Trump’s Foreign Policy is Weakening Populism Internationally

Trump's Political Nationalism is Damaging Populist Cultural Nationalism Worldwide

What follows is an extended version of my recent Telegraph article.

Trump has imposed tariffs on Canada and cut aid to Ukraine. This is weakening cultural nationalism across the West.

It is also boosting mainstream parties like Canada’s Liberals, British Labour and the German CDU, something liberal commentators are noticing and celebrating.

Trumpism contains an important contradiction. On the one hand, it views itself as fronting a worldwide movement against globalist elites. The recent CPAC conference featured foreign populist luminaries such as Javier Milliei, Nigel Farage and Jair Bolsonaro and an ‘international summit’ of conservative speakers from around the world. A similar, albeit more Anglocentric, transnationalism is evident at the National Conservatism conferences, featuring J.D. Vance, or the Jordan Peterson-fronted Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) which I attended recently in London. Vice-president J.D. Vance is especially well-connected to what we might term the Populist International. This is a key source of regime legitimacy.

On the other hand, Trump’s America-centric political nationalism has significantly damaged this project. Canada’s populist-lite Conservative leader Pierre Poillievre is its first victim. Prior to Trump announcing tariffs and threatening to annex Canada, the Conservatives enjoyed a seemingly unassailable polling lead of over 20 points, powered by Canadians who were sick of Trudeau’s woke extremism and his Liberal Party’s penchant for mass migration. However, Trump’s bombast has created a rally-around-the flag effect that has closed the gap between the two parties.

In Germany, meanwhile, some argue that Elon Musk’s intervention in the election in favour of the AfD sparked a ‘foreign interference’ backlash, damaging the AfD and causing it to underperform.

Trump’s attacks on Ukrainian president Zelensky and his cozying up to Putin have likewise fallen flat with many national populist voters outside America, who view Zelensky as a heroic defender of his people against a tyrant. In Britain, for instance, only a minority of Reform Party voters oppose assistance to Ukraine. Vance and Trump’s dressing-down of Zelensky reinforces the feeling that for America’s leaders, there is no principle other than might makes right.

America’s muscle-flexing political nationalism is alienating many who cheered the cultural nationalist notes played by J.D. Vance at Munich. ‘I praised Vance’s Munich speech criticizing the censorship and immigration policies of the European governments,’ wrote British-American historian Niall Ferguson, but the administration’s stance on Ukraine struck Ferguson as ‘appeasement.’ Vance is sensitive to the perceptions of the nationalist international, and swiftly retorted on X that Ferguson’s tweet was ‘moralistic garbage.’ This did not convince Ferguson’s fellow British conservatives Konstantin Kisin, Piers Morgan and Douglas Murray, who joined Ferguson’s critical chorus.

Out of interest, I ran a poll on X in which I asked only ‘conservatives in the West’ whether they were pro- or anti-Ukraine. The categories were designed to elicit a gut emotional response. Of nearly 2000 people who answered, conservatives outside America leaned 75-25 in support of Ukraine. Even a narrow majority of online American conservatives backed Ukraine. This echoed polls which showed that most Republican voters felt much cooler toward Putin than Zelensky.

Trump has now slapped tariffs on Europe. This will tarnish the populist brand still further as attention is diverted away from Europe’s quest to reduce immigration and resist woke revolution. The entire continent may respond the way the Canadian electorate has, with political and economic threats from America displacing cultural ones.

As my doctoral supervisor Anthony Smith once summarized it, the philosophy of nationalism holds that each nation has its own particularity which it should protect and develop, and that a peaceful world order is based on free nations. Those who support principled nationalism oppose imperialist actions such as laying claim to another country, erasing its culture or invading it. Only an egocentric nationalist concerned solely with their own national status would do so.

Trump initially inspired principled nationalists across the world because he vowed to roll back the power of elites and institutions to weaken national borders, memory and traditions. The focus on limiting illegal immigration and ending the anti-white, anti-male, transactivist DEI regime landed well worldwide.

But this has changed as the Trump administration has gone on an America-centric power trip. As Matthew Continetti observes:

‘[This] began with Trump’s pledges to acquire Greenland, absorb Canada, name the Gulf of America, retake the Panama Canal, and own the Gaza Strip. Trump announced reciprocal tariffs on global trade…called Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator without elections” .’

These actions give primacy to political rather than cultural nationalism, state power over cultural reform.

This egocentric political nationalism is deflecting attention away from the acute cultural threats facing nations across the West: woke cultural socialism, mass immigration and the vogue for multiculturalism over assimilation.

Political nationalists concentrate on politics and economics. They are interested in separating (i.e. Sturgeon’s Scotland), unifying (i.e. Mazzini’s Italy) or expanding to gain status (i.e. Wilhelm’s pre-WWI Germany). Economically, nationalists seek self-sufficiency through protectionism and mercantilism.

Cultural nationalism is typically defensive. Cultural nationalists seek to protect their culture through linguistic revival (i.e. De Valera’s Gaelic-Catholic postwar Ireland), assimilation (i.e. the ‘100 Per Cent Americanization’ drive of the 1920s) or immigration restriction.

Political and cultural nationalism can reinforce each other, but they can often conflict. For instance, American political nationalists in the 1840s wanted to annex all of Mexico, and in the 1890s to absorb the Philippines. They were successfully opposed by American cultural nationalists who felt that this would dilute America’s Anglo-Protestant ethnocultural unity.

In the 2010s, growing concern over immigration and multiculturalism benefited Quebec’s cultural nationalist Coalition Avenir du Quebec (CAQ), sucking oxygen away from the separatist but pro-immigration political nationalism of the Parti Quebecois. Something similar appears to be happening to the pro-immigration, multiculturalist political nationalism of Sinn Fein in Ireland.

National populism is fundamentally about cultural nationalism, namely limiting immigration and multiculturalism. While political independence from the European Union or international agreements matters for populist elites such as Nigel Farage or Marine Le Pen, most of their voters view this is secondary. For them, the quest for political sovereignty is important primarily as a means to prevent further decline in national distinctiveness and cohesion.

Worries about pressure on public services or jobs are real, but when I asked Brexit voters in a 2017 survey whether ‘pressure on public services’ was a concern, most ranked this of middling importance. It only shot up when the prefix ‘immigrants putting’ was inserted in front of the word ‘pressure.’ Views on immigration shape economic concerns rather than the reverse.

Inside America this tension is not yet manifest.

But that will change as executive orders are blocked by the courts, relying on Congress to proceed. Legislating means setting priorities. If these are dominated by foreign spats and trade wars, this expends the political capital, floor time and column inches needed to secure border enforcement and win the long war of attrition for free speech and cultural tradition against the ravages of DEI in government and education.

Outside the US, the America Alone approach drives up the visibility of political nationalism. Countries are forced to defend against American aggression, repressing cultural concerns.

Will the political nationalist ego of MAGA trump its cultural alter?

If so, expect a weaker and more divided international right.