Trump’s MAGA agenda poses as anti-globalist—but masks a self-serving, chaotic new form of globalism.
No one has been more consistent in denouncing globalists and globalism than Donald Trump. Tariff may be his favorite word, but globalist is his preferred epithet. How ironic, then, that Trump and his second administration have emerged as an uber-globalist monstrosity.
To be sure, Trump’s MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) movement is ostensibly about turning one’s back on the rest of the world. Echoing aviator Charles Lindbergh’s isolationist America First movement of the 1930s, its goal is to unwind the cross-border ties that have underpinned economic relations for decades.
Before MAGA, free and open trade was the order of the day. Countries like China and Russia were brought into the World Trade Organization on the assumption that integration with the global economy would nudge them toward political liberalization. Large numbers of migrants, skilled and unskilled, crossed into America every year, seeking economic opportunities that they could not find at home. But the liberal world order has now been replaced by Trump’s bewildering slew of tariffs, mostly directed against America’s longstanding friends and allies, and often-brutal deportation of migrants.
Moreover, whereas the United States previously anchored a global system of open capital markets, now Trump’s advisers are proposing extraordinary interventionist measures to usher in a new regime. Among other things, they want to convert short-term Treasury securities into very long-term bonds, an extraordinarily disruptive move that most bondholders would regard as a default. In each case, the Trump administration’s goal is to kick away the pillars of a system that many MAGA supporters no longer consider beneficial.
But the reality is that Trump is still fully engaged in the globalization game. His key adviser and financial backer, Elon Musk, has a vast international portfolio of business interests – notably in China – and Trump himself has real-estate holdings around the world. Such global interests are central to the new US policy. The only real card that Trump could play to bring Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table is the prospect of a large inflow of US investment in Russian energy and minerals.
Trump’s “transactional” approach (international dealmaking) is just globalism under another name. The term “globalist” comes from Ernst Jäckh, an émigré German scholar at Columbia University who used the word in a 1943 book, The War for Man’s Soul, to describe the nature of “Hitlerism.” The Nazi leader, Jäckh wrote, “has embarked on a ‘holy war’ as the God-sent leader of a ‘chosen people’ bred not for imperialism but for globalism – his world without end.”
Hitler and Stalin were both globalists in the sense that they saw conquest and an expanding yoke of influence as the key to advancing their own regimes’ interests. Both even kept globes on their desk – an interior-design choice memorably satirized in Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. Soon enough, the label showed up in debates about America’s own place in the world. After World War II, opponents of US internationalism deployed it as a pejorative (sometimes appropriately) against the United Nations system or the US interventions in Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East. In these cases, the label had some rhetorical force, because it was still understood to mean a global power grab that lacked any underlying ethical principle.
True, some MAGA advocates do claim to be following a deeper principle in their attempt to overhaul the world order. It goes by the name of sovereigntism, the idea that a country has an exclusive duty to its own citizens. As Vice President J.D. Vance told Fox News in January: “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” He then posted on Musk’s X platform to explain: “Just google ‘ordo amoris.’”
Though Vance’s supporters are unlikely to have understood the reference, it did trigger a stormy debate among intellectuals. Ordo amoris (“order of love”) refers to St. Augustine’s presentation of the consequences of divine love. How can Christians uphold their duty to love all humans when such love inevitably involves choices, or what modern political scientists would call tradeoffs? Vance’s answer is that charity (caritas) should go first to those who are closest to us.
But nowhere in the Augustinian or Christian tradition is it actually said that the family is the first priority, followed by geographically proximate neighbors, and so on. On the contrary, caritas has always referred specifically to one’s obligations toward strangers, and globalization has long meant that such interactions can take place across great distances.
In an astonishing and illuminating move, Pope Francis – who has far more credibility to pronounce on Catholic doctrine than the recent convert Vance does – made precisely this point in a letter addressed to America’s bishops. “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted,” Francis explains, “is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan.’”
Likewise, John Paul II, the Polish pope whom many conservatives once feted, always stressed that solidarity – brotherly love – is central to any Christian understanding of a properly ordered moral universe. And Pius XII, as Francis’s letter emphasizes, formulated an Apostolic Constitution on the Care of Migrants.
Globalism, as an ethically unanchored pursuit of advantage on an international scale, is at the core of MAGA. It promotes a vision that ultimately will produce disorder, rather than order. Jäckh was right about the battle for the world’s soul. Salvation for the US may now lie in Making America Principled Again.
Copyright Project Syndicate
Harold James is the Claude and Lore Kelly Professor in European Studies at Princeton University.