A new American century?

In the United States as in many other Western democracies, the mainstream right entered the 1990s with a sense of achievement and heightened expectations about the future of world order. With the Soviet Union on the verge of collapse, conservative ideologues celebrated the end of the Cold War as an unprecedented victory for the free-market ideology they had been promoting in their decades-long struggle to counter the worldwide influence of communism. In what would become the most influential polemic of the decade, neoconservative political scientist Francis Fukuyama went so far as to suggest that what the world was witnessing with the fall of the Iron Curtain was perhaps not just the end of the Cold War but the end of history as such – i.e., ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’.Footnote ⁸

Paleoconservatives offered a radically different assessment. In their eyes, the United States had won the battle against Soviet communism, but American conservatism had lost the war of ideologies. And it had done so at great cost to the cultural, moral, and demographic fabric of American society. Paleoconservatives had fought the Cold War like good anti-communist patriots. But the globalist strategy pursued by the United States since 1945 had always been contentious and difficult to square with conservatism’s hostility towards big government and interventionist foreign policies. While important aspects of it had been justified by the expansionist nature of the Soviet Union, the strategy had now lost its raison d’être. It left the United States with a vast national security bureaucracy, military–industrial complex and extensive networks of international security pacts, treaty regimes, and commitments to international organizations that Washington’s securocrats were now looking to repurpose to wage the liberal democratic peace on the rest of the world. At best, the New World Order that the foreign policy establishment had just promised to build only guaranteed a fake truce. For it did not protect Americans from the looming disaster of extinction through immigration, declining birth rates, and the proliferation of egalitarian ideologies and governmental agencies that constantly tell citizens how to think.Footnote ⁹ As Sam Francis emphasised, almost six decades after FDR signed the New Deal into law, the American right had made no progress in challenging its principles and achievements. The fact that conservative intellectuals were now celebrating the triumph of neoliberal globalization at the same time as they lamented the loss of the unifying communist threat was a symptom of a movement devoid of all meaningful substance of its own: ‘American conservatism is a failure.… Virtually every cause to which conservatives have attached themselves for the past three generations has been lost, and the tide of political and cultural battle is not likely to turn anytime soon’.Footnote ¹⁰

No less than the mainstream right, paleoconservatives wished to maintain the geopolitical lead that the United States enjoyed after the defeat of communism. But they insisted that this could only be achieved through a substantive disengagement from the international architecture built during the Cold War. They saw in post-Cold War foreign policy debates an opportunity to revive the spirit of the America First nationalism that many Republicans embraced half a century ago. Just months before the beginning of Operation Desert Storm in August 1990, Buchanan wrote a provocative essay in The National Interest entitled ‘America First – and Second and Third’, in which he channelled the interwar rhetoric of Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee (AFC) to outline his foreign policy vision for the post-Cold War era:

Crucially, America First in this paleoconservative vision was not just a wistful throwback to a bygone era of isolationism and American greatness. It involved the construction of an ethnic nationalism of the kind that Europe once produced, and which the United States never really had. This new nationalism would position itself clearly against the ruling elites and reshape the country’s politics by asserting the material interests and worldview of what Francis called ‘Middle America’.

Francis, who quickly became one of the leading thinkers of this campaign, borrowed the concept of Middle America from the political sociologist Donald Warren.Footnote ¹² Warren’s work since the mid-1970s had been examining the ‘populist bridge between modern democracy and social reaction’.Footnote ¹³ Francis strategized it into a political imaginary for a disillusioned and culturally conservative population that could become the catalysing social force for a radical right-wing revolution against the established order. In this ideological framework, Middle America is middle in the sense that it is white working-and-middle-class, and that it is found in greatest numbers and homogeneity in the Midwestern region of the United States (although by no means only there). It is also middle in the sense that it is hierarchically squeezed between a growing non-white urban underclass that erodes its cultural norms and privileges from below, and an affluent liberal ‘managerial elite’ that constantly subverts these norms and privileges from above through its control of state agencies and dominant cultural, educational, and economic institutions. The move sought to radicalise the American right and expand its social base by overcoming its aristocratic disdain of the masses.Footnote ¹⁴

The idea of the ‘managerial elite’ is primarily inspired by the work of American conservative political theorist – and former Trotskyist – James Burnham (1905–1987).Footnote ¹⁵ Francis, Gottfried and other Chronicles writers drew on it throughout the 1990s and early 2000s to theorise and challenge these configurations of power.Footnote ¹⁶ In essence, the paleoconservative theory of managerialism contends that America is ruled by a technocratic elite that achieved hegemonic status during the twentieth century by subordinating the industrial-commercial bourgeoisie that had governed the United States from the 1860s onwards. This managerial elite, the so-called ‘New Class’, is defined by its mastery of the technical and organizational skills that enable late modern societies to function. These skills include not only science and engineering but also administration, law, communication, social psychology, and a whole range of other techniques that have become central to the management and control of complex large-scale organizations under conditions of mass democracy. Thus, whereas the old bourgeois elite regarded governmental power as a potential threat to its interests and sought to conserve the institutional status quo, the New Class is accelerationist: it perceives its interest in the expansion of governance networks dedicated to the constant improvement and reconstruction of society. This is because to maintain and expand the rewards of its technical skills, the New Class must continually extend the application of its skills to an ever-increasing range of functions, institutions and political spaces. It does this by constantly finding or inventing problems that experts can solve through administration, re-education, therapy, regulation, or the manipulation of cultural symbols and economic incentives. This can be anything from racism to childcare, public health, immigration, national security, development, terrorism, trade regulation, and climate change.

