Writing in the Atlantic late last month, journalist George Packer posited a “new theory of American power,” a liberal internationalism that accounted for a “recognition of limits” for US foreign policy. Packer summed up this strategy toward the end of his essay: “Align US policy with the universal desire for freedom, but maintain a keen sense of unintended consequences and no illusions of easy success.”

This was both a challenge and a promise to Americans wanting to move on from the “war on terror”: don’t forget the war on terror’s failures — and reject its methods (torture and rendition) — but maintain a vision of global “freedom” flourishing through military power. The war in Ukraine, Packer argued, had killed the (now fleeting) popularity of “restraint” — the idea that the United States should scale back its international commitments, cut or remake the military budget to reflect a reduced role for the United States in the world, and give up on a strategy of what political scientist Barry Posen has called “liberal hegemony”

As one would imagine, Packer’s essay caused a stir, if not a visceral loathing, among restrainers (the term du jour for anti-interventionists). But as historian Samuel Moyn tweeted, Packer’s essay — while gilding liberal internationalism for a rehabilitation of American primacy — reflected the reality that the old order cannot return after the war on terror, “that a militarism-first option of liberal warmongers can’t simply be revived.”