By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Trump and the New Age of Nationalism

As it did in 2016, Donald Trump’s presidency has prompted commentators in and outside of Washington to reflect on the direction of U.S. foreign policy. Questions abound over how Trump will deal with China and Russia, as well as India and emerging powers in the global South. U.S. foreign policy is headed into a period of uncertainty, even if Trump’s first term provides a stark reference point for how he might manage the United States’ role in the world in the coming years.

Trump’s return to the White House cements his place in history as a transformational figure. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan shaped distinct “ages” of U.S. history—they redefined the role of government in Americans’ lives and remade U.S. foreign policy in enduring ways. Roosevelt’s presidency, which engendered a multilateral order led by the United States, heralded the dawn of “the American Century.” Reagan sought to maximize U.S. military and economic power; his was a time of “peace through strength.” PostCold War administrations have oscillated between these two visions, often taking on elements of both. Trump inherits the remnants of these ages, but he also represents a new one: the age of nationalism.

Washington’s traditional impulse to divide the world into democracies and autocracies obscures a global turn toward nationalism that began with the 2008 financial crisis and led to protectionism, hardening borders, and shrinking growth in many parts of the world. Indeed, a resurgence of nationalism—particularly economic nationalism and ethnonationalism—has characterized global affairs since the mid-2010s, when the world saw a rise in popularity of nationalist figures, including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen in France, and Trump.

Instead of questioning or challenging this new age of nationalism, Washington has contributed to it. In the administrations of both Trump and President Joe Biden, the United States has been preoccupied with consolidating U.S. power while restraining Chinese advancements. Rather than prioritizing job creation or economic growth globally, Washington has deployed tariffs and export controls to weaken China’s economic power relative to the United States. A global green-energy transition that addresses the roots of the climate crisis has given way to a politically contentious and fleeting bid to expand U.S. electric vehicle production. Supply-chain resilience has overtaken economic interdependence, as the logic of a “rising tide that lifts all boats” has been supplanted by a race to claim a greater share of a shrinking global economic pie. And by failing to see instability, violence, and debt distress in the global South as related to the problems of higher-income countries, the United States exacerbates the spread of nationalism abroad.

This new nationalist era can be discerned in the pivot to “great-power competition”—a vague phrase that frames U.S. grand strategy toward China. But great-power competition forecloses on the potential of the United States to build a new internationalist age in the tradition of Roosevelt following World War II. It also sustains an anachronistic status quo, premised on U.S. primacy, that no longer exists and limits the political imagination needed to generate a more peaceful, stable world. A decade-long preoccupation with great-power competition has cost the United States valuable time and momentum to build a new international order in ways that limit conflicts and incentivize nations to reject Beijing’s economic and military influence.

To be sure, Beijing does pose threats to democracies, human rights, and cybersecurity around the world. But viewing those threats through the prism of great-power competition has led some observers to  present China as an existential danger on par with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. This aggressive, zero-sum approach toward Beijing has compounded the risks of the age of nationalism.

If American policymakers are to reinvigorate the United States’ role in the world and contribute to peace and stability for countries suffering from human rights abuses, inequality, and oppression, they must broaden their horizons and eschew this age of nationalism. The pressing problems of climate change, democratic backsliding, economic inequality, and unsustainable levels of sovereign debt will not be solved by strengthening U.S. power to the detriment of the broader world.

 

Nationalism Resurrected

When the United States and its allies defeated the Axis powers in 1945, American leaders realized that the old imperial order no longer served the interests of global peace. The League of Nations proved feckless as the great powers turned to autarky and protectionism in the 1920s and 1930s, fomenting the nationalism that drove the autocratic regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan to war.

In 1945, Roosevelt feared that when the shooting stopped, the Allies would seek to protect their respective interests by turning inward, as they did after World War I. In his State of the Union address that year, he said that the United States must work toward “establishing an international order which will be capable of maintaining peace and realizing through the years more perfect justice between Nations.” This new order, as Roosevelt saw it, depended on multilateral institutions that enlisted U.S. economic and military might on behalf of global partners that needed security and prosperity in the wake of World War II.

Roosevelt defined the national interest in global terms—in the preservation of a multilateral order that made the world safe for capitalism and liberal democracy. Although large portions of the postcolonial world remained underdeveloped, and multilateral institutions disproportionately benefited the richest nations, there was space for reemerging noncommunist economies in Asia and Africa to assert their interests in the postwar order. In 1948, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade eliminated trade barriers that strengthened the Japanese economy. In 1964, decolonizing countries organized themselves within the United Nations into a grouping they called the G-77, with an eye to challenging the West’s neglect of African and Asian nations. Today, global South nations continue to turn to the UN to achieve climate justice, uphold international law, and hold private corporations accountable for violating labor and environmental laws.