Much of the specific ideological content of this anti-establishment vision took shape as a response to the neoconservative foreign policy agenda of the 1990s and early 2000s. In this analysis, the neoconservatives were the right-wing of the New Class. They moved from the left and joined the conservative movement in the late 1960s to defend the liberal managerial system against the perceived excesses of the civil rights movements and the cultural revolutions, but they never had any intention of ever pursuing an authentic conservative agenda.Footnote ¹⁷ The younger generations now leading this enterprise sought to consolidate and grow these managerial networks by mobilising commitments to the expansion of the US-led liberal international order into the new millennium.

This competing programme for the creation of a new American century rested on a systematic critique of political realism. Like liberal internationalists, neoconservatives argued that globalization and the spread of liberal democracy had delegitimated this cynical strand of power politics. Incapable of effectively linking moral and identity issues to the exercise of American power, realism’s narrow and materialistic account of the national interest could not generate the domestic support required for even the most basic forms of international action. Thanks to the extraordinary power differential now elevating the United States above all other great powers, America was now in a position of moving beyond the realist geopolitics of sphere of influence. It could compel the entire world to play largely by American rules, or face a steep price, from crippling sanctions to outright regime change. This was supported by a re-assertion of the political mythology of American exceptionalism, which emphasized America’s progressive national identity and willingness to provide a variety of public goods within multilateral institutions and patterns of strategic restraint towards weaker powers.Footnote ¹⁸

This was everything paleoconservatives hated about what American politics had become. In their view, the neoconservative case for a military buildup unconnected to any identifiable threat was both a formula for endless meddling and an affront to the conservative tradition that the right claimed to represent.Footnote ¹⁹ Against this perversion of the national interest, paleoconservatives called for a recovery of the prudent political realism of the Old Right that would refrain from treating the American republic as a means for the pursuit of globalist ends. Freed from its Cold War dilemmas and responsibilities, this realism promised to defend US sovereignty while striving to maintain America’s lead as the greatest trading nation on the planet. This would be done by disengaging the military from Europe and other distant operational theatres where the United States no longer faced a clear threat to its interests, while simultaneously increasing spending on the navy and missile defence systems to ensure that America retained permanent control of the seas and skies: ‘first in air power, first in space’.Footnote ²⁰

To paleoconservatives, realism offered the most compelling approach to US foreign policy not necessarily because of its theoretical abstractions about human nature and the objective causal laws of international anarchy, but because of its realistic alignment with domestic public opinion. Far from being out of touch with the attitudes and life experiences of ordinary Americans, as neoconservatives claimed, realism expressed the common sense of the American people, the large majority of which believe that how other people rule themselves is their own business and are unmoved by elite ambitions to build new world orders. As Buchanan repeatedly argued throughout the 1990s, ‘the Republican Party at its grass roots is much more economic-nationalist in trade policy, much more America First in foreign policy. The globalists and free traders and interventionists still control the party at its hierarchy, but they are chiefs without Indians’.Footnote ²¹ By embracing a globalizing agenda that undermines particular identities, Francis similarly emphasized, the right had ‘effectively metamorphosed itself into the left and forfeited the sole grounds of its appeal to the nationalism and social and cultural conservatism animating Middle Americans’. Against the neoconservatives, Francis insisted that the mobilization of universalist narratives of American exceptionalism was both a dangerous opening of the nation to others and a debilitating vehicle for the subordination of public affairs to individual and interest groups’ concerns.Footnote ²² A nationalist realism committed to the security and prosperity of Middle America had to break all these dependencies on the Gestalt of liberalism:

Paleoconservatives derided globalists who celebrated the demise of the nation-state at the same time as emergent nationalisms were wreaking havoc everywhere in the Balkans, the Caucasus, Asia, and the Middle East.Footnote ²⁴ In their eyes, internationalist claims that geopolitical spheres of influence had been consigned to the dustbin of history rested on a dangerously static understanding of the dynamics of political power. Not least because it naively assumed that other ethnic groups, nations, and great powers would simply agree to coexist and take their assigned places in a US-led international order. Paleoconservatives emphasized America’s geopolitical advantage as an ‘island-continent’ in this context. Long before Trump and his entourage, they argued for a much-expanded re-articulation of the Monroe Doctrine as a key component of their America First agenda. As Francis wrote in 1991:

