In both rhetoric and substance, the ideologies of globalism and nationalism have been playing a major role in current events and controversies. How have they shaped American and world attitudes and actions over centuries?
Introduction
The current controversy about the violent riots in Los Angeles and President Trump’s military response to them is part of a larger debate between two diametrically opposite perspectives on the role of the nation state in the world. For globalists from Wilson and his followers to the Biden administration, borders between nations essentially make no sense, given that we are all moving, or should be moving, toward a one world without nation states. Armed force in the name of national security, whether to put down domestic insurrection or foreign attack, is not only misplaced but highly dangerous, from this perspective, especially when the insurrection is “justified.” For the nationalists, from Lincoln to TR to Trump, however, a nation state has a right to preserve its own existence, and consequently strong measures to protect the border and ensure “domestic tranquility” are entirely reasonable.
This essay will set the current arguments in the broader context of the history of globalism and nationalism, primarily in twentieth-century American history. It will demonstrate that what former House Speaker Newt Gingrich calls “the Triumph of Trump” is also a triumph of the nationalists over the globalists and represents a major turning point in America’s relations with the rest of the world and a rejection of decades of Democrat and Republican globalist strategy.
The Current Rhetoric of Globalism and Nationalism
In 2018 President Trump delivered a notable address at the 73rd annual session of the U.N. General Assembly, rejecting globalism and embracing nationalism. “America is governed by Americans,” Trump said; “we reject the ideology of globalism, and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism.” He also urged that, “around the world, responsible nations must defend against threats to sovereignty not just from global governance, but also from other, new forms of coercion and domination.” He called for countries to take ownership of their own governments and not rely on entities like the E.U., U.N., WTO, and multinational corporations. In a similar speech to the International Criminal Court in the same year, Trump declared, “We will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable, global bureaucracy.”
In 2019, Trump reiterated his stance on globalism and nationalism in another UN speech: “The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots,” the President said. He extoled the right of “sovereign and independent nations who protect their citizens, respect their neighbors and honor the differences that make each country special and unique.” More recently, Trump has explicitly called himself a nationalist at his rallies, rebuking globalists for “putting other nations’ interests ahead of those of the United States.” He has said that “a globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly not caring about our country so much. And, you know what? We can’t have that.” In his public statements about trade, immigration, the border, and foreign policy generally, President Trump has emphasized nationalism and rejected globalism in both his terms in office.
In stark contrast to Trump, President Biden clearly sided with the globalists in his speech for the 78th annual session of the U.N. General Assembly: “The United States seeks a more secure, more prosperous, more equitable world for all people, because we know our future is bound to yours.” President Biden also said, “Let me repeat that again: We know our future is bound to yours. And no nation can meet the challenges of today alone.” Biden made it very clear that he supports global cooperation, and that the future of the United States is closely connected to that of the world.
This globalist perspective was, of course, nothing new for Biden. In 2004 when he was a Senator, he criticized the Bush administration’s war in Iraq and offered a new plan for American foreign policy. We need, he said, to take an “enlightened nationalism” approach. “We have to come up with a new standard for intervention that is permissible, that reflects the world we have now,” and by the “new standard” he called for us to “strengthen international organizations and agreements like intelligence cooperation, … [and give] assurance that multinational pacts would be enforced.” In 2016, as the world reacted to the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union, Biden in a visit to Ireland warned against trends toward nationalism “in Europe and other parts of the world.” He criticized leaders who are “peddling xenophobia, nationalism, and isolationism.” In addition, Biden said it was un-American to “build walls instead of bridges.”
In sum, one can see clear differences of rhetoric in the speeches of Presidents Trump and Biden on the nationalist globalist dichotomy. Is it all only a matter of rhetoric, however? Are these divergent perspectives actually reflected in concrete policy differences?
Policy Ramifications
The differences between the Biden and Trump administrations on the border and illegal immigration are clearly rooted in the question of whether to prioritize national sovereignty or embrace a more international approach. The nationalists like Trump advocate for more border control to preserve America’s sovereignty. The globalists like Biden seem convinced that we shouldn’t have closed borders; rather they advocate for more lenient immigration enforcement in the name of humanitarian cooperation. This explains, for example, why the first Trump administration made an effort to close the border by constructing a wall, while the Biden administration stopped the construction of the border wall and re-directed the extra funds that were supposed to complete the project.