When the Cold War ended in 1991, the United States subordinated international institutions to the pursuit of primacy in a unipolar era. With the Soviet Union defeated, there appeared to be no viable alternative to the U.S.-led liberal world order. As a result, multilateral institutions became adjuncts of U.S. power, as the United States and Europe assumed that liberal democratic ideals would flourish around the world, including in Russia and China. The war on terror after 2001 further eroded internationalism, with the United States using its preeminence to coerce, cajole, or flatter nations into joining its military campaigns, with little consideration for how Washington’s actions would damage U.S. relations with the non-Western world.

Then came the 2008 financial crisis. As global growth stagnated, the United States offered bank bailouts and protections to consumers to stabilize U.S. markets, and China launched a massive infrastructure project to employ its workers and sustain its growth rates. But most nations climbed out of the Great Recession by accumulating unsustainable levels of sovereign debt. And as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank imposed terms on its borrowers that were politically unpopular, the governments of developing economies turned to Beijing as the lender of choice.

This setting—a volatile, unequal economic order—created opportunities for nationalist politics and politicians. When globalization failed to pay the same dividends that it had in the 1990s, demagogues blamed undocumented immigrants and the elites who presided over a corrupt, unfair system. Economic nationalism took hold in many countries. Populist rhetoric surged in the 2010s, as leaders told their populations to look for answers to global problems within their borders, not beyond them. Figures such as Orban rose to power by lambasting the IMF and the European Union. In 2017, as prime minister, Orban claimed that the “main threat to the future of Europe is not those who want to come here to live but our own political, economic, and intellectual elites bent on transforming Europe against the clear will of the European people.” Anti-immigration rhetoric proliferated, as leaders around the world blamed immigrants for their countries’ problems.

Governments around the world turned to industrial policy and state-led capitalism to protect their economies from globalization—a trend that China led and the United States now follows with measures such as the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act. In Russia, the autocratic leader Vladimir Putin has embraced an ideology of nationalist imperialism, consolidating economic resources through state expansionism; Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has corroded the global norm against territorial conquest. Meanwhile, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, once an advocate of free markets, has presided over a new era of state capitalism, centralizing the banking industry and exerting state control over foreign investment. And countries in the Middle East, in their efforts to deter U.S. primacy, now look to statist China as a model to partner with and potentially emulate. The age of great-power competition is an age of nation-states consolidating elite economic power through nationalist policies.

 

A New Cold War

In his first term, Trump embraced and profited from the resurrection of nationalism and great-power competition. Whereas President Barack Obama downplayed great-power competition, on the belief that cooperation with Beijing served the economic interests of the United States, Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy adopted an “America first” foreign policy that emphasized U.S. prosperity over the global good. The United States, the administration wrote, will “compete and lead in multilateral organizations so that American interests and principles are protected.” This translated to the United States leaving, even if temporarily, organizations such as the UN Human Rights Council and UNESCO, which promotes international cooperation in education, science, and much else. Trump also withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty—a Reagan-era arms control treaty with Moscow—and the Paris agreement, the global pact to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A fixation on great-power competition also led Trump to institute tariffs on Chinese imports valued at $200 billion, launching a trade war that escalated tensions between Washington and Beijing and increased the cost of living for U.S. consumers by as much as 7.1 percent in parts of the country.

Biden promised a pivot away from “America first,” but he, too, ultimately succumbed to the age of nationalism. In early 2021, he pledged “to begin reforming the habits of cooperation and rebuilding the muscle of democratic alliances that have atrophied over the past few years of neglect.” But this rhetoric failed to translate into cooperation outside of a framework of great-power competition. To maintain the United States’ rivalry with China, Biden expanded upon Trump’s protectionist policies. Although Biden departed from Trump in his emphasis on alliances and partnerships, he, like Trump, believed that the primary purpose of America’s economic statecraft was to constrain China’s power while maximizing the power of the United States. As the historian Adam Tooze argued in the London Review of Books last November, Biden sought “to ensure by any means necessary, including forceful interventions in private business trade and investment decisions, that China is held back and the US preserves its decisive edge.”

To that aim, Biden dramatically strengthened the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which monitors and restricts foreign investment on national security grounds; expanded the number of Chinese firms blacklisted for associations with the Chinese military; preserved Trump’s initial tariffs targeting China; imposed new tariffs on Chinese semiconductor and renewable energy technology; introduced new restrictions on Chinese investment in the United States; and made new tax credits available to U.S. technology firms conditional on their divestment from Chinese firms. What Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, initially dubbed a “small yard, high fence” approach became an economic strategy to contain China and unravel U.S.-Chinese interdependence in high-technology sectors of the global economy.

