she (again with her father) has launched a new group, the Alliance for a Strong America, to, as she puts it in a direct-to-camera video, “educate about and advocate for the policies needed to restore American power and pre-eminence.”

I’ll leave it to others, like James Fallows and Brian Beutler, to weigh in on the merits of the WSJ op-ed itself, particularly as they relate to the former vice president's own record and degree of self-awareness. But evaluating the op-ed and the new group on purely strategic grounds, it’s clear that we haven’t heard the last of Liz Cheney. And the worsening situation in Iraq—which has occasioned her reemergence—suggests she’ll be on more comfortable political footing.

After all, one of the biggest difficulties Liz faced in her Senate campaign was that foreign policy was completely off the table. Instead of getting to ride the old neocon hobbyhorse of Obama’s perfidy and weakness in the Middle East, she had to talk about grazing rights and Internet sales tax—in other words, the things that mattered to voters in Wyoming rather than to her fellow talking-head panelists on Fox News. And even when it came to courting Republicans outside Wyoming for money and endorsements, Cheney couldn’t go to the neocon wheelhouse. Although some of the Republicans who hated her father’s foreign policy views, like Senator Rand Paul, supported Enzi, so did hawks like Senator John McCain. As one hawkish Cheney associate lamented to me last year about the Senate race, “At some level it’s a proxy war, but how much of a proxy war can it be when you have McCain and Rand Paul on the same side?”