ABSTRACT
There is a tendency among international and geopolitical scholars to cyclically underestimate the challenges and structural transformations occurring under their eyes and to explain these cognitive failures by recurring to nostalgic narratives of ‘why we lost’ something. We have seen such an approach several times in recent decades where the ‘lost’ object, from time to time, was represented by the Balkans, or Turkey, or Russia, or China and so on. This tendency of being geopolitically short-sighted and then geopolitically regretful is clearly an aspect of the present times, in which the West has visibly lost the leadership of world affairs, or governance as it is mostly called nowadays.
