The Ideology of Empire
On America First, fear, and “the moral equivalent of war.”
We have launched a new issue focused on grasping the extent and the history of U.S. foreign intervention — how does the U.S. conceive of its role in the world, what has it done to maintain that role, and what has or hasn’t changed over time. A new foreign policy consensus seems to be rapidly emerging, and, per usual, the most helpful thing to do is to slow down and try to understand the context of the moment we are in. This is our third interview of the series.
This interview with Christopher Nichols, Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security Studies and Professor of History at The Ohio State University, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
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To start, it would just be nice if you could introduce yourself and tell me a little bit about what you do.
I'm a history professor and a professor of National Security Studies. I taught for 10 years at Oregon State University and then took this job as the Woody Hayes Chair in National Security Studies at the Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University. I focus on the role of ideas in US foreign policy, and the intersection of foreign and domestic policy.
I got my start as a scholar writing about and taking seriously ideas about isolationism in the mid-2000s. This is when most people were talking about internationalism, and the sort of foregone conclusion that the world had flattened. It seemed to me that the history of isolationism and debates over nationalism were even more live and important than many were assuming, and now, obviously, we live in this moment where we have had a major presidential campaign set up foreign policy and domestic policy positions around “America First.”
So, I'm really interested in ideology, and rethinking how the US has been involved in the world, and trying to draw on the historical context to make more sense of our current moment. And to some extent think about what that past can teach us. Or, simply, take a sense of optimism from the past. Because it has been bad in the past, and the terrors of the present and sense that the sky is falling have been things that many people have felt in a wide range of different eras, and often they've continued forward in their regular lives and in state and local and federal actions and move forward without the sky actually falling.
When you started writing about isolationism, did you feel like you were being prescient? Or were you surprised that the work became as relevant and as sort of prominent as it did?
I'd like to say I was prescient, but I was surprised. When I started, I was really interested in debates over American Empire. I began with a focus on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This was the period for what were essentially arguments about the limits of – and best uses for– US power in the world, and they came to take on new significance in the imperialist and anti-imperialist debates in 1898, when the US first had significant military and commercial power.
And in the early 2000s to 2010 period, it seemed to me that many of those ideas resurfaced as Americans became more skeptical about involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and about the shape of the US presence in the world after the end of the Cold War. Americans began questioning the justification for maintaining numerous overseas bases and such a large military. People were raising questions about human rights, humanitarian intervention, and the appropriate role of the US in the world. I heard echo after echo of the debates from the 1890s.
The return of isolationist ideas became clear by 2016, but it was visible in surveys from the late 2000s. Americans increasingly said the US should "mind its own business" in the world – a sentiment that continued through the Obama years. In fact, Obama partially ran on this platform in 2008. So, it didn't surprise me that Americans were arguing for a more inward focus on infrastructure and major healthcare initiatives. These aren't necessarily small government proposals.
What struck me – both then and in my historical work now – is that isolationist arguments have come from across the political spectrum. These ideas are popular not just on the right, but across the board for Americans. A push for universal healthcare, for instance, is hardly a priority for the US right. But other types of interventions, particularly those focused on the economy and inward-looking policies, say regarding jobs, labor, protecting specific industries or sectors, and issues and perceptions of prices, have come from across the political divide, in the past and present. But this continues to elude our political class.
How do you define ideology? And what is its role today?
If you think about the world around us, it's infinitely complex. Something has to help us reduce that to something finite, right? That is what an ideology or a grand strategy does. It is the intellectual architecture that shapes the set of ideas that are then implemented.
Many politicians, eschew ideology. They'll say, I don't have an ideology, and that's often a giveaway that they do. In one of my books on ideology I talk about this in the introduction with references to both Barack Obama and George W. Bush. But to understand the core elements of that ideology requires us to look at the assumptions that are underlying the kinds of policies, prescriptions, rhetorics, and things they put out there.
Do you have a working definition of the ideology of our current government?
One challenge of the current US government is that there are kind of multiple overlapping sorts of ideologies at work. If you look at the Republican party, for instance, just in foreign policy, there's a group that really does want to support Ukraine, a kind Cold War Truman-esque US commitment to free peoples fighting authoritarian aggressors, but that is not the default position of the party. So how do you square those two things? To say that there's like a singular ideology governing the Republican party, I think would miss the underlying realities. But, there are certainly a few central tenets.
There's unilateralism, which is a core precept of isolationism. The idea that the US will act alone and will prioritize its own sovereignty is clearly a Trumpian position, and it's an ideology that governs virtually every action of his and many of those around him. Second, there's a personal politics to it. So some presidents have put aside much of their ego. Trump is not a president like that. His politics are personal and to understand his ideology one must turn to biography. Trump is a real estate person, focused on space and place, a self-styled deal maker, and his is essentially a politics of perceived wins and losses. That is, there is little to no compromise. He’s no diplomat. The other element crucial to this zero sum personal and unilateral politics is its transactional nature – the sense that the US government will measure its domestic and foreign policies in terms of how it benefits.
The last thing worth noting is a kind of vague market capitalist framework that is not precisely a free trade orientation, but more of an old mercantilist model. It is this old vision of protecting domestic markets or new industries, at the expense of consumers, making things cost more so you could prioritize domestic interests.
Alongside this view is the need for more land for both markets and security. That's why he keeps yelling about the Panama Canal or Greenland or Canada – it's very much in keeping with old 19th-century expansionist mercantilist ideas. You need space, you need to protect domestic industries, this will help acquire new citizens, new workers, new markets.
That logic and way of understanding threats and opportunities had been mostly rejected by the end of the 20th century, and it's frankly really surprising to see it come roaring back. No reputable economists think that high tariffs is a smart political-economic positioning in a 21st-century interdependent economy with fundamentally different underlying factors, like the internet. In terms of new territory and security. In an era of space-based surveillance and US military hegemonic power, as well as world economic dominance, the US simply doesn't need space the way we once did, or that American policymakers thought the nation did when the US annexed the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, etc. at the end of the nineteenth century.
I guess this is sort of none of your business, but do ever you try to figure out why people are doing what they are doing? Like, do you have perspective on why Trump