Part II: Why do populists on the left and right hate globalism?

An ideological marriage that threatens the liberal international order

Note: This is the second essay in a three-part series about the liberal international order and its enemies (you can read part I here). Part III will be published soon.

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In February 2023, the Chinese Foreign Ministry published a document which accuses the United States of imposing “rules that serve its own interests in the name of upholding a ‘rules-based international order.’” Beijing has every incentive to present that order as a U.S.-dominated imperial project because China is a rival great power that wants to establish its own transnational rules and institutions. Russia still regards itself as a great power, too, which is why Vladimir Putin relentlessly attacks the EU, NATO, and the democratic governments that maintain the liberal international order. Putin invaded Ukraine last year because he feared the prospect of an increasingly independent neighbor moving out of his kleptocratic orbit and toward the liberal democratic West.

While it makes sense for authoritarian leaders to despise the liberal international order, it’s remarkable how many Western politicians and intellectuals share their contempt. This attitude is particularly common among populists — on the right and left — and it is steadily becoming more mainstream. While populist movements reflect genuine and partly justified feelings of discontent with globalization and other forms of international integration, populists also cynically exacerbate these feelings with lies, conspiracy theories, and appeals to tribal hatred. Defenders of the liberal international order must combat these falsehoods and tactics directly, but it’s also necessary to understand where anti-globalism critics are coming from and address the legitimate grievances of fellow citizens who feel like victims rather than beneficiaries of a more interconnected world.

The nationalist revival on the right

The rise of the populist right in the United States and Europe has fueled resistance to the idea that democratic countries should pursue political liberalization, economic openness, and mutual security around the world. President Donald Trump was bitterly hostile toward free trade, immigration, military alliances, and other core elements of the liberal international order. While a majority of British voters chose to leave the EU after a dishonest campaign convinced them that withdrawing would be quick and painless, many leave supporters were also opposed to what they regarded as infringements on their sovereignty from an oppressive bureaucracy in Brussels.

Emerging political movements like National Conservatism have arisen in response to these political developments, and they reflect a significant ideological shift among right-wing parties and intellectuals in the U.S. and Europe. Although conservatives have long been suspicious of certain aspects of globalism — such as large-scale immigration and some features of international law — many of the most revered conservative leaders of the past 75 years (such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher) were strong proponents of a muscular foreign policy, free trade, and other policies that sustained the liberal international order.

National conservatives reject this tradition. While the movement’s statement of principles declares support for “trade treaties, defensive alliances, and other common projects that respect the independence of their members,” the second half of that statement is more salient than the first. National conservatives often argue that the liberal international order is a new form of imperialism that undermines the autonomy of sovereign states, tramples on citizens’ rights, and incites geopolitical conflict. Yoram Hazony is the chairman of National Conservatism, and his 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism uses the words “globalism” and “imperialism” interchangeably: “I will understand ‘globalism,’” he writes, “for what it obviously is — a version of the old imperialism.” According to Hazony, one of the West’s “great imperialist projects” is the European Union, which he says has “progressively relieved member nations of many of the powers usually associated with political independence.” Other nationalists use the same rhetorical tactic — in his 2019 book The Case for Nationalism: How It Made Us Powerful, United, and Free, Rich Lowry describes the EU as “neo-imperial” and “perhaps the greatest threat to self-government in the West.”

These are strange accusations, as countries must apply for membership in the EU and undergo an arduous accession process that takes an average of about nine years. A series of national referenda over the decades have resulted in substantial (often overwhelming) majorities voting for membership. Many nationalists around the world celebrated Britain’s exit from the EU as a populist revolt against globalist hegemony, but when YouGov recently asked Britons how they would vote if the referendum were held today, just 33 percent said they would choose to leave, while 55 percent would vote to remain. Pro-Brexit politicians and pundits often claim to be trumpeting the will of the people, but this clearly isn’t the case. As of spring 2022, support for the EU within member states was reaching all-time highs — if anti-EU populists really speak for the people, why are the people against them? Meanwhile, there are eight candidate countries currently integrating EU legislation into their national laws in a bid to become new members. This looks more like democracy than imperialism.

