Donald Trump hates the neocons. He’ll tell you so himself.
In a speech in Saudi Arabia in May, Trump criticizedpast American presidents for being “afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins,” mocking “so-called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits” as useless. He has long ridiculed the Republican establishment for its management of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—though more in the tone of a fan angry about his team losing than of a principled opponent of militarism.
This philosophy of nonintervention, however, has turned out to be the opposite of his actual policy.
Last week, Trump unveiled his National Security Strategy, which claims that European nations face “civilizational erasure” resulting from the politics of the European Union, and from “migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.” To the extent the document articulates any strategy at all, it appears to be for the United States to pressure Europe to deregulate, crack down on migration, and buy more oil and gas.
Trump has interfered in foreign affairs in many ways. He has ordered the bombing of Iran and is preparing for an attack on Venezuela; “We’re gonna hit ’em on land very soon,” he toldPolitico on Monday. In the Caribbean, his military has committed what law-of-war experts have called murder, launching missiles at boats suspected of carrying drugs. (The national-security justification for this is nonexistent; most illegal narcotics are brought into the U.S. through ports of entry by people who are crossing legally.) He has pressured other countries economically—for example, by imposing punitive tariffs on Brazil for prosecuting former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally who had attempted a coup. And he has expressed a desire for territorial expansionism through the annexation of Canada and Greenland. One thing is very clear: Trump is in no sense a “noninterventionist.”
[From the January 2026 issue: The neocons were right]
But more important, he is not so different from the neoconservatives he often criticizes. Like them, he embraces the wielding of American power to impose his own worldview on countries that do not share it. The attack on Europe for supposedly accepting “civilizational erasure” is nothing if not an attempt to “dispense justice” to European nations that have committed the sin of multiculturalism. This is a kind of neo-neoconservatism, premised on ethno-nationalism rather than the democracy promotion of the post-9/11 era.
As the neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol once wrote, “In foreign policy, neoconservatism believes that American democracy is not likely to survive for long in a world that is overwhelmingly hostile to American values.” It was therefore important to use military force and diplomacy to compel other nations to share those values. After 9/11, this became the operating principle of American foreign policy. The theory was that, by spreading democracy, America would be less likely to be attacked again. In October 2001, the then-neoconservative Max Boot wrote, “We must not only wipe out the vipers but also destroy their nest and do our best to prevent new nests from being built there again.” To be safe, America had to make the rest of the world more like America.
Like the neocons, Trump’s neo-neocons repeatedly invoke the West’s complacency and unwillingness to defend its own values, a frailty that can be rectified only through the ritual use of military force against weaker targets. The conservative writer Jonah Goldberg once articulated what he called the “Ledeen Doctrine,” after the neoconservative Michael Ledeen, which was: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Despite Trump’s rejection of George W. Bush, MAGA bears many similarities to the right-wing politics of that era—a fetishization of violence and torture, the treatment of opposition as treasonous, a disdain for due process, and an anti-Muslim bigotry at odds with fundamental American principles.
Although the pretense of adhering to democratic values has been abandoned by an administration that disdains democracy, free speech, and the rule of law, the theory is nonetheless the same: Unless America defends ethno-nationalism against the forces of multiracial democracy elsewhere, ethno-nationalism will not be safe here. The Trump administration’s rabid hostility toward the “Rainbow Nation” of South Africa, with its history all Americans can recognize, makes more sense in this context.
[Franklin Foer: Why the Gulf monarchs shower Trump with gifts]
Although the neoconservative project failed and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are justly remembered as disasters, some neocons did care deeply about the principles of democracy, in their own misguided way. They have proved it by opposing Trump, even at the cost of their former associations and status in the political party to which they have devoted their lives. But for others, the appeal of interventionism seems to have been more about a kind of ethnic chauvinism, about reiterating the superiority of the enlightened West over primitivist “Islamofascism.” For that faction of former neocons, well, Trumpism fit like a well-tailored suit.
Trump’s National Security Strategy is, of course, not just about foreign policy. This administration has shown itself to be hostile to America’s multiracial inheritance. It is engaged in a social-engineering project to make the United States less diverse through mass deportation; the attack on birthright citizenship; and selective enforcement of antidiscrimination laws, which will make it easier to exclude women and ethnic and racial minorities from elite professions. A National Security Strategy that describes any nation with more welcoming policies as engaged in its own self-destruction is a warning, too, for those Americans who do not fit within the Trump administration’s racially defined view of citizenship. After all, if European civilization can be “erased” by the mere presence of those who do not share the ethnic background of the majority, then the same applies to white people in the United States.
The Trump administration’s strategy document states that “who a country admits into its borders—in what numbers and from where—will inevitably define the future of that nation.” Trump has made clear that this is no anodyne statement—at a rally Tuesday he defended his “permanent pause” on “third-world migration” by expressing his dismay at the fact that instead of people coming from Norway, Sweden, or Denmark, immigrants were coming to the U.S. from “Somalia, places that are a disaster, filthy, dirty, disgusting.” Trump is not concerned about “migration”; in some general sense, he’s concerned that the immigrants are not white.
This is the “Great Replacement” theory, applied globally. It is the same might-makes-right worldview of the worst neocons, but in service of the abhorrent principle of segregation instead of democracy, and suggesting a future of American imperialism unmoored from any pretense of a belief in the equality of mankind.
The post Trump’s New Imperialism appeared first on The Atlantic.