The current Trump administration’s efforts to deport illegal immigrants, led by Border Czar Tom Homan, are part and parcel of the same nationalist ideology. So, too, is Trump’s rejection of the Paris Climate Accords as well as his explicitly nationalist, even mercantilist policy on trade. Free traders have always been distinctly globalist in their orientation, and it must be recalled that Marx said it was capitalism which was paving the way for the breakdown of nation states with its one world of free trade. Capitalism and free trade were, in Marx’s view, slowly eroding what makes an Englishman English or a Frenchman French or an American American. Tariffs and protection of domestic industry, by contrast, are a regression, from the globalist perspective. From the nationalist point of view of an Alexander Hamilton or a Donald Trump, however, tariffs and protectionism make complete sense. A nation has a right to protect its own industry, just as it has a right to protect its borders.
Perhaps nowhere is the nationalist perspective behind President Trump’s current policies more clearly evident than in his forceful response to the LA ICE riots. Here, though, Trump’s nationalism is reminiscent, not only of Hamilton, but also of Lincoln.
In his First Inaugural Address, Lincoln made clear what policies he would pursue in the face of disobedience to federal law and authority. After trying to reassure the South that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery where it exists,” Lincoln turned to the subject of sedition and secession: “A disruption of the federal union, heretofore only menaced, is now formidably attempted.” He then went on to argue eloquently for the constitutional immortality of the Union:
I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.
Lincoln did not deny the existence of a right of revolution, but he insisted it to be just that, a revolutionary right and not a legal or constitutional one.
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
Moreover, he noted that the Constitution gives We the People the right to assemble peaceably, not to riot and destroy property or threaten life. When people riot, he said, the government has every right – indeed the duty – to oppose them and, if necessary, to resist force with force.
Lincoln made clear in that First Inaugural what his nationalist philosophy meant for policy and for his role as President:
I therefore consider that in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is unbroken, and to the extent of my ability, I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States. Doing this I deem to be only a simple duty on my part, and I shall perform it so far as practicable unless my rightful masters, the American people, shall withhold the requisite means or in some authoritative manner direct the contrary. I trust this will not be regarded as a menace, but only as the declared purpose of the Union that it will constitutionally defend and maintain itself… The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; …The mails, unless repelled, will continue to be furnished in all parts of the Union. So far as possible the people everywhere shall have that sense of perfect security which is most favorable to calm thought and reflection.
The President’s duty, above all, for Lincoln, was to preserve the Union by any means necessary and to transmit that Union, intact, to his successor as President.
It is, of course, highly improbable that Donald Trump will ever deliver a speech as eloquent in its defense of federal power to suppress domestic insurrection as Lincoln did. The same Lincolnian nationalist perspective, however, underlies Trump’s statements and policies about the LA riots. In his recent speech at Fort Bragg, Trump declared of the LA situation: “This anarchy will not stand.” He said he was authorized to use federal military power, just as Lincoln had vowed to do, to “uphold the supremacy of federal law.” Just as with Lincoln, Trump sees the federal military presence as “defending our Republic itself,” and “stopping an invasion.”
Critics of the President’s policies label them a threat to democracy. They either deny there is violence in LA or label it “exuberance of the moment.” Certainly from an anti nationalist perspective, there is no merit in Trump’s position. Nor was there justification, from that point of view, in Lincoln’s.
There is no justification in using military force to protect a nation’s integrity if you see no future for nation states like the one Lincoln and Trump are preserving.
