T.J. Jackson Lears identified William Fulbright as one of the pragmatic realists against “the American Century” in his contribution to The Short American Century: A Post-Mortem:

Virtue unleashed was at best an annoyance, at worst a holy terror. “I am not prepared to argue that mankind is suffering from an excess of virtue but I think the world has endured all it can of the crusades of high-minded men bent on the regeneration of the human race,” Fulbright said. For starters, not everyone shared the same notion of regeneration: American emissaries of virtue all too often found themselves in the position of the Boy Scouts who, when asked by their scoutmaster why it took three of them help an old lady across the street, explained that “she didn’t want to go.”

Instead of this intrusive moralism, Fulbright proposed what he identified as a “conservative policy” inspired by Burke, Castlereagh, and Metternich: “They believed in the preservation of indissoluble links between the past and the future, because they profoundly mistrusted abstract ideas, and because they did not think themselves or any other men qualified to play God.” Fulbright shared the European conservatives’ historicism–which was not a simpleminded belief that one could extract discrete “lessons” from history but a recognition that the power of the past pressed inescapably into the future, shaping policy decisions in ways that messianic utopians could only dimly understand. A sober appreciation for history tempered grandiose delusions. (p. 112-113)

What also distinguished this conservative view was an unwillingness to stoke instability and disorder in pursuit of a particular doctrine or idea. Armed doctrines always run roughshod over human dignity, and they can often lay waste to entire countries. Such doctrines also fail on their own terms. An appreciation for history would lead us to realize that there are no exceptions to this.