It is also in this context that Buchanan began to float the idea of a formal annexation of Canada and Greenland. Writing in the Washington Times in April 1990, Buchanan suggested there was a strong chance that Canada might break apart because of Quebec nationalist separatism and the failure of the Lake Meech Accord. Were it to do so, he hoped that the United States would move in to pick up the pieces:

Buchanan reiterated his continental vision in more threatening terms throughout the 1990s. As he declared in an interview with American Enterprise in 1998: ‘Canada is going to be absorbed into the United States – it is already, economically. If I were a Canadian, I’d be nervous as I could be’.Footnote ²⁷ By then, paleoconservatives had become a lot more hostile towards free trade and everything associated with globalization, campaigning against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the General Agreement on Tarrifs and Trade (GATT), and calling for a withdrawal from the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the erection of tariff walls. Buchanan wrote with admiration about the legacy of Friedrich List, the German entrepreneur and political theorist who developed the modern theory of autarky in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁸ He praised List’s model of national self-sufficiency as a valuable alternative to the over-theorized abstractions of Marxism and the classical liberalism of Adam Smith. He insisted that such economic nationalism had served America well from its inception all the way up to the New Deal. But it was China that was now following the ‘path to power laid out by List, treating the United States, the world’s most advanced nation, like a colony, a source of raw materials and a dumping ground for manufactures’. China, Buchanan raged, had ‘exploited slave labor, consumed all the Western credit it could extort, stolen intellectual property, and strong-armed American companies like Boeing and McDonnell Douglas to manufacture in China as the price of a deal’. Now Beijing ‘was using the hard currency from its trade surpluses and international bank loans to buy submarines, destroyers, anti-ship missiles, and fighter aircraft from Russia, and to build long-range missiles to reach the West Coast of the United States’.Footnote ²⁹

Paleoconservatives attributed a similar stance to other countries in the Global South that were now much more focused on economic power than military alignment. In a comprehensive critique of the neoconservative agenda, James George Jatras warned that the long-standing asymmetries of power between the European and non-European worlds were being reversed: ‘Perceiving our moral weakness and their demographic strength, they increasingly see European wealth and land as a prize to be expropriated: in short, The Camp of the Saints’. Yet instead of confronting this reality with decisive action, neoconservatives embraced a managerial humanitarianism that empowered just about every other culture, religion, and ethnic group in their respective struggle against the agents of Western civilization. In this view, American exceptionalism was not the envy of the world but a laughingstock:

Clashes of civilizations: old and new

It is on these terms that paleoconservatives engaged in conservative debates over the other grand international relations (IR) narrative of the 1990s and early 2000s, namely Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’. From their perspective, Huntington’s civilizational prophesies had certainly captured important ethnocultural dimensions of the post-Cold War geopolitical environment. The problem is that they remained caught in the conceptual framework of the modernization theories that Huntington had done so much to advance in previous decades. This had debilitating implications for how Huntington and his followers understood the civilizational conflicts facing America and the West at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

First published as a Foreign Affairs article in 1993 and extended into a book in 1996, Huntington’s clash of civilization thesis argued that the main source of conflict in the twenty-first century would not be economic or ideological but cultural, religious, and civilizational.Footnote ³¹ According to the author, the end of the Cold War shifted attention from conflict with Russia to relations between the developed world and regions along its periphery. Against Fukuyama, Huntington argued that modernization was different from Westernization and that the West – individualism, constitutional protection of human rights, democracy, the rule of law, free markets – was not universalizable. He also emphasized in this context that mass immigration from Third World countries was becoming a particularly acute question in Europe and North America; failure to acknowledge these realities would bring the West into conflict with other civilizations, particularly Islam and China.

It was this last point in particular that caught the attention of many conservative readers at the time.Footnote ³² One of the most influential interventions in this respect came from traditional social and political conservative James Kurth, a former student of Huntington who shared a professional space with Paul Gottfried at the Foreign Policy Research Institute during the 1990s. In a 1994 article published in The National Interest, Kurth argued that the primary threat to the security and prosperity of the United States in the coming decades would not be a clash between the West and one or many of the other non-Western civilizations, as Huntington had predicted, but rather a clash within Western civilization itself. This clash would oppose the defenders of Western civilization to a ‘post-Western’ alliance of multicultural, postcolonial and feminist movements eager to break free from the ethical and governmental framework of the modern territorial nation-state.Footnote ³³

According to Kurth, the idea of the West that was being challenged in this confrontation originated in the metaphysical fatigue afflicting European intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Against enlightenment conceptions of the ‘civilizing process’, it ‘registered the awareness that this civilization was only one among many. It was a civilization past the enthusiasms of faith, and also past the exuberance of being a civilization so blessed that it was in a class by itself’. It was Americans in subsequent decades who overcame and transformed this declinist conception of Western civilization by associating it with the core features of liberal modernity. This took place in the context of a large-scale nation-building programme that sought to assimilate ethnic minorities and new immigrant populations by imposing ‘the English language, Anglo-American history, and American civics (what Robert Bellah would later term the American “civil religion” and what Huntington has elsewhere termed the “American Creed”’.Footnote ³⁴ In turn, the fusion of this Americanization project with the more inclusive and longue durée language of civilization allowed the United States to enter the Cold War as a strong and cohesive national state, and to become the leading representative and geopolitical defender of the West.