Happy subjects of the scary European “empire.”

A lengthy and democratic accession process isn’t compatible with the idea that the EU is a tyrannical empire.

The right’s nationalist turn has fundamentally altered the political landscape in the United States and Europe. When Trump introduced his “America First” foreign policy eight years ago, many Republicans were aghast that a leading contender for the GOP nomination chose to echo Charles Lindbergh’s isolationist, anti-Semitic movement to keep the United States out of World War II. Within a few years, America Firstism had become dominant within the GOP — as of October 10, 2023, Trump was 49 points ahead of his nearest rival for the 2024 presidential nomination. Republicans who were initially horrified by Trump’s America Firstism, such as South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, are now among his most sycophantic supporters. After attempting to overthrow American democracy on his way out of office, Trump now promises to “totally obliterate the deep state” if he’s elected in 2024, which would include gutting the State Department, the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and the intelligence services while installing his own lackeys across the U.S. government. Nationalists are constantly warning us about the tyranny of institutions like the EU, but the true authoritarian threat comes from their own ideology once it seizes power.

On the other side of the Atlantic, nationalist parties and leaders have enjoyed growing popularity and influence over the past decade. Viktor Orbán won his fourth consecutive victory in April 2022, despite his effort to establish what he calls “illiberal democracy” in Hungary. In recent years, the ruling Fidesz Party has undermined judicial independence; corrupted the democratic process (with controlled access to the media and audits of opponents, for instance); and repressed politically inconvenient educational institutions, NGOs, and other civil society organizations. Like many nationalists, Orbán has a narrow definition of what it means to be a citizen — he’s deeply hostile to immigration (which he describes as “poison”), and he inflames xenophobic sentiment in the country with talk of “Muslim invaders” and by insisting that multiculturalism is an “illusion.”

In France, Marine Le Pen — leader of the anti-immigrant and anti-EU National Rally, formerly the National Front (a rebranding intended to move the party away from its far-right roots) — made it to runoffs against Emmanuel Macron in the past two presidential elections. From 2017 to 2022, Le Pen’s share of the vote jumped from 33.9 percent to 41.5 percent. An April 2023 poll found that Le Pen is more popular than Macron, and in the 2022 parliamentary elections, her party won 89 seats in the National Assembly — up from just eight before. This strong showing helped to deny Macron’s centrist alliance a parliamentary majority. Le Pen has attempted to soften her image and make her party more palatable to mainstream voters in recent years, but she will always be a creature of the hard right. During the 2017 election, she promised to suspend immigration and she has long argued that France should leave the EU and drop the euro. While she now says “Frexit is by no means our project,” her insistence on the “supremacy of national law” and demands for strict border controls contravene the most basic requirements and principles of the union.

Nationalism is on the rise elsewhere in Europe. In Germany, Alternative for Germany (AfD) — one of the most radical far-right parties on the continent — is now the second-most popular party in the country. AfD regards the EU as a “failed project” that should be dissolved, demands “negative immigration” (net deportation of 200,000 people per year, to be precise) and the immediate closure of the borders, and wants to lift all sanctions against Russia. Last fall, Giorgia Meloni — yet another nationalist who’s hostile to immigration and the EU — became the prime minister of Italy. (It should be noted that Meloni’s tenure has been surprisingly moderate — for example, she has consistently maintained Italy’s support for Ukraine since taking office, despite the mounting political risks of doing so.) In Poland, the nationalist Law and Justice Party has been in power since 2015, and today’s elections will determine whether the party can secure a third term in office. Like Fidesz, Law and Justice has adopted anti-democratic measures — such as encroachments on judicial independence and the conversion of Poland’s public broadcaster into a propaganda machine — while making explicit xenophobic and homophobic appeals to voters.

