Most importantly, it demonstrates that time and history are not directional but circular. They can be turned back by sheer force. It’s understandable why this is a hard pill to swallow for a significant number of people who are either old-school die-hard liberal ideologues or those who grew up shaped by the post–Cold War “end of history” era. But the reason evangelical liberal internationalism fails repeatedly is not because of lack of trying, but that it is unnatural and is primarily dependent on hegemonic will and capability, and hegemony is unsustainable. Restrainers, different though their political backgrounds and underpinnings might be, understand that key assumption. Ideas won’t matter if there is no America to preserve anyway. Ideas won’t matter if the reigning hegemon is overstretched and collapses like the British Empire or the Soviet Union. The instinct of a realist and a restrainer is to avoid a scenario that might result if one keeps following failed prescriptions of the last quarter-century. And that is why restraint is on the rise. 

Dr Sumantra Maitra is a national-security fellow at CFTNI; a non-resident fellow at the James G Martin Center; and an elected early career historian member at the Royal Historical Society. You can find him on Twitter @MrMaitra. 

 Image: Reuters