Since the early 1990s, however, the elites were rapidly moving away from this positive civilizational self-understanding. Kurth blamed the rise of feminist movements and postcolonial ideologies. Under the sway of deconstructive and postmodern genealogical methods, these forces sought to reconfigure America as a multicultural melting pot and attacked ‘the West’ as an oppressive patriarchal instrument of white hegemony, preferring cultures ‘derived from the African, Latin American, Confucian, and Islamic civilizations rather than from the Western one’.Footnote ³⁵ Kurth argued that these degenerative trends were no longer confined to the radical left but had contaminated the positions of mainstream liberal and conservative publics that, despite their differences, had always ‘believed in the modern ideas represented by the American Creed’. Whereas liberalism had become postmodern, driven by the energy of postcolonial multicultural activists, conservatism increasingly found its energy among militant religious believers. This raised a fundamental existential question for the political elites of the twenty-first century: ‘Who, in the United States of the future, will still believe in Western civilization? Most practically, who will believe in it enough to fight, kill, and die for it in a clash of civilizations?’Footnote ³⁶

Huntington acknowledged and incorporated much of his former student’s diagnosis in the extended 1996 book version of The Clash of Civilizations and subsequent publications, insisting that the survival of the West depended upon Americans strenuously reaffirming their Western identity against ‘diversity ideologies’ at home while firmly resisting imposing it abroad.Footnote ³⁷ John Fonte, who today rides with the national conservatives, made similar arguments in another influential 2002 Orbis article entitled ‘Liberal Democracy vs. Transnational Progressivism: The Ideological War Within the West’.Footnote ³⁸

Paleoconservatives certainly shared the anxieties expressed in this Huntingtonian literature. In their eyes, however, the idea of the West that Huntington, Kurth, Fonte, and other like-minded conservatives wanted to defend against the perceived threats of an increasingly assertive Global South and the ‘post-Western’ progressivism of the left was a symptom of the cultural crisis that needed addressing. It rested on a liberal democratic vision of European civilization, America and the world that had completely distorted and impoverished the terms of this urgent cultural-geopolitical debate. As Jatras argued:

Already during the early 1990s, paleoconservatives questioned the post-Cold War significance of a West that seemed to include not only European civilization and its North American offshoot but also ‘Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea as well as other non-Western states’.Footnote ⁴⁰ In their eyes, this Cold War conception of the West did not denote a distinct civilizational entity but a zone of managerial occupation that constantly adapted to the demands of neoliberal capitalism with scant regard for the ethnic, cultural, and spiritual traditions that came under its control. Against Huntington and his followers, paleoconservatives insisted that the West was a much older civilizational entity influenced by Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem, and whose relatively recent commitments to the abstractions of liberal modernity conflicted with the sacrifices needed for its survival. If Huntington’s post-Cold War popularity had demonstrated anything, wrote Fleming, it is that the Western intelligentsia had become completely separated from its classical heritage: ‘The conversation about civilizations and empires, their rise and fall, their conflicts, has become steadily more stupid.. What is Mr. Huntington but George F. Babbit with a Ph.D.? He is but one in that long series of American “exceptionalist” gurus whose wisdom consists of saying what everyone has already been taught to believe’.Footnote ⁴¹

Echoing James Burnham’s The Suicide of the West (1964), paleoconservatives insisted that liberalism was not necessarily the cause of Western decline, but it had undermined the elites’ capacity to resist this decline.Footnote ⁴² This is because liberalism fosters a speculative disposition and debilitating sense of guilt about all social and global problems that undercuts the power-focused mindset necessary to maintain a civilization.Footnote ⁴³ As Fleming argued, ‘Among the most dangerous of our theoretical illusions are the political fantasies that can be summed up in words like democracy, equality, and natural rights; the principle of one man, one vote and the American tradition of self-government. No one who lives in the world with his eyes open can actually believe any of this’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Paleoconservatives also aimed the ‘dangerous malleability’ of the American Creed in this context. ‘According to the American Creed’, Jatras wrote, ‘it is heresy to admit what we all know to be true: that on a certain level, those of us who are hyphenated [African-Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans etc…] are not as unambiguously “American” as those who have no other ethnic identity’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Francis rightly pointed out that Huntington came close to acknowledging so much in his controversial last book, Who Are We? The Challenge to American National Identity (2004).Footnote ⁴⁶ There, Huntington argued that America is not just a ‘creedal nation’ but does have a ‘core identity’ based on the Anglo-Protestant culture created by the British settlers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He argued that the American Creed was itself the product of this Anglo-Protestant core, but that its exercise over the course of several generations had facilitated the elimination of the racial and ethnic components that were once central to American identity. This had allowed the United States to become a prosperous multiethnic and multiracial meritocracy. The rest of the book is a screeching warning that this cultural legacy was gravely endangered by the dual threat of Hispanic immigrants who will not assimilate into the Anglo-Protestant core, and the rise of a post-Western cosmopolitan elite that has rejected national identity to affirm ‘the moral superiority of identifying with humanity at large’.Footnote ⁴⁷

Paleoconservatives saw Huntington’s analysis as a welcome but characteristically flawed engagement with the problem of mass immigration and civilizational extinction they had been writing about since the 1980s. As Francis argued, paleoconservatives have never found much empirical evidence to suggest that the Creed that Huntington believed to be so central to the nation’s identity had much authority in American politics until the beginning of the twentieth century and the advent of the managerial state: ‘The Protestant Republic the British settlers and pioneers created in North America knew nothing of it, or of its happy talk about “eliminating racial and ethnic barriers”’. But more fundamentally, the problem is that Huntington incoherently assumed that there can be a core Anglo-Protestant culture without an Anglo-Protestant people to maintain it: ‘Culture is a product of the human beings who create it, and, as Huntington keeps insisting, when masses of people carrying one culture enter into another society with another culture, the result must be conflict (dare we say a “clash of civilizations”?) and change. The newcomers assimilate to the host, or the host assimilates to them, or both assimilate to each other’.Footnote ⁴⁸ For all his anxiety about the preservation of American identity, Huntington did not seem to grasp that, by his own argumentation, the Anglo-Protestant core had historically promoted and legitimized its own destruction:

Paleoconservatives also offered a different assessment of the ‘post-Western’ challenge to America’s national and civilizational identities. Like most historians, they traced the origins of this challenge to the legacies of the New Left and the countercultural movements of the 1960s. These movements were ‘countercultural’ in the sense that they sought to reshape social institutions according to their own progressive anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-authoritarian ideals and view of the world, rather than simply providing an alternative within the existing managerial system. Yet despite significant successes in challenging various forms of discrimination, they struggled to gain widespread support among traditional working-class institutions and therefore failed to reproduce themselves independently of the society that they rejected. The transnational social movements that subsequently emerged out of these defeated insurrections reacted by rejecting party politics and formal organized representation. Instead, they reoriented their struggle towards ‘the global’ and embraced a high-strung identity politics which replaced the class struggle with concerns for political correctness, postcolonial confessions of guilt, and adulation of various underprivileged groups. Yet far from posing a genuine threat to the managerial regime, the proliferation of these postnational ideologies and activist networks since the 1970s contributed to its legitimation by providing it with a semblance of opposition that shows the regime is tolerant of dissent while having no prospect of mounting a serious revolutionary challenge.Footnote ⁵⁰

From this perspective, what the Huntingtonian literature lamented as the subversive incursion of the radical left into the political mainstream could just as well be read as the opposite: the assimilation of a defanged, post-Marxist ‘counterculture’ into the globalizing order of liberal managerialism. As Gottfried argues in a more recent piece, this assimilation is the wellspring of what we today call ‘wokeism’. The world it has generated is nothing like the one Fukuyama and the other ‘end of ideologists’ ever imagined:

In sum, to the paleoconservatives, the intra-civilizational conflict between the ‘post-Western’ ideologues and the conservative defenders of the American Creed was only superficial. For despite significant differences in their aspirations, both sides pursued ‘liberal’ agendas conducive to the erosion of the majority culture and a global unification under the dominance of managerial elites. The real clash defining the politics of the United States and the West in the twenty-first century would be the one between the partisans of this globalist dystopia on one side, and ordinary citizens who have historically shouldered the burden of the liberal international order and want to defend their cultural and biological identities against the machinations of the managerial elites on the other.

Trumpism and the paleoconservative moment in US foreign policy

Francis’ premature death in 2005 was a huge loss to a movement that was already ailing under the pressures of a chronic lack of funding, internal conflicts, and exclusion from the national media and mainstream conservative platforms.Footnote ⁵² Yet cracks in the power configuration that had long sustained neoconservative control of the American right were also beginning to show in light of the catastrophic failures of US foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan and the financial crisis of 2008. Paleoconservatives saw the millions of votes that ‘Taft Republican’ candidate Ron Paul received in the 2008 presidential primaries as the beginning of a ‘post-paleo’ countermovement led by a younger generation of libertarian right-winger willing to build bridges with other traditionalist and anti-neoconservative forces. It is in this context that Gottfried has been credited with helping to develop the term ‘alternative right’ with one of its leading figures, Richard Spencer, after a speech he gave at the inauguration of the H.L. Mencken Club in November 2008.Footnote ⁵³ A few months later, in February 2009, the growing sense of alienation that accompanied the deepening of the economic crises also gave birth to a Tea Party movement which re-packaged many paleoconservative themes in slightly more libertarian forms.

Trump and his MAGA movement swept to power on the coat-tail of these forces. Although shaky at first, he and his base eventually coalesced into a genuine political movement that very closely resembles the ‘Middle American Radicals’ that Francis anticipated decades earlier. As historian David Greenberg argued in December 2016, because deep divisions on the right had until then drawn little analysis, Trumpism was widely portrayed as the challenge of a trailblazing outsider to the political establishment. But this was an incomplete picture insofar as the transgressive showman was channelling ‘an at least semi-coherent ideology – a new iteration of the populist and nationalist paleoconservatism that has long lurked in the shadows of American politics’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Buchanan offered a similar analysis as he celebrated his old opponent’s successes a few months earlier:

Well-known MAGA figures who have been associated (at least in part) with paleoconservative thought include political strategist Steve Bannon, Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller, national security official and primary author of the 2025 NSS Michael Anton, Trump’s former speech writer Paul Weyrich, politician and venture capitalist Blake Masters, and lawyer John Eastman, who authored the memo advising Vice-President Mike Pence to disqualify the 2020 election results. Gottfried, who has edited a revitalized Chronicles since 2021, also pointed out that many writers and media pundits who have re-invented themselves in light of Trump’s success are parroting ideas and positions that paleoconservatives have been defending for decades. While some like David Azerrad, Matthew Schmitz, and Michael Brendan Dougherty have acknowledged this influence, others have not (Gottfried specifically mentions post-liberal authors Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and Gladden J. Pappin).Footnote ⁵⁶ Yet many also do so inadvertently simply because they find themselves confronted with developments that the paleoconservatives were writing about decades earlier.

Chronicles greeted Trump’s second coming with equal enthusiasm, hailing his administration’s NSS as a ‘masterstroke of realist diplomacy adapted for twenty-first-century America’.Footnote ⁵⁷ The magazine celebrated its 50th anniversary in April 2026 at the Willard Hotel in Washington D.C. by launching a new partnership with the Centre for Renewing America, a Trumpian think tank created by Russell Vought in 2021.Footnote ⁵⁸ As Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Vought was responsible for overseeing the implementation of the president’s agenda across the executive branch during the first Trump presidency and was reappointed in February 2025.

As emphasized in the ‘Introduction’ section, none of this is to suggest that paleoconservatives have captured the White House, or that Trumpism is a simple re-adaptation of Buchanan’s America First agenda. However, reading the politics and foreign policy discourses of the Trump administration and its MAGA entourage in the context of these intellectual lineages provides a better understanding of some of their more perplexing dimensions, goals, and implications by situating them historically in the wider ideological environment of the ‘harder’ American right. The remainder of this study focuses on three important elements of ideological continuity.

First, like the paleoconservatives, Trumpians want to effect a radical break with the progressive time scape of exceptionalist narratives of American identity – both because it is seen to be opening the nations to undesirable immigration and it limits the United States’ ability to compete against other great powers in world politics.Footnote ⁵⁹ Against the prospects of mutual gains and the long-term horizons of complex interdependence, Trumpians affirm the static temporality of international anarchy as a realm of recurrence and repetition where politics is a zero-sum struggle in which every community is a potential rival, and survival depends on cultural unity and control of resources and territory. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth summarized this vision emphatically while explaining the NSS in December 2025, associating it with the worldview of the national majority culture:

According to Michael Anton, this realist shift is a long-overdue ‘return to normalcy’.Footnote ⁶¹ The justification reads like a riff on ‘hegemonic stability theory’,Footnote ⁶² but with a distinctive managerial slant. In this vision, American leadership is neither Providential nor exceptional but subject to the same negative feedback loops affecting all states exercising power and that, over time, increase the costs of protecting the status quo faster than the political and economic gains yielded by the status quo. These include the diffusion of technological innovations from the lead economy to the rest of the world, the growth advantages that come from free riding off hegemonic protection, and the waning appetite for investments in protection. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio emphasized upon taking office in January 2025, the point is not only that internationalist foreign policies have locked the United States into producing and policing public goods that it can no longer afford, but also that the interests and cultural symbols attached to these goods have long been inimical to the survival of the United States and its people: ‘While America too often prioritized the global order above our core national interest, other nations continued to act the way nations have always acted and always will. They have manipulated the post-Cold War global order to serve their interests at the expense of ours. The post-war global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us’.Footnote ⁶³ Trumpians associate the unwillingness of successive administrations to acknowledge this reality with the rule of a globalist ideological technocracy that wields its power through the manipulation of cultural norms and the propagation of what Anton calls ‘managerial leftist-libertarianism’.Footnote ⁶⁴

Following on this, Trump and his ideological entourage contend that the main conflict dividing the West in the twenty-first century is not between the United States and Europe but between liberal managerial elites and nationalist forces on both sides of the Atlantic. This ‘post-Huntingtonian’ civilizationalism is deployed strategically both to support a more discriminatory account of American national identity and build new transnational coalitions capable of reshaping the European order in America’s new illiberal image, reaffirming the United States’ role as the leading defender of the West but in a completely different cultural and ethnopolitical register.

Trump first experimented with these arguments in a 2017 Warsaw speech co-written by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, questioning whether the West still had the strength and resolve necessary to defend its civilization against Islamic terrorism, the destruction of traditions, and the ‘steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people’.Footnote ⁶⁵ But it is Vice-President J.D. Vance who really unleashed the full rhetorical power of this civilizational politics at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025. Widely regarded as an intervention on behalf of the European far-right ahead of upcoming German elections, Vance’s Munich speech played down the geopolitical threat of Russia to suggest that ‘woke’ liberalism was the real threat to the survival of Europe and its long-standing geopolitical cooperation with America. Vance sought to drive a wedge between democracy and the progressive temporality of liberalism by casting the procedural, universalist character of liberal norms as the source of democratic ‘backsliding’. He railed against Europe’s ‘cancel culture’ and the alleged inclination of European elites to enact policies designed to undermine the sovereign will of majorities when it expresses non-progressive positions. Against the secularising and legalistic character of liberalism, Vance affirmed the ‘sacred’ power and ‘great magic’ of democracy as a forceful mechanism to raise daunting barriers against immigration.Footnote ⁶⁶

The 2025 NSS officialized this commitment to the European far-right, announcing that the United States will actively support long-ostracized nationalist forces to reverse the threat of ‘civilizational erasure’ and alleviate the risk of an armed conflict between Russia and diffident European states.Footnote ⁶⁷ According to Chronicles’ foreign affairs editor Srdja Trifković, ‘There is no contradiction between the document’s stated refusal to intervene in the domestic affairs of foreign countries where no American interest is at stake, and its implicit commitment to help patriotic, anti-globalist European parties and political forces that reassert their nations’ identities’. This is not different from when the United States supported anti-Communist forces during the Cold War: ‘Since the European Union interferes, brazenly, in the elections in Romania or Moldova, it should accept similar efforts from the United States’.Footnote ⁶⁸ As Rubio emphasized in his own Munich speech in February 2026, America as the descendent of European civilization is ‘not interested in being the polite and orderly caretaker of the West’s managed decline’. What it wants is to lead a post-liberal civilizational renaissance that will restore for America a clearer sense of its own ‘place in the world’ and renew the ancestral cultural and religious bonds that once sustained transatlantic cooperation.Footnote ⁶⁹

Finally, another important line of continuity with the paleoconservative agenda of the 1990s is the re-articulation of the Monroe Doctrine pursued by the Trump administration since January 2025. The policy has been in the works for some time. It is presented in the 2025 NSS with an added ‘Trump Corollary’ authorising the United States to deny ‘non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets’ anywhere from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego.Footnote ⁷⁰

The ideological justification for this controversial policy again shades into visions of the United States as a civilizational great power, asserting the existence of an American sphere of influence freed from the contested narratives of a common globality that shaped great power rivalries during the Cold War. Strategically, the aim is not only to keep China, Russia, and Iran out of the Western hemisphere but also to integrate the continent more closely into some sort of quasi-autarkic bloc dominated by the United States. Rubio speaks of a ‘common home’ in need of greater security and economic integration.Footnote ⁷¹ According to Chatham House analyst David Lublin, the economic basis of this hemispheric policy is simply that ‘the US and its neighbours north and south are collectively bigger, richer, stronger and more self-contained than any possible challenger’. The thinking is that ‘not only is the continent separated from the rest of the world by two massive oceans, but it is economically more closed, and less dependent on the rest of the world, than any rival region’.Footnote ⁷² Continental integration in this context is seen as deepening an anti-China policy that began in the second Obama administration with the so-called pivot strategy announced in 2011, and that was consistently reinforced by subsequent administrations.

If recent history is anything to go by, however, the Trump administration is unlikely to offer much in the guise of reciprocity when it comes to investments or help with infrastructure, relying instead on coercive policies to force other governments to turn away from the alternative system of integrated supply chains, commodity corridors, loans, and payment mechanisms China has been constructing in the region since the early 2000s. Only two days after toppling Venezuelan President Maduro in January 2026, Trump threatened Colombia with a similar fate and reasserted his claim that Greenland had to come under American control because of its strategic shipping routes and rich deposits of rare earth minerals essential for defence and electronics. ‘The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot, a real lot’, Trump proudly declared.Footnote ⁷³ According to Trifković, this ‘ostensibly eccentric’ focus on Greenland makes perfect sense when seen through the geopolitical prism of Trump’s realism:

Yet showing oneself willing to use force to annex territory from long-term allies is unlikely to strike many IR specialists as a sound realist move. It is also doubtful that many realist scholars today would endorse this deterministic politicization of geography and naked embrace of power politics and aggression. While no one owns the monopoly on this much-contested tradition, the realism of the Trump regime and its entourage should at least be clearly distinguished from the American realism that became so influential within the discipline of IR during the second half of the twentieth century. Crafted by the likes of Hans Morgenthau, John Herz, and other Atlanticist thinkers on the back of two devastating world wars, this ‘classical’ realism sought to mobilize conservative insights to develop a more robust ‘Cold War liberalism’ capable of countering the dangerous demagogies of ethnic nationalism, anti-communist zeal and moral crusades in American foreign policy. These thinkers were under no illusion that international institutions could become a spontaneous source of order, or that collective security and the criminalization of aggressive war could eventually put an end to war as such. But they still valued multilateral diplomacy, alliance systems, and international law as important tools for power management and consensus building amongst allies. These realists were uneasy with identity politics, just as they were anxious over the depoliticising tendencies of modern liberal technocracy.Footnote ⁷⁵ They saw that domestic and foreign policy were closely intertwined in this respect. As Felix Rösch and Thorsten Wojczewski emphasize, this is why realists put their hopes in intellectuals and foreign policy experts to mitigate the conflict between the electorate and a political establishment often perceived to be indifferent to the common good and expressions of the popular will, ‘searching for pathways to turn this reform potential into creative, non-destructive forces’.Footnote ⁷⁶

The ‘flexible realism’ professed by the Trump administration and its entourage is of a different ilk. Steeped in apocalyptic assertions of civilizational conflicts and suicide, its unilateralist approach to world ordering channels a profound disdain for existing norms of non-intervention and other symbolic and institutional structures of interaction that can mediate hostility between radically divergent worldviews. In this post-liberal vision of American diplomacy, allies are routinely insulted and intimidated with unpredictable tariffs threats, while enemies are confronted with aggressive communicative choices strongly at odds with the sober rhetoric cautioned by realist diplomacy.Footnote ⁷⁷

One should also question the association of this paleo-Trumpian realism with the legacy of the AFC of the interwar period. The America Firsters of the 1930s were isolationists who embraced the idea of American exceptionalism to argue that the United States as the virtuous leader of the New World had to avoid getting involved in the political affairs and conflicts of the Old World. They embraced the Monroe Doctrine as a basis for defending the Western Hemisphere against further European colonization. But they opposed the proactive, interventionist spirit of the Roosevelt Corollary (with its claim to an ‘international police power’ for the United States in Latin America) on the ground that such anticolonial imperialism created unnecessary foreign entanglements and liabilities. The Trump regime, by contrast, relishes the superpower status of the United States, and its commitment to reorient US foreign policy towards the Western hemisphere is hardly a question of effecting a retreat from the world stage. While it strongly objects to the use of foreign policy as a tool to promote democracy and human rights, it has shown itself very much willing to intervene militarily or politically on several continents to enforce its vision of the national interest.Footnote ⁷⁸ As Gottfried emphasized a week after the United States and Israel launched their war against Iran in February 2026, right-wing opposition to the ‘forever wars’ of the neoconservatives and the liberal managerial elites should not necessarily be conflated with a principled isolationism opposed to all military interventions. The question is whether the intervention in question serves the vital interests of the United States.Footnote ⁷⁹

Paleoconservatives have been divided on whether the pre-emptive strikes on Iran meet this criterion. Gottfried in the early stages of the war emphasized Iran’s posture as a regional disruptor and gave the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt.Footnote ⁸⁰ But as the expected quick capitulation of the Iranian regime failed to materialize, others echoed Buchanan’s long-time warning that the conflict with Iran was a strategic diversion and called for a more focused delivery of the ‘flexible realism’ laid out in the NSS.Footnote ⁸¹

Yet it is highly unlikely that this ‘flexible realism’ can deliver the second American century that paleoconservatives have aspired to since the end of the Cold War. Not least because the inward-looking nationalism it channels leaves America’s continued claim to world leadership with very little in the guise of a plausible legitimating principle. The decline experienced by the United States in its international reputation since the beginning of the second Trump presidency is already well documented and spans several political and economic domains. It is characterized by eroded trust among historical partners and a general loss of attraction, suasion, and moral authority that undermines the willingness of others to follow the lead of the United States.Footnote ⁸²

Paleoconservatives deserve more recognition for their contribution to the history of the American right and the ideological environment supporting the transformation of American politics and foreign policy under Trump. They have often provided insightful analyses of the crusading follies of neoconservative foreign policy and some of the more solipsistic identity politics of the left. But ‘America First’, with its promises of national restoration, civilizational renewal and limited foreign entanglements, is a dangerous ideological oversimplification rather than a realistic response to the complex challenges of globalization and late modernity.