It will, of course, be pointed out, with some justification, that the threat to the Union posed by the LA situation is not nearly as grave as that which faced the nation on March 4, 1861, when several southern states had seceded and were raising an army to oppose the federal government. Still, the fact that a true civil war may not be imminent is no justification for passivity in the face of blatant and violent disregard of the law. The President has the right to regard the looting and burning in Los Angeles as what he correctly calls “a willful attempt to nullify federal law.” As Florida Governor Ron De Santis has said, “the President not only has the right; he has the duty to enforce the laws of the land.” Moreover, if, as the President contends, the position of the rioters is that they will continue to pillage and burn until ICE and all federal authority supporting it is withdrawn from the city, the situation is not entirely unlike that of Fort Sumter or other places around the country in March 1861. If not directly parallel to the start of the Civil War, it is certainly analogous to the situation faced by President Andrew Jackson when he confronted South Carolina’s nullification of the tariff. Even so ardent a states’ rights President as Jackson proved to be a nationalist in that situation, saying “our federal union, it must and shall be preserved.” In fact, Trump sounded like Jackson, and indeed Lincoln, in that same Fort Bragg speech when he said, referring to the rebel “flags” of the rioters: “The only flag that will fly at federal property in Los Angeles is the American flag, so help me God!”
Trump can also find support in the actions of more recent presidents who have used force to put down domestic disorder. In 1957, when Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus tried to prevent admission of black students to a public high school, President Eisenhower sent 1000 federal troops to the school area and federalized the state national guard, becoming the first President since Reconstruction to use federal troops to protect civil rights. In 1963, in response to riots in Birmingham and the defiance of Alabama Governor George Wallace to desegregation, President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard to ensure the enrollment of black students at the University of Alabama. From Jackson and Lincoln to Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Trump, then, Presidents have taken a nationalist approach to issues of domestic disturbance and insurrection.
In both rhetoric and substance, therefore, the ideologies of globalism and nationalism have been playing a major role in current events and controversies. How have they shaped American and world attitudes and actions over centuries?
Historical Background: Globalism vs Nationalism
Nearly sixty years ago in 1968 a book called War, Peace and the Presidency, by Henry Paolucci, a conservative scholar, traced the historical development of what he called a “militant anti-national” globalist faction in American politics, from Wilson’s League of Nations through FDR’s United Nations through the disarmament movement in the cold war and the peace at any price movement in Vietnam. He contrasted this perspective with his own traditional nationalist point of view, stressing and valuing national sovereignty or the right of any nation state including the United States to its own self determination and freedom.
Of course, the idea of global government and world peace did not begin with Woodrow Wilson. Since antiquity, military leaders from Alexander the Great to Caesar, from Napoleon to Hitler have dreamed of uniting the world by force. In the era of the American founding, idealists like Jefferson and enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire had visions of a one world of peace and freedom.
Their approach contrasted sharply with the mercantilist nationalism of Hamilton and the Federalists led by Chief Justice John Marshall, a man whose patriotism was cultivated in the hard and bitter winter of Valley Forge.
It was with Wilson, however, that globalist ideas were first given concrete practical expression in America. Reflecting on the horrendous casualties of the First World War, Wilson saw himself as the Messiah who would save the world from war. The “final solution,” he thought, was a League of Nations to which all disputes would be referred. All nations including the United States would ultimately have to cede their sovereignty to the League, which would in turn police the world and protect world peace.
In contrast to Wilson’s globalist perspective, however, stands the attitude of former President Theodore Roosevelt, who had been defeated by Wilson when he ran on the Progressive ticket in 1912. In anticipation of that presidential run, on August 31st, 1910, TR made the famous “New Nationalism” speech, in which he called for the federal government to be involved actively in the lives of all Americans by promoting social and economic justice. At the core of this speech is a profound patriotism, a belief that any nation, including the United States, has a right to determine its own destiny. “O my fellow citizens,” TR began, “each one of you carries on your shoulders not only the burden of doing well for the sake of your country, but the burden of doing well and of seeing that this nation does well.” He went on to praise the veterans of the Union army of the Civil War, saying they “deserve honor and recognition such as is paid to no other citizens of the Republic; for to them the republic owes it all; for to them it owes its very existence. It is because of what you and your comrades did in the dark years that we of today walk, each of us, head erect, and proud that we belong, not to one of a dozen little squabbling contemptible commonwealths, but to the mightiest nation upon which the sun shines.” Later in the speech, TR turned to foreign policy, saying that “I believe in an efficient army and a navy large enough to secure for us abroad that respect which is the surest guarantee of peace.”
TR had also put that nationalist ideology into practice as President when he threatened to call out the army to end the coal strike of 1902. As he later explained in his autobiography, the President has the right to protect the nation by any means necessary in time of crisis. Although he was far from an isolationist, TR later was sharply critical of Wilson’s League, agreeing with many that the plan would seriously erode American sovereignty.