These political successes have emboldened nationalists everywhere, and they’re increasingly working together to advance their interests more broadly. Nationalists suddenly drop their aversion to global cooperation when it comes to partnerships with other nationalists. After the Serbian nationalist leader Milorad Dodik announced that he wanted to oversee the dissolution of Bosnia, Orbán promised to veto any sanctions the EU might impose on him for pushing a dangerous secessionist agenda. Putin also supports Dodik, who regurgitates the Kremlin’s talking points on the war in Ukraine — such as his observation that Russia was “forced to start this special operation.” According to Dodik, “this is not a war between Ukraine and Russia,” but a war between Russia and the hegemonic West.

Moscow remains at the center of the global nationalist and authoritarian axis, despite Russia’s disastrous war on Ukraine. Orbán maintains a close relationship with Putin and touts Russia’s “stability” while insisting that it’s “impossible” for Ukraine to win on the battlefield. He constantly impedes the adoption of new sanctions against Russia (Hungary is also exempt from the EU oil embargo), and Budapest continues to do business with Russian companies on everything from nuclear power to public transit. Hungary refuses to ship weapons to Ukraine (and has interrupted the delivery of weapons from other EU countries), or even publicly allow its territory to be used for weapons transfers.

Le Pen argues for the “reattachment” of Crimea to Russia, the removal of France from NATO’s integrated military command, and the end of joint Franco-German military programs. Although Le Pen has been forced to toughen her rhetoric toward Russia — especially after the revelation that her party took money from a Russian bank in 2014 — she once declared that she shared Putin’s values and envisioned a “new world order” led by nationalist leaders like him, herself, and Trump.

AfD echoes Moscow’s propaganda by blaming the United States and NATO for the war in Ukraine. This position isn’t without its tensions, as it’s difficult for a party supposedly committed to the principle of inviolable state sovereignty to take the side of an imperial power that launched a brutal invasion of its neighbor. Here’s how the former chairman of AfD, Andreas Kalbitz, attempted to explain this contradiction:

Normally, defending Ukraine would coincide with our own interests in the idea of national sovereignty. We believe in a Europe of fatherlands. But this is a proxy war. And for many conservative people, Putin is the only big player working against the whole idea of Western liberalism.

While many nationalists aren’t so candid about their animosity toward liberalism, they despise it all the same. Kalbitz was later ousted from AfD over his membership in a neo-Nazi group (which, given his attachment to a “Europe of fatherlands,” was appropriately called German Youths Loyal to the Fatherland).

The National Conservatism website declares that the world has entered an “age of nationalism” and criticizes conservatives who’ve “grown increasingly attached to a vision of a global ‘rules-based liberal order.’” The website also claims that National Conservatism exists to provide an intellectually respectable version of nationalism “in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race.” There’s a reason national conservatives feel they need to provide this disclaimer — political theories grounded in race have historically been a core part of nationalism, from Nazism to the populist nationalists who are obsessed with immigration and demographic change today. This is why Orbán claims that Hungary is being “invaded” by immigrants, Le Pen wants to shut down all immigration, and AfD demands a deportation frenzy. It’s why their nationalist counterparts in the U.S. have similar political goals and tactics: Tucker Carlson dedicated episode after episode of his Fox News show to the idea that Democrats are importing immigrants to replace white Americans; Trump threatened to gun down migrants at the border (or at the very least, shoot them in the legs).

Hazony, Lowry, and other nationalist intellectuals present a benign version of their ideology, free of bigotry and authoritarianism. They insist that nationalism is the only defense against globalist despotism — an anti-imperialist doctrine that celebrates the diversity and sovereignty of all countries. But this lofty vision never finds its way into the real world — when nationalists take power, their countries invariably lurch toward oppression and xenophobia. Nationalism also leads to imperialism — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a war for national expansion and glory, just as the Third Reich was a product of fevered ideas about German superiority and entitlement. Hazony simply evades these inconvenient facts by redefining the most noxious forms of nationalism as globalism: “Russia acts as an empire. Russia has never in its history been a nation state. It’s always been an empire.” Russia has, in fact, been a nation state for a long time — a nation state with imperial ambitions. As the world has witnessed over the past several years, Russian nationalism is a bottomless well of imperialist tyranny. And the only check on this tyranny is the liberal international order that Hazony and his fellow nationalists despise.

