Our Nationalist Age is An Age of Imperial Geopolitics

Global inequality fuels nationalist politics. In Foreign Affairs, Mike Brenes and I explain why and what it means for foreign policy

Photo by Y K on Unsplash

I have a new essay in Foreign Affairs with my co-author Mike Brenes called “Trump and the New Age of Nationalism.” Here’s the gist:

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…The age of great-power competition is an age of nation-states consolidating elite economic power through nationalist policies…The nationalist turn in U.S. foreign policy under Biden empowered the very corporations that have contributed to the inequality that fuels nationalism…The age of nationalism is a punitive one for lower-income countries…

…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.

I wanted to make two points that give context to how you might read our argument.

One is that the essay is guilty of “methodological nationalism.” Foreign Affairs is a journal that writes about “nations” as if they’re people, singular entities. To write there is to do the same. To be a policy wonk at all is to be press-ganged into writing that way.

This tends to obscure class politics and who benefits from the decisions that states make. But it’s a shorthand of convenience to say stuff like “China believes XYZ” or “The United States does ABC.” Sometimes you have to write like that for stylistic reasons and brevity, even though it’s reasonable to ask, “Who precisely is doing and thinking what in sentence constructions like these!?”

Anyway, it’s the establishment publications that are foremost committed to conjuring “the nation” into being with words, so there’s no getting around methodological nationalism despite its vulnerabilities to critique.

The second thing that gives context to this essay is the implicit need to talk around imperialism. I’ve been among the earliest scholars to identify Trump’s foreign policy as having a distinct imperial quality, which represents both continuity and change. Our age-of-nationalism argument buttresses my imperialist analysis.

Put simply, an age of nationalist politics is an age of imperialist geopolitics. As our book The Rivalry Peril makes clear enough (which debuts today!), great-power rivalry ought to be understood as inter-imperial rivalry. But that’s an entirely separate argument and would require its own essay (which we more or less wrote here).

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