“America First” in its original iteration was a slogan for isolationists. But the new America Firsters are not remotely isolationist; nor are they anti-imperialist, despite what certain credulous anti-anti-MAGA journalists and academics of the left would have you believe. Since Trump first appropriated the phrase, “America First” has gone from an isolationist credo to a neo-imperialist rejection of liberal internationalism.
But to say that right-wing nationalists are opposed to the “rules-based international order” isn’t to say they reject the notion of international rules and codes of conduct. In fact, the Trump administration, like right-wing nationalist parties around the world, is governed by very strong intuitions about how countries are supposed to behave. It’s just that those intuitions differ radically from the ones undergirding international institutions like the United Nations, the Geneva Conventions and so on.
The political dispute that lays this bare most clearly is between Europeanists and right-wing Euroskeptics. Euroskepticism is a label most commonly applied to parties in European nations that want independence from the European Union: UKIP, the AfD, the Sweden Democrats, the Five Star Movement, and so on. But even though the United States is in no imminent danger of joining the EU, the Trump Administration — and most overtly Vice President J.D. Vance — shares the Euroskepticism of nationalist parties on the other side of the Atlantic. Vance made this all but explicit in his February speech to the Munich Security Conference, when he scolded America’s erstwhile European allies for “[opening] the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants” and reminded them that “in England, they voted for Brexit.”
To Vance, the European Union breaks the rules of the new international order not despite of the fact that it is a rule-bound, trans-national body, but because of it. In other public remarks, Vance has frequently emphasized that polities bound together by law or civic religion are inherently inferior to those united by blood and soil. “America is not just an idea,” he said in a recent address to the formerly Straussian, now neo-fascist Claremont Institute. “We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.”
The whole point of the EU is that it is not a “particular people.” It is, by its very nature, multi-ethnic and multicultural. And while it very often falls short of Europeanists’ highest aspirations, it remains a living rebuke to right-wing nationalist ideas about the biological foundations for political unity.
The rules of the nationalist international order are as follows. Nations are defined by common ancestry: other ethnicities must, within the boundaries of a particular nation, assume a subordinate status. And just as there must be a hierarchy within nations, there is a hierarchy of nations: the superior ones must be allowed to dominate their respective spheres of influence. Under these rules, pluralism and multi-lateral cooperation are not just naïve or misguided, but actual violations of proper international norms.
People have often remarked on the irony of nationalist globalization: right-wing nationalist parties all over the world enthusiastically share ideas, messaging strategies, and even material support with one another. But this only looks like a contradiction if you assume these parties are isolationist, or opposed to the idea of some kind of coherent international system. In fact, they’re trying to impose their international system on the rest of us.
This post was inspired by my efforts to make sense of what the hell happened in the most recent Japanese elections, where a “Japan First” party, Sanseito, gained 14 seats in the upper house of the National Diet. I was a little bemused to discover that the party, is led by an antisemite who once promised that his party would not “sell Japan out to Jewish capital.” There’s an obvious historical logic to the antisemitism of nationalist parties in Germany, France, the United States and various other Western countries. But Japan? Japan has never had a Jewish population of any size or note; there are maybe a couple thousand Jews in the entire country today.
Clearly, Sanseito’s Sohei Kamiya is guzzling down the same rancid slop as his counterparts in other developed countries. Antisemitism is just part of the nationalist package. As the ur-conspiracy theory, antisemitism also generally tends to travel with conspiracism, which is another key ingredient in the nationalist stew.
But I think there’s something else going on here, and it goes back to twentieth century tropes about “rootless cosmopolitans” or, in an expression coined by Henry Ford’s newspaper, “the international Jew.” Jews are a nation of sorts, but without national boundaries; there are more people with at least one Jewish parent in the United States than there are in Israel. The diaspora is where the majority of Jews live, it has been since antiquity, and it probably always will be.
This fact — and the fact that so many members of the diaspora, including myself, feel no identification with the state of Israel — poses serious problems for the nationalist international order. It also helps to explain the ambivalent relationship that many right-wing nationalist parties have with Israel. On the one hand, the Israeli government plays by the right-wing nationalist rules: it dominates and terrorizes non-Jewish subject peoples, it invokes blood and soil as the core of Israeli nationhood, and it even indulges in conspiratorial, antisemitic tropes about members of the diaspora. On the other hand, Netanyahu’s genocidal war of conquest in Gaza is too much to stomach for even some members of the nationalist right. Plus, at the end of the day, Israel is still full of Jews.
To the extent that Israel offers a solution to the Jewish question, it is because right-wing Zionism gives antisemites in other countries a certain amount of plausible deniability. They can distinguish between the “real” Jews of Israel, who they can claim to support, and the rootless Jewish diaspora, which represents the real menace to gentiles. But that’s not really a solution to the fundamental problem, which is that the durability of the diaspora — even after the Holocaust — is a constant reminder of why the nationalist international order will always be a mirage.
People like Vance will never get to see a world without migration, shifting demography, and ambiguous ethnic boundary lines, because that world has never existed. Multiculturalism and pluralism are not utopian ideals, but a necessary response to one of the basic, enduring facts of human civilization. People move around and intermarry. Traditions evolve and cross-pollinate. Ethnogenesis is not just something that happened in the past, but an ongoing, dynamic process. The first Syrian migrants to England arrived not under the EU, but under the Roman Empire. There are even some Jews in Japan.
UPDATE: I removed language that implied Sanseito was interchangeable with another party that also gained in the Japanese Diet elections. Thanks to Tobias Harris for pointing out the error.