Economic nationalism on the left

On much of the left, “globalism” is another word for decades of disastrous policies enacted by arrogant and incompetent elites who are allegedly responsible for everything from exploding wealth inequality to endless war to the destruction of democracy. In a gleeful denunciation of the globalist “establishment” after the Brexit referendum, Glenn Greenwald attacked those who “regard with affection and respect the internationalist institutions that safeguard the West’s prevailing order: the World Bank and IMF, NATO and the West’s military forces, the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, the EU.” Greenwald regards these institutions as “profound failures” which have “spawned pervasive misery and inequality.” He offers no data to substantiate these claims, and he ignores all the political, social, and economic successes (see part one of this series) of the globalist institutions he decries.

Left-wing provincialism is nothing new, and Brexit brought this phenomenon into especially sharp focus. Jeremy Corbyn was once among the most influential left-wing politicians in the world (before he torpedoed the Labour Party by dragging it into a yearslong anti-Semitism scandal), and he has always been an opponent of European integration. Corbyn voted against the EU’s predecessor (the European Economic Community) in 1975, and he voted “no” on ratifying the EU’s founding treaty in 1993. In 2009, Corbyn condemned the EU and NATO as a “European empire.” Ironically, Corbyn was Labour leader during the Brexit referendum — while he made a half-hearted case for remaining in the EU (he had little choice politically), he couldn’t hide his many years of anti-Europeanism. Other prominent left-wingers like George Galloway actively campaigned alongside the nationalist right in opposition to staying in the union. Galloway said he was honoring the memory of the late Labour MP Tony Benn, who described the EU as a modern “empire” and spent decades arguing that Britain should have nothing to do with it.

Although globalist economic policies like the elimination of trade barriers and subsidies have caused job dislocation and inequality in wealthy countries, these policies have also helped to lift billions of people out of extreme poverty. Greenwald repeatedly uses the words “economic misery” and “economic suffering” to describe the state of the world thanks to the globalist institutions and policies outlined above. But between 1990 and 2021, inflation-adjusted GDP more than doubled in the United States and rose from $9 trillion to nearly $15 trillion in the EU. Over the same period, per capita GDP in the United States and the EU surged by 57 percent and 55 percent, respectively. While wages for some American workers have been essentially flat since the 1970s (accounting for inflation, cost of living, etc.), one of the primary reasons for the “shrinking” or “hollowing out” of the middle class is a rise in the number of people who can be classified as “upper income.” As a 2020 study published by George Washington University and the Urban Institute explains: “While the benefits of economic growth have not accrued equally, they have not gone solely to the top 1 percent. The upper middle class has grown.” The study concludes that the “main reason for the shrinking of the middle class (defined in absolute terms) is the increase in the number of people with higher incomes.”

This is what “failure” looks like?

The theme of Greenwald’s essay is the idea that wealthy globalist elites “thrive while everyone else loses hope” — a sense of despair that is channeled into aggrieved populist politics. It’s true that trust in institutions has declined in the twenty-first century and opportunistic politicians like Trump exploited this lack of trust to gain power. But this doesn’t mean those institutions have, in fact, failed.

“Even now,” Greenwald writes, “Western elites continue to proselytize markets and impose free trade and globalization without the slightest concern for the vast inequality and destruction of economic security those policies generate.” The idea that liberal market reforms and globalization have led to the “destruction of economic security” around the world is an inversion of the truth. This is a ubiquitous narrative on the left today — that globalization is a core component of a brutal neoliberal economic agenda, which prioritizes deregulation, the efficient flow of capital, and fiscal austerity over the well-being of workers. But this narrative isn’t in contact with reality. Since the mid-twentieth century, there has been a drastic increase in social spending as a share of GDP in the United States and Europe. In 1960, Britain and the U.S. spent 9.7 percent and 6.2 percent of GDP on social programs, respectively — proportions that rose to 21.5 percent and 19.3 percent by 2016 (the year of the Brexit referendum and Trump’s inauguration).

