‘America First’ Nationalism Isn’t Leaving the White House

F oreign policy was for years the great point of agreement between the paleo Right and the radical Left, with the familiar polemicists from those respective camps insisting that the United States acts as an “empire.” Patrick Buchanan wrote a big foreign-policy book called A Republic, Not an Empire, with the romantic subtitle Reclaiming America’s Destiny. Noam Chomsky published angry essays with titles such as “Modern-Day American Imperialism: Middle East and Beyond,” in which he observed that, “Talking about American imperialism is rather like talking about triangular triangles.”

The points of particular harmony are amusing and illuminating: Chomsky identifies George Washington as the father of American imperialism, and crackpot paleo-libertarian hero Murray Rothbard denounced the founding father as “Generalissimo Washington,” a thug and a caudillo.

But the United States practices a funny kind of imperialism. Rather than command tribute from subjugated peoples, it sends billions and billions of dollars around the world in the form of both public aid and private assistance, along with a considerably greater sum in investment — a $6 trillion position as of 2019. American philanthropic efforts led by Norman Borlaug and funded by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations revolutionized food production from Mexico to India, helping to abolish the plague of famine — and, ultimately dependency — from those countries. From the Marshall Plan in Germany to the reconstruction of Japan, losing a war to the United States was a winning move — as it would be for Iraq and Afghanistan, too, if the powers that be in those unhappy countries had the capacity to take advantage of it.

The United States enjoyed a hegemon’s position at the end of World War II, but it did not practice traditional hegemonism. In an important sense, it couldn’t: The American position of worldwide dominance at the end of the war was commanding, but it was neither stable nor sustainable; in a world of traditional great-power national-interest politics, the United States would have seen its position decline as Germany and Japan rebuilt and other nations recovered. As one nation among nations, the United States would have been a very big fish, but by no means a match for a sufficiently robust alliance of smaller fishes. From that point of view, the United States created the liberal postwar order in order to secure its own position and its own interests. It was a project not of conquest but of seduction.

Economically and politically, the United States was not in itself sufficient to satisfy its own aspirations, its national mission and ministry. It required a larger, richer order. And so it worked to create a world of cooperation, trade, cultural exchange, and development based on that rarest of political commodities: genuinely enlightened self-interest rooted in the knowledge that Americans have more to gain from rich and stable neighbors than from poor and desperate ones. At the height of the Cold War, the dream of the purported warmonger Ronald Reagan was to create an effective missile-defense system and then share that technology with our greatest enemy, the Soviet Union, in order to render both countries’ nuclear arsenals ineffective. That was partly idealism, but it was partly realism, too.

The global order founded in the postwar years is to a nontrivial extent an American order, a fact that is sometimes more readily appreciated in Brussels and Beijing than it is on the campaign trail in the United States. For the second half of the 20th century and well into the 21st, globalization effectively meant Americanization. The institutions of the global order speak with an American accent: The General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, the predecessor to the World Trade Organization, was born in the U.S. State Department; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was largely the work of U.S. diplomats whose interest in mutual defense was far from altruistic; the United Nations was largely the work of the Franklin Roosevelt administration, especially New Deal lieutenant Harry Hopkins, in cooperation with the British government of Winston Churchill. Newer institutions have held broadly to the pattern: ICANN has the distinctive mark of California on it. The critical institutions and protocols of global cooperation may have their headquarters in Geneva or Brussels, but they are in the largest part (though of course not exclusively) the product of American effort and imagination.

And what is true formally is true informally: World culture is informed by American culture, from hip-hop to Facebook.

The liberal postwar order became a genuinely global order not by force of arms but because the benefits of belonging to it far outweighed the tradeoffs. We didn’t have to twist a lot of arms: If anything, we were too accommodating to those who came calling. For example, we probably should have been more demanding on both the trade and political fronts when Beijing sought “most-favored nation” status from the Clinton administration in 1994 and entry to the WTO in 2001. But we seem to have a national commitment to dropping the ball on China: When the Trump administration started making noises about putting together a Pacific trade bloc to counteract Chinese power in the region, it apparently did not occur to anybody that one of the administration’s first acts had been blowing up precisely such an arrangement in the form of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

(The real world is complex and does not conform to our ideological needs, and so it must be noted that some of those global institutions’ American connections are less than entirely confidence-inspiring: The International Monetary Fund and the World Health Organization both were midwifed in part by Americans working as Soviet spies — Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss, respectively.)