Of course, in the end, Wilson’s dream of the United States joining the League of Nations did not come to fruition. In 1920, as Wilson lay gravely ill in the White House, the Senate rejected Wilson’s League, as well as the Treaty of Versailles of which it was the crowning jewel. In the aftermath of Wilson’s failure, however, many of his supporters, whom Paolucci calls “orphaned Wilsonians,” aimed to make his dream a reality. One of those was, of course, Franklin Roosevelt, who had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Wilson and had run for Vice President in 1920 on a pro League of Nations platform. As World War II drew to an end, FDR pushed for an international organization to do what Wilson had imagined the League would accomplish. Under FDR’s leadership, the cooperation of other countries in the development of the United Nations was secured.
With the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, many American intellectuals began to advocate a radical change in the way the peoples of the world conduct their international affairs to avoid a nuclear holocaust. Robert Hutchins, G. A. Borgese, famous refugee from Italian Fascism, and his wife Elizabeth Mann Borgese were all active in framing a new Constitution for the World, a document which, they hoped, would be ratified by the United States in time for the bicentennial of 1976, and later by all the other peoples of the planet. The Preamble of that World Constitution identifies its authors as “We the People of the Earth.”
The document declares that “the advancement of man in spiritual excellence and physical welfare is the common goal of mankind,“ and that “universal peace is the prerequisite for the pursuit of that goal.” “The age of nations must end and the era of humanity begin,” it continues. “The governments of the nations have decided to order their separate sovereignties in one government of justice, to which they surrender their arms; and to establish, as they do establish, this Constitution as the covenant and fundamental law of the Federal Republic of the World.” This World Constitution also calls for a world President who would be a “dispenser of justice” and a protector of peace. Unlike our American President, who, as Trump often reminds his audiences, is elected to serve America, not the world, this global chief executive, would be “the symbol of the political unification of mankind, of power and justice under law.”
That sort of talk has been quite common in the American academy for at least three quarters of a century. Moreover, as the nuclear arms race accelerated in the years after 1945, a genuine anti national, pro globalist faction evolved within the Democrat party. Among the leaders of that faction were the widow of the late President, Eleanor Roosevelt and her friend Adlai Stevenson, who ran for president twice in the 1950s on a pro disarmament, globalist platform.
It had been President Truman, FDR’s successor, who invited Eleanor Roosevelt to join the U.S. delegation for the first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in 1946. During Eleanor Roosevelt’s time in the U.N. between 1945 and 1952, she played a key role in promoting global cooperation. In Adlai and Eleanor: Progressives Who Shaped the World, Stephen Heard describes her position “as a Chairlady of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, [a post] she held for several years.”
Adlai Stevenson took part in the development of the United Nations in 1945 by sailing to England to spearhead the organization’s first meeting. During the first general assembly in 1946. he helped pass the first 103 resolutions. During the second session Stevenson developed a political relationship with Mrs. Roosevelt. In his diary he later wrote, “[we] discussed politics, languages, and education. Everything confirms [my] convictions that she is one of the few really great people to have known.” After more discussion with each other, Mrs. Roosevelt “believed Mr. Stevenson possessed the same qualifications as her late husband,… [and was] urbane, articulate and highly intelligent.”
In 1952 when Truman announced he was not going to run again, Mrs. Roosevelt encouraged Stevenson to run for the democratic presidential nomination. Stevenson lost in 1952, and he lost again in 1956, but as the election of 1960 neared, the globalists found an educatable candidate in the young John F. Kennedy. Kennedy was not by instinct a globalist. His millionaire father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had been a notoriously “unenlightened” person, and Jack too was thought of by globalists as a “bread and butter liberal”—someone more interested in domestic economic issues than world peace. Still, Kennedy was very ambitious, and he wanted to win, so the peace faction globalists educated him and won him over to their side, and he courted them to help him win the election.
Kennedy did win in 1960, of course, and he then proceeded to fill his administration with globalists, including his new National Security Advisor Walt Whitman Rostow, a man who had written that it is a legitimate American objective to “see an end to nationhood as it has been historically defined.” In The United States in the World Arena, Rostow said that we should “see removed from all nations—including the United States—the right to use substantial military force to achieve their own interest.” In addition, in his second book The Stages of Economic Growth, he imagined a world without war due to the end of nation-states: “the hypothesis is that war, ultimately, arises from the existence and acceptance of the concept of national sovereignty.” Rostow defined national sovereignty as countries retaining “the ultimate right—a right sanctioned by law, custom, and what decent men judge to be legitimate—the right to kill people of other nations in defense or pursuit of what they judge to be their national interest.” In a speech at UCLA. he bemoaned the fact that “Nationalism is on the rise in Communist China, Eastern Europe, and, indeed in the Soviet Union itself…. Dangerous clashes of nationalism exist in many parts of the free world and absorb a high proportion of the energies of diplomacy in the search for pacific settlement.”
When Kennedy was assassinated, LBJ kept the globalists as his advisors. For their part, they did not trust him. Johnson knew he had to win them over if he had hopes of securing election in his own right in 1964. So, he went all out to woo them, securing passage of revolutionary civil rights laws. In 1964, with the support of the globalists, LBJ won a landslide election, swamping his Republican rival, conservative Barry Goldwater.
After the election, Johnson began escalating American involvement in Vietnam, angering the globalists. By 1968, they were in rebellion against him, and Johnson was forced to pull out of the race. In the meantime, Richard Nixon, a Republican who had been a staunch anti-communist in his days in Congress but who had come to realize that only a peace candidate could win, was beginning to court the globalists. Paolucci anticipates the arrival of Richard Nixon, describing how Nixon was outbidding the Democrats for the peace vote in the 1968 race.
The election of Nixon in 1968 confirmed that the Republican party, as much as the Democrats, was solidly globalist and anti-nationalist in perspective. Nixon’s appointment of Dr. Henry Kissinger, a renowned globalist from Harvard, to become national security advisor in 1969 and later secretary of state in 1973 confirmed this anti-nationalist perspective. As senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said in his article in the Atlantic Monthly, it was not the actions of Democrats like Kennedy or Johnson that caused the shift in US policy from a nationalist to a globalist point of view; rather it was the Republican Nixon who did that.
With the resignation of Nixon in the wake of Watergate and the subsequent humiliating defeat in the Vietnam War, a revolution in the Republican party followed. It was with the election of Reagan in 1980 that the Republican party, for the first time since TR, began to adopt a nationalist, anti-globalist perspective. Reagan’s hardline policies on the Soviet Union and his buildup of American military strength led to a resurgence of patriotism. And so, for the first time since T.R. and Wilson, the country had a true choice between a nationalist Republican party and an anti-nationalist globalist Democrat party.
In the years after Reagan’s departure from office in 1989, the Republican party began again to move towards the globalist perspective with candidates like Bush, Dole, W. Bush, McCain, and Romney. With the Democrats under Clinton and Obama also pursuing globalism, there was a convergence of both parties on a globalist supra nationalist perspective.
The big change came with the nomination and election of Donald Trump in 2016. With his “America first” and MAGA policies, Trump was explicitly nationalist in his approach. The reelection of Trump in 2024 thus marks a watershed in the history of globalism and nationalism in America. President Biden and Vice President Harris’s policies had been explicitly globalist in their orientation, and they were unquestionably rejected by voters in 2024.
Conclusion
The nationalist and globalist ideologies have played a vital role in shaping American political history from the start of the 20th century to the present. With figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump advocating the Nationalist perspective, and Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Walt Rostow, and Joe Biden among others standing for the Globalists, we see how political rhetoric and policy positions have been influenced by this debate. It is beyond the scope of this short essay to explore fully which perspective, globalist or nationalist, is preferable, and why. Whether one supports the globalist vision of international cooperation or the nationalist defense of sovereignty, however, one thing is clear: the 2024 election affirmed that millions of Americans continue to believe that their country comes first and that preserving it is worthwhile. America’s future and that of the world will depend on which vision, globalist or nationalist, prevails.
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The author gratefully acknowledges his former Manhattanville student, Bill Salazar, for his assistance in the research for this essay.
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The featured image is a 1912 political cartoon, “After you, Teddy!”, and has no known copyright restrictions, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