The nationalist turn in U.S. foreign policy under Biden empowered the very corporations that have contributed to the inequality that fuels nationalism. Within Washington’s emergent nationalist framework, Tesla’s business in China has benefited from tariffs on electric vehicles, not only because it enjoys a dominant position in the United States’ electric vehicle market but also because its CEO, Elon Musk, has secured an exemption on European tariffs for Tesla’s Chinese-made electric vehicles (nine percent instead of 20 percent). Meanwhile, these same tariffs have punished consumers and cut off U.S. green-technology manufacturers from much-needed collaboration with Chinese firms. Silicon Valley defense startups and venture capital firms have plowed tens of billions of dollars into artificial intelligence, which they now seek to sell to the Pentagon, the sole buyer for their products.

Biden’s gestures toward multilateralism were a significant departure from the fervid nationalism of the first Trump administration, but they fell short of genuine internationalism. His efforts at alliance building reflected not the beginning of a multipolar era but an ideological contest between democracy and autocracy in a new cold war with China. The Atlantic Partnership, a Biden-era alliance of coastal nations, provides a telling example. Although ostensibly designed to ameliorate climate change in countries bordering the Atlantic coastline, the organization is ultimately an effort to constrain China’s illegal fishing industry and entice African nations away from Chinese capital.

The age of nationalism is a punitive one for lower-income countries, as it limits opportunities for the United States to establish goodwill and allegiances with African and Asian nations. Before even taking office, Trump, in an effort to buoy dollar supremacy, targeted the BRICS nations (which constitute more than 40 percent of the world’s population) with currency tariffs. Actions such as these promise to cut off the United States from global supply chains while increasing the cost of consumption for the American consumer. Using coercion to preserve the primacy of the U.S. dollar may benefit Wall Street, but it also enlarges the U.S. trade deficit and undercuts the United States’ export sectors by raising the relative price of U.S.-made goods in foreign markets.

Finally, Washington has at times undermined its alliances by rejecting international institutions when they do not serve U.S. national interests. By sending both cluster munitions and antipersonnel mines to Ukraine, the United States continues to be an outlier undermining international treaties to which it refuses to fully accede, such as the Convention on Cluster Munitions (which has 111 state parties) and the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Treaty (which has 164 state parties, including the United States). Trump and Biden both also eroded the authority of the World Trade Organization, refusing its dispute-settlement mechanism, blocking new appellate judge appointments, and ignoring complaints filed against it for U.S. industrial policy’s various rule infractions, including exorbitant tariffs and corporate subsidies to thwart China’s and India’s economic growth. And in November, Biden issued a White House statement denying the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court on all matters pertaining to the Israeli government’s war in Gaza.

 

Cooperation Over Competition

Unfortunately, Trump is likely to reinvigorate a nationalist foreign policy. His administration is primed to view the crisis in the Middle East as a civilizational conflict to be dealt with through military force rather than diplomacy. Alliances in East Asia will function as useful proxies for constraining Beijing’s influence. Washington will see competition with China as an existential struggle that heightens anti-immigrant sentiment at home, potentially leading to hate crimes and greater violence against Asian Americans, as occurred during Trump’s first term. And with respect to Latin America, Trump will remain myopically fixated on securitizing the U.S.-Mexico border, forgoing the opportunity to collaborate on issues of mutual concern, such as transnational crime and climate change.

But if the United States is to address the world’s problems in a meaningful way, U.S. grand strategy must break free from the age of nationalism. A broader internationalist vision that works to the betterment of the global South, or the global majority, is a far better foundation for world order than competition with China, which will benefit only a few. Rather than treating African and Asian nations as pawns in a great-power competition with Beijing, Washington must come to terms with how the marginalization of lower-income countries inhibits growth that can further the interests of the United States and its allies. Working with the IMF and the World Bank the United States can bring debt relief to African nations and restructure struggling economies to minimize corruption and further democratic rights. Instead of allowing the BRICS to operate as a counter to the West, Washington must recognize the validity of their concerns and welcome new approaches that prioritize Africa and Asian nations. A stronger global South will also rein in ethnonationalism and anti-immigrant politics, as resilient economies make it hard to sustain the argument that immigrants are “stealing” jobs and draining state resources.

It is time for the United States to move past the obsolete zero-sum logic of great-power competition. Instead of squandering more resources in the counterproductive pursuit of primacy, Washington should renew its commitment to strengthening economies and advancing human rights around the world. The national interest does not reside in outmaneuvering China in every domain—it resides in an internationalist vision that emphasizes cooperation over competition.

 

 

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