Now, having created a world, the United States is in retreat from the world it created. Why?

The problems Americans associate with what we call (for lack of a better term) globalization would not have seemed like problems at all to political leaders of the past. For centuries, kings and emperors made vast investments of blood and treasure to establish trade routes and keep them open. But in the contemporary United States, politicians complain that the world brings all of its best produce to the United States, laying treasures at the feet of Americans at prices that are just too damned . . . low, because Americans must be protected from desirable goods offered at affordable prices. Donald Trump is one of the few world leaders ever to complain that the Germans are not militaristic enough. Joe Biden will come into office facing some real problems, but they will be problems that would have been the envy of most of the world leaders who have ever lived.

Biden presents himself as the anti-Trump, but in many important ways the two men are more alike than different. (Please spare me the myth of Joe Biden’s decency — he is as fundamentally dishonest a man as our political caste has produced.) Much has been made of Trump’s supposed nationalism — our so-called nationalists have a much stronger commitment to the word than to the idea — but it is only a variation on Barack Obama’s wan attempts to repackage Teddy Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” as “economic patriotism.” Calling to mind Bill Clinton’s “butchers of Beijing” talk, Biden has promised to operate from the hawkish side of Trump when it comes to China. He does not talk exactly like Trump, but he has quite similar ideas when it comes to trade and globalization. In 2016, Trump remarked that he often found himself in agreement with Bernie Sanders when it came to trade and immigration, and it was the socialist from Vermont via Brooklyn, not the nat-pop demagogue from Queens, who whispered darkly of an “open borders” plot hatched by business interests to undercut the position of the American workingman by flooding the labor market with nefarious foreigners scheming to . . . work. That kind of nationalist thinking is by no means an exclusively Republican project; in fact, the central planning it involves traditionally comes much more naturally to Democrats, because it is based in progressivism’s managerial assumptions about the nature of society.

Trump will be missed in Budapest and Warsaw, while most of our European allies will be happy to see him go. But they should not get their hopes up too high when it comes to the Biden administration, the interests of which appear to be largely limited to undoing initiatives that have Donald Trump’s fingerprints on them. Biden may put a signature on the Paris Agreement as a sop to the Left, and he may take a few small steps such as reversing the Trump administration’s move to reduce the U.S. troop presence in Germany. But he also intends to double down on Trump-era “buy American” rules and is likely to maintain at least some of the Trump-era tariffs with Richard Trumka and the AFL-CIO looking over his shoulder. Biden will be at odds with Germany and France over developments such as Nord Stream 2. And if, after the shock of the Trump administration, the Atlantic allies are less willing to accede to American leadership, it will be in no small part because they believe that American leadership can no longer be relied upon, that crediting Washington leaves them unacceptably vulnerable. As Mark Leonard of the European Council on Foreign Relations puts it: “In this sense, Trump—an exponent of everything Europeans oppose—may have served as the accidental father of European sovereignty. The politicians most supportive of a strong transatlantic alliance find themselves paradoxically tolerating outcomes that could well destroy it.”

An even greater paradox is that the “America First” element in both parties is leading a retreat away from American interests secured in the liberal global order. Our nickel-and-dime nationalists — and Joe Biden is included in their number, though he doesn’t call himself one — have only a scanty and crude understanding of the national interest, which they reliably conflate with a series of discrete parochial interests: this steel mill, that politically sensitive automobile company, these sweetheart deals for Boeing. The United States in 2020 is not facing a Nazi Germany or a Soviet Union — as horrifying as the government of the so-called People’s Republic of China is, it represents a challenge of a different kind.

But the interests of the United States in 2020 are in many ways still what they were in 1945: trade, stability, cooperation in the pursuit of common interests, mutual security, peace. These are interests that the United States cannot secure by relying exclusively on its own national resources. Neither can the United States improve its national position by retreating from international institutions and international engagement.

There have always been those who advocated a Little America. The Pat Buchanans and Noam Chomskys of the world have always been with us — but we once had the good sense not to put them in charge of anything. Now, we have replaced Donald Trump with a more conventional and better-mannered embodiment of substantially similar thinking, another small and simple man for a world that stubbornly refuses to grow smaller or simpler.