Trumpism is not an ideological invention; it is a rediscovery. The foreign-policy historian Walter Russell Mead, in his 2001 book 'Special Providence', identified four traditions that have shaped American statecraft: Hamiltonian (commerce and finance), Wilsonian (democracy promotion), Jeffersonian (restraint and civil liberties), and Jacksonian (populist nationalism). The last of these — named for Andrew Jackson, the seventh president — is suspicious of foreign entanglements, protective of the working white majority, quick to violence when honour is threatened, uninterested in remaking the world, and deeply loyal to a specific idea of the American folk community. It is not new. It ran through American politics from the 1820s through William Jennings Bryan, and re-emerged periodically — Pat Buchanan in the 1990s, Ross Perot, elements of the Tea Party. Trump did not invent this tradition. He revived it, professionalised its media operation, and captured the Republican Party for it. That capture is the most important fact of twenty-first-century American politics.
The core enemy in the MAGA worldview is not Russia and not, initially, China. It is 'globalism' — the post-1945 architecture of alliances, trade agreements, multilateral institutions, and elite consensus that MAGA argues have hollowed out American industry, sovereignty and identity for the benefit of a professional-managerial class that lives on the coasts and works for multinational corporations. NATO, the WTO, the WHO, the UN, the International Criminal Court, the Paris climate agreement, the Iran nuclear deal, USMCA (formerly NAFTA) — all treated with a mixture of suspicion and hostility. Free trade is not a good in itself; it is a policy that specific American communities paid for with their factories. Immigration is not a source of dynamism; it is a policy that specific American communities paid for with their wages. This is a real diagnosis with a real constituency, and dismissing it as pure racism or pure nostalgia (both of which are present) misses why it has been electorally durable across three presidential cycles.
Classical American conservatism since roughly the 1950s — the Reagan-Bush-McCain-Romney tradition — believed in a liberal empire: free trade plus military primacy plus democracy promotion, held together by permanent alliances. Trumpism keeps the military (indeed enlarges the defence budget) and drops the empire. Allies must pay their own way — the 2% NATO target treated as a rent bill, not a political goal. Democracy promotion is naive at best and hypocritical at worst. Regime change (Iraq, Libya) is a Bush-Obama mistake never to be repeated. The nation comes first, and 'nation' has a specific cultural content: English-speaking, majority-Christian, respectful of border enforcement, suspicious of double loyalties. This is an inward-turning conservatism much closer to European national-populist parties (Meloni, Le Pen, Orbán, PVV) than to the George W. Bush Republican Party of twenty years ago. The transformation of American conservatism into a European-style national-populist movement is one of the underrated stories of the last decade.
The hemisphere is home. Trumpism's foreign-policy centre of gravity is, unusually for a modern American movement, the Americas. Mexico (migration, cartels, fentanyl, trade), Canada (softwood lumber, dairy, tariffs, occasional annexation jokes that Canadians take rather less lightly than intended), Panama (canal fees and Chinese port operators), Greenland (Arctic, minerals, radars), Cuba and Venezuela (regime rivals, ideological affront, oil). Europe and the Middle East are treated as transactional problems to be managed at arm's length. The neighbourhood is existential. This is a return to a much older American strategic instinct — one that predates the Cold War and the two World Wars — and it fits naturally with the ideological premise that the nation, not the empire, is what matters. If you are not trying to run the world, you spend your energy on the yard around the house.
If globalism has a face, MAGA says, it is Chinese. Chinese factories took the manufacturing jobs (roughly 5 million lost from US industry between 2000 and 2010, according to the well-known Autor-Dorn-Hanson research); Chinese-made or Chinese-precursor fentanyl kills roughly 70,000 Americans a year; Chinese state-backed firms are accused of systematically stealing intellectual property; Chinese ownership of TikTok is treated as a national-security question; Chinese-owned farmland near US military bases is treated as espionage. Tariffs on China are treated as moral, not just economic. Where the Cold War's ideological frame was communism versus democracy, this one is more civilizational and economic than ideological — a rivalry between the American nation and the Chinese party-state understood as competing ways of organising modern industrial societies. The bipartisan American consensus on China hardness runs from Bernie Sanders to Josh Hawley, and MAGA is the most electorally successful expression of it.
For MAGA, uncontrolled migration is not a policy failure to be optimised. It is the failure — the single clearest evidence that the American elite has stopped taking the nation seriously. A country without a border, in this view, is not a country. This inverts a generation of Republican pro-immigration business logic (cheap labour, growth, family values) and fuses foreign and domestic policy into a single file: cartels, fentanyl, trade, migration, remittances, and border technology are all treated as one integrated national-security problem. It also explains why so much of the administration's early foreign policy — tariff threats against Mexico and Canada, warships off Venezuela, redesignations of cartels as foreign terrorist organisations, pressure on Latin American governments to accept deportations — traces back to the border. The border is not one issue among many. It is the metaphor for the entire political project.
Tariffs in the MAGA vocabulary are not just economic tools or revenue devices or protectionist barriers. They are speech acts. A tariff says: you have insulted us, and you will pay for it, on our timeline, in the currency of your market access to the largest consumer economy on Earth. Applied to allies (Canada, the EU, Japan, South Korea) as readily as to rivals (China, Mexico), they signal that the old distinction between friend and foe — a distinction that structured US foreign policy for eighty years — is treated as an outdated map. There are no permanent alliances, only permanent interests, and interests are re-negotiable every quarter. Economists mostly agree that the costs of tariffs fall largely on American consumers. That is not, within this framework, a decisive objection. Symbolism, leverage, and the political message of standing up to unfair treatment are treated as first-order goods that justify second-order costs.
Trump himself is a specific political figure with a specific media persona and a specific base. He will not be president forever. But the coalition he has built — working-class white voters plus a growing share of working-class Hispanic and Black men, plus a socially conservative religious base, plus a small but influential tech-right — has already re-mapped what 'conservative' means in the United States. The next Republican foreign policy will not look like George W. Bush's, whoever ends up leading the party. It will be economically protectionist, culturally traditionalist, foreign-policy restraint-curious, and structurally hostile to the multilateral institutions of the last eighty years. J. D. Vance, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio (post-2015), Tom Cotton — the intellectual and political leadership of the movement is generational, not personal. That is why 'is this just Trump?' is the wrong question. The answer, increasingly clearly, is no.
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