The brutal neoliberal agenda at work.

It simply isn’t true that Western governments are unconcerned about the social and economic consequences of globalization, nor is it true that economic conditions have deteriorated for most people over the past few decades.

Although the emergence of neoliberalism in the early 1980s led to cuts in social spending, it’s important to remember that the shift to neoliberal economic policies was a response to a prolonged period of dangerously high inflation in the 1970s and 1980s. In his 2022 book Liberalism and Its Discontents, Francis Fukuyama argues that neoliberalism was an overreaction to this crisis which represented an “extreme” and politically destabilizing version of liberal economic thought. However, after the return of high inflation in recent years, Fukuyama has reconsidered this view. He argues that fiscal discipline and tight monetary policy (key elements of the neoliberal “Washington consensus”) may be necessary to avoid even more economic pain, and urges us not to forget the

economic crises of the 1970s and 80s, when suddenly rising oil prices triggered not just inflation, but in several cases hyperinflation. This then led to balance-of-payments crises, massive devaluations, recessions, and ultimately a series of sovereign defaults across Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Many developing countries lost at least a decade’s worth of economic growth.

Austerity isn’t the only source of suffering for workers — just look at Argentina or Venezuela today, with annual inflation rates of 124 percent and 404 percent, respectively. Beyond the importance of ensuring a stable money supply, other elements of neoliberalism such as free trade have substantial economic benefits: greater market access, lower prices, economic growth, innovation, and higher levels of efficiency and product quality. What would American cars be like today if auto manufacturers in the United States never had to compete with Japanese companies like Toyota and Honda? These benefits must be carefully weighed against the political instability globalization can create by disrupting certain industries (like manufacturing), increasing inequality, and yes, causing wages to stagnate or decrease for certain groups of workers — especially those who lack the skills required by an increasingly competitive global economy. But the case for greater government support for marginalized workers, investments in education, and other policies that help societies adapt to economic change can be made without misrepresenting or ignoring the unprecedented benefits globalization has provided.

Left-wingers hold the word “solidarity” in high regard. They call for solidarity with workers around the world, solidarity with the victims of Western imperialism, and solidarity with their ideological allies across borders. But left-wing solidarity is selective. When progressives are more preoccupied with condemning the “imperialism” of NATO and Western governments than defending Ukraine, they’re elevating political posturing over solidarity with a society that’s fighting for its life against actual imperialism. When they decry the EU as an imaginary modern empire, they’re rejecting one of the most radical and successful internationalist projects ever undertaken. And when they demand protectionism — a demand that has become increasingly common on the left since the Cold War — they’re hurting foreign workers who are often in desperate economic circumstances.

After Brexit, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders published an op-ed with the same jeering tone as Greenwald’s broadside against the liberal international order: “Surprise, surprise,” he wrote, “Workers in Britain … have turned their backs on the European Union and a globalized economy that is failing them and their children.” Sanders went on to argue that the “globalized economy, established and maintained by the world’s economic elite, is failing people everywhere.” While we can argue over what “success” and “failure” look like in the international economy, it’s misleading to make such a sweeping negative claim with no acknowledgment of the drastic economic growth and worldwide escape from poverty that are largely due to globalization. Sanders’s view also betrays a surprisingly insular view from a politician who regards himself as an internationalist.

For example, Sanders condemns “disastrous trade agreements that encourage corporations to move to low-wage countries.” The image of the heartless capitalist constructing sweatshops in Bangladesh or Vietnam to exploit cheap labor while depriving domestic workers of jobs and dignity has been a staple of the anti-globalization movement for decades. But this view ignores several realities.

