Trump’s New Imperialism
In a recent speech in Saudi Arabia, former President Donald Trump expressed his disdain for neoconservatives and their approach to foreign policy, criticizing previous American leaders for their attempts to impose justice abroad. He ridiculed the notion of “nation-building,” suggesting that the U.S. should not concern itself with the internal matters of other nations. However, despite his rhetoric of nonintervention, Trump’s actual policies reveal a stark contradiction. His newly unveiled National Security Strategy paints a grim picture of Europe, claiming that the continent is facing “civilizational erasure” due to migration policies and multiculturalism. This document suggests that the U.S. should pressure European nations to adopt more stringent immigration controls and to increase their energy purchases from America, illustrating a more interventionist stance than his words might imply.
Trump’s foreign policy actions further highlight this contradiction. He has engaged in aggressive military actions, including bombings in Iran and threats of intervention in Venezuela, while also using economic pressure against countries like Brazil. His administration has even entertained ideas of territorial expansion, such as annexing Canada and Greenland. Critics argue that Trump’s approach mirrors that of neoconservatives, as he similarly seeks to impose his worldview on other nations, albeit through a lens of ethno-nationalism rather than the promotion of democracy. This shift in ideology suggests a neo-neoconservatism that prioritizes a vision of America that is racially and culturally homogenous, contrasting sharply with the principles of democracy and multiculturalism that once guided U.S. foreign policy.
The implications of Trump’s National Security Strategy extend beyond international relations; it signals a broader social agenda aimed at reshaping American identity. His administration’s efforts to restrict immigration and promote a racially defined view of citizenship reflect a troubling trend towards exclusion and division. Trump’s rhetoric, including his disparaging comments about immigrants from non-Western countries, aligns with the “Great Replacement” theory, which posits that the demographic changes in Western nations threaten their cultural identity. This perspective not only echoes the worst aspects of neoconservative ideology but also risks fostering a climate of intolerance and xenophobia at home. As Trump continues to navigate the complexities of foreign and domestic policy, the convergence of his administration’s actions with neoconservative principles raises critical questions about the future of American values and identity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO8tJSXMWi8
Donald Trump hates the neocons. He’ll tell you so himself.
In a speech in Saudi Arabia in May,
Trump criticized
past
American presidents for being “afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins,” mocking “so-called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits” as useless. He has long ridiculed the Republican establishment for its management of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—though more in the tone of a fan angry about his team losing than of a principled opponent of militarism.
This philosophy of nonintervention, however, has turned out to be the opposite of his actual policy.
Last week, Trump unveiled his
National Security Strategy
, which claims that European nations face “civilizational erasure” resulting from the politics of the European Union, and from “migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.” To the extent the document articulates any strategy at all, it appears to be for the United States to pressure Europe to deregulate, crack down on migration, and
buy more oil and gas
.
Trump has interfered in foreign affairs in many ways. He has ordered the bombing of Iran and is preparing for an attack on Venezuela; “We’re gonna hit ’em on land very soon,”
he told
Politico
on Monday. In the Caribbean, his military has committed what
law-of-war experts
have called murder, launching missiles at boats suspected of carrying drugs. (The national-security justification for this is nonexistent; most illegal narcotics are brought into the U.S. through
ports of
entry
by people who are crossing legally.) He has pressured other countries economically—for example, by imposing
punitive tariffs
on Brazil for prosecuting former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally who had attempted a coup. And he has expressed a desire for territorial expansionism through the annexation of Canada and Greenland. One thing is very clear: Trump is in no sense a “noninterventionist.”
[
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]
But more important, he is not so different from the neoconservatives he often criticizes. Like them, he embraces the wielding of American power to impose his own worldview on countries that do not share it. The attack on Europe for supposedly accepting “civilizational erasure” is nothing if not an attempt to “dispense justice” to European nations that have committed the sin of multiculturalism. This is a kind of neo-neoconservatism, premised on ethno-nationalism rather than the democracy promotion of the post-9/11 era.
As the neoconservative godfather
Irving Kristol once wrote
, “In foreign policy, neoconservatism believes that American democracy is not likely to survive for long in a world that is overwhelmingly hostile to American values.” It was therefore important to use military force and diplomacy to compel other nations to share those values. After 9/11, this became the operating principle of American foreign policy. The theory was that, by spreading democracy, America would be less likely to be attacked again. In October 2001, the
then-neoconservative Max Boot wrote
, “We must not only wipe out the vipers but also destroy their nest and do our best to prevent new nests from being built there again.” To be safe, America had to make the rest of the world more like America.
Like the neocons, Trump’s neo-neocons repeatedly invoke the West’s complacency and unwillingness to defend its own values, a frailty that can be rectified only through the ritual use of
military force against weaker targets
. The conservative writer Jonah Goldberg once articulated what he called the “
Ledeen Doctrine
,” after the neoconservative Michael Ledeen, which was: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Despite Trump’s rejection of George W. Bush, MAGA
bears many similarities to the right-wing politics
of that era—a fetishization of violence and torture, the treatment of opposition as treasonous, a disdain for due process, and an anti-Muslim bigotry at odds with fundamental American principles.
Although the pretense of adhering to democratic values has been abandoned by an administration that disdains democracy, free speech, and the rule of law, the theory is nonetheless the same: Unless America defends ethno-nationalism against the forces of multiracial democracy elsewhere, ethno-nationalism will not be safe here. The Trump administration’s rabid hostility toward the “
Rainbow Nation
” of South Africa, with its history all Americans can recognize, makes more sense in this context.
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Although the neoconservative project failed and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are justly remembered as disasters, some neocons did care deeply about the principles of democracy, in their own misguided way. They have proved it by opposing Trump, even at the cost of their former associations and status in the political party to which they have devoted their lives. But for others, the appeal of interventionism seems to have been more about a kind of ethnic chauvinism, about reiterating the superiority of the enlightened West over primitivist “Islamofascism.” For that faction of former neocons, well, Trumpism fit like a well-tailored suit.
Trump’s National Security Strategy is, of course, not just about foreign policy. This administration has
shown itself
to be
hostile to America’s multiracial inheritance
. It is engaged in a social-engineering project to make the United States less diverse through mass deportation; the attack on birthright citizenship; and selective enforcement of antidiscrimination laws, which will make it easier to exclude women and ethnic and racial minorities from elite professions. A National Security Strategy that describes any nation with more welcoming policies as engaged in its own self-destruction is a warning, too, for those Americans who do not fit within the Trump administration’s racially defined view of citizenship. After all, if European civilization can be “erased” by the mere presence of those who do not share the ethnic background of the majority, then the same applies to white people in the United States.
The Trump administration’s strategy document states that “who a country admits into its borders—in what numbers and from where—will inevitably define the future of that nation.” Trump has made clear that this is no anodyne statement—
at a rally Tuesday
he defended his “permanent pause” on “third-world migration” by expressing his dismay at the fact that instead of people coming from Norway, Sweden, or Denmark, immigrants were coming to the U.S. from “Somalia, places that are a disaster, filthy, dirty, disgusting.” Trump is not concerned about “migration”; in some general sense, he’s concerned that the immigrants are not white.
This is the
“Great Replacement” theory
, applied globally. It is the same might-makes-right worldview of the worst neocons, but in service of the abhorrent principle of segregation instead of democracy, and suggesting a future of American imperialism unmoored from any pretense of a belief in the equality of mankind.