First, jobs created by foreign investment in developing countries offer incomes that are much higher than the local alternatives, which has contributed to the dramatic decline in extreme poverty around the world. Second, many trade agreements include labor provisions that offer workers greater protection than they would have received otherwise (the proportion of agreements that include these provisions has risen over the past decade). And third, when the United States doesn’t take the lead on trade, other countries fill the vacuum. For example, aside from China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, and an array of other trade agreements, Beijing is even trying to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (formerly the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP) after the Trump administration pulled out in 2017. It’s one thing to argue that trade agreements should contain stronger worker protections, environmental regulations, and so on — provisions that China is less likely to care about than the United States — but the opposition to free trade in principle has become a left-wing dogma that makes workers around the world poorer and less safe.

It’s understandable that many on the left are reluctant to celebrate the economic progress that has been made over the past 75 years. After all, there are still hundreds of millions of people living on less than $2.15 per day, Sanders cited real statistics on wage stagnation (for certain segments of the workforce), the benefits of globalization haven’t been evenly distributed, and there’s plenty of understandable anger with this status quo. But for too many left-wing critics of the liberal international order, globalism is a simplistic byword for policies hatched by a cabal of sinister elites who horde all the money and power while workers around the world suffer. “The very, very rich enjoy unimaginable luxury,” according to Sanders, “while billions of people endure abject poverty, unemployment, and inadequate health care, education, housing and drinking water.” One of the main reasons for the collapse of institutional trust over the past decade is the acceptance of narratives like this. When populists tell people they’ve been robbed for decades by corrupt globalists, is it any wonder that they embrace nationalist alternatives like Trumpism and Brexit?

At a time when much of the right has embraced nativism and authoritarianism, it has never been more important for the left to offer a viable alternative. In a 2018 speech, Sanders identified a “growing worldwide movement toward authoritarianism, oligarchy, and kleptocracy.” He recognized that “Donald Trump and the right-wing movement that supports him is not a phenomenon unique to the United States.” He attacked the global “authoritarian axis” encompassing many of the nationalist figures discussed in the previous section — from Trump to Orbán. He even acknowledged that this “authoritarian axis is committed to tearing down a post-World War II global order that they see as limiting their access to power and wealth.” It isn’t often that you hear radical left-wingers tout the benefits of the liberal international order.

But Sanders also argued that “it is not enough for us to simply defend that order as it exists.” This is a fair point — globalism has created powerful feelings of alienation and resentment among millions of citizens in democracies around the world, and these feelings contributed to the rise of Trump, Brexit, and the success of far-right parties in Europe. But one reason for the growing unease with globalism is the relentless demagoguery that surrounds the subject. It’s easier to blame shadowy globalist forces (greedy oligarchs, meddling bureaucrats in Brussels, etc.) for a country’s ills than to do the hard work of building an intelligent immigration system, preparing workers for a more globalized economy, and minimizing the political and economic disruptions caused by an increasingly interconnected world.

As many on the nationalist right and the populist left continue to build eerily similar political narratives around the failures and schemes of nefarious globalists, it’s important to demonstrate why the liberal international order is worth defending in the first place. Progressives like Sanders can contribute to this project, or they can energize the nationalist right by granting its central premise.

An alliance of anti-globalists on the left and right

During one of his many appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, Greenwald used economic nationalism as an excuse for isolationism: “In what conceivable way will the lives of American citizens be materially improved … by sending tens of billions of dollars, now in excess of a hundred billion dollars, to the war in Ukraine?” This is a perfect mirror of Carlson’s own position, which is presumably why Greenwald became a fixture on his show after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Here’s how Carlson put it in a February 2022 monologue:

If you listen to Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republicans in the Senate, you would think that what the average, say, welder back in his home state of Kentucky really wants — more than a pay raise or an affordable vacation or decent schools for his children — what he really wants is an end to Russian aggression against the brave people of Eastern Ukraine. And that’s why if you go to any dollar store in the state, from Ashland to Covington to Paducah to Owensboro, you’ll find what they used to call regular folks muttering bitterly about that damn Vladimir Putin.

Carlson should have given the residents of Paducah and Owensboro some credit instead of treating them like beleaguered rubes who only care about what’s happening down the street. Two months after he delivered that monologue, CBS News and YouGov released a survey which found that 72 percent of Americans who call themselves conservatives said they were in favor of the U.S. sending weapons and supplies to Ukraine. After more than a year and a half of war, however, right-wing support for Ukraine has collapsed — an August CNN poll found that 71 percent of Republicans are now opposed to authorizing more funding for Ukraine.

It’s no mystery why support for Ukraine on the American right has evaporated. While many Republicans in Congress remain nominally committed to funding Ukraine’s war effort, the loudest voices in the party hold a different view. Trump accuses President Biden of putting “Ukraine first” and “America last,” and his isolationist message is pressuring populist members of Congress to cut off funding. A recent effort by Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz to eliminate military assistance to Ukraine attracted 93 Republican votes — up from 70 three months ago. Even if there’s still support for Ukraine among most Congressional Republicans, recall that Trump leads the GOP field by 49 points. Here’s how he summarizes the state of the war and the United States’ role in it:

We have never been closer to World War III than we are today under Joe Biden. … Every day this proxy battle in Ukraine continues, we risk global war. We must be absolutely clear that our objective is to immediately have a total cessation of hostilities. All shooting has to stop.

The two most popular Republican presidential contenders aside from Trump are Vivek Ramaswamy and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, both of whom have taken an America First line on Ukraine. DeSantis dismissed the war as a “territorial dispute” earlier this year and argued that supporting Ukraine isn’t a vital American security interest. Ramaswamy wants to broker a deal with Putin which will cede every inch of territory Russia has stolen and ensure that Kyiv will never be allowed to enter NATO. Instead of resisting an imperialist dictator who has spent decades undermining democracy around the world (and in the case of Ukraine, attempting to extinguish democracy altogether), Ramaswamy would reward him. Likewise, Trump’s promise to end the war in 24 hours implies that he believes the lines on the battlefield should be frozen where they are now, handing Putin a major victory.

Trump was the first president since the founding of NATO raise doubts about the United States’ commitment to Article V — the collective defense provision in the alliance’s charter. He views NATO like he views all international institutions, agreements, and initiatives: in strictly transactional terms. During the campaign in 2016, Trump said he would only protect allies in the event of a Russian attack if they “fulfilled their obligations to us” — something he thought NATO countries had failed to do. During a 2018 interview, Carlson asked, “Why should my son go to Montenegro [which became a member of NATO in 2017] to defend it from attack? Why is that?” Trump responded: “I understand what you’re saying. I’ve asked the same question.” Trump even considered withdrawing from NATO when he was in office, and he says he will “fundamentally reevaluate NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission” if he wins a second term. There should be no illusions about what this means — Trump would likely withdraw from the alliance.

The dissolution of NATO would be celebrated by much of the left. When Russia invaded Ukraine, left-wing intellectuals and activists immediately shifted the blame from the dictator who had just launched an imperial war of conquest to the defensive alliance helping an embattled democracy protect itself. The Democratic Socialists of America demanded that the United States “withdraw from NATO,” “end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict,” and cut off the “tens of billions in military aid and weapons shipments” Washington is sending to Ukraine. Noam Chomsky announced that there would be “no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War.” Greenwald blames NATO expansion for the invasion and claims that the United States wants to “infinitely prolong the war in Ukraine to weaken Russia.” Cornel West argues that “NATO expansion not simply was a provocation, but it’s part and parcel of an overall pattern of U.S. imperial activity.”

Many on the left are incapable of assessing any new geopolitical reality without filtering it through the cloudy, antique lens of pseudo anti-imperialism. The American political theorist Michael Walzer describes this as the “default position” of the left — a position which purports to be “anti-imperialist and anti-militarist,” but which amounts to little more than the reflexive view that “everything that goes wrong in the world is America’s fault.” A principled and consistent “anti-imperialist” position wouldn’t deflect blame from the dictator responsible for the most devastating imperial war of the twenty-first century.

“I restrict myself to discussing American terror,” Chomsky explained in 1969. He has frequently repeated this view in the decades since, arguing in 1986 that it’s “very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.” Many on the today’s left (such as Greenwald) have cited this position as the guiding principle of their own politics. While Chomsky’s maxim may sound like an honorable commitment to self-criticism, it often leads to a myopic obsession with the transgressions of Western governments and a reluctance to criticize even the most egregious crimes committed by any state that opposes the West. One major reason for this blinkered view is the conviction that the liberal international order isn’t just a failure — it’s a modern form of imperialism overseen by the ultimate “liberal hegemon,” the United States. This conviction is shared by many on the nationalist right. In The Virtue of Nationalism, Hazony says there have been two great “imperialist projects” since the Cold War — the establishment of the EU and the “American ‘world order,’ in which nations that do not abide by international law will be coerced into doing so, principally by means of American military might.” This view would have been anathema to the mainstream American right a decade ago, but this is no longer the case.

In a June 2020 article, Greenwald called for an alliance between the populist left and populist right. He lauded what he described as Trump’s scorn for “imperialism and regime change wars.” He saluted Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who “opposes international free trade organizations such as the WTO (the defining goal of the left-wing 1999 Seattle protests).” He congratulated Carlson for playing a “significant role in stopping air strikes against both Syria and Iran.” When Carlson was fired from Fox, Greenwald said his ouster would lead to the “elimination of the only real, sustained dissent on US militarism” at the network and applauded him for opposing the “US proxy war in Ukraine.” Recall that this is how Trump described the war in Ukraine as well — as a “proxy battle,” which denies the agency of the Ukrainians and implies that the United States is merely using them to weaken Russia. This is exactly the sort of rhetoric the anti-Ukraine, anti-globalist left wants to hear from a man who might return to the Oval Office in 2025. Trump continued:

There must also be a complete commitment to dismantling the entire globalist neocon establishment that is perpetually dragging us into endless wars, pretending to fight for freedom and democracy abroad, while they turn us into a third-world country and a third-world dictatorship right here at home. … Our foreign policy establishment keeps trying to pull the world into conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia based on the lie that Russia represents our greatest threat.

It’s no wonder that the populist left embraces the populist right. Trump shares the widespread left-wing conviction that the United States is a uniquely malignant force in the world. If you think that’s an overstatement, consider how Trump concluded his rant about the “globalist neocon establishment”: “The greatest threat to Western civilization today is not Russia. It’s probably — more than anything else — ourselves.” Chomsky couldn’t have said it better.

While populists on the left and right will always disagree about certain issues — don’t expect Carlson or Trump to call for robust action on climate change or Medicare for all anytime soon — they share a mutual hatred for the core ideas and institutions that have built the liberal international order. We’ll explore some of the historical, political, and philosophical foundations of this hatred in future essays, but we must first recognize that hatred really isn’t too strong a word. As Trump puts it:

These globalists want to squander all of America’s strength, blood, and treasure chasing monsters and phantoms overseas while keeping us distracted from the havoc they’re creating right here at home. These forces are doing more damage to America than Russia and China could ever have dreamed. Evicting this sick and corrupt establishment is the monumental task for the next president.

The growing alliance between people who think this way on the left and right is the gravest threat to the liberal international order. It’s only possible to resist this threat by appealing to the liberal traditions on both sides — economic openness and the defense of democracy on the right; international solidarity and the protection of universal human rights on the left.

While it’s necessary to acknowledge the political instability caused by globalism, this doesn’t mean turning inward and ignoring the dramatic rise in wealth, political freedom, and all the other aspects of human flourishing that have fundamentally improved during the first 75 years of the liberal international order. Those who deny or dismiss these victories and fixate on paranoid conspiracy theories about the “globalist neocon establishment” or the new “European empire” are willing to undermine the greatest engine of human progress ever built to serve their own petty and parochial political needs. But this is to be expected — there’s a long history of nationalist and populist demagogues working tirelessly to divide people into mutually hostile groups and profit off their hatred. The real historic injustice would be empowering these demagogues at a time when we need the liberal international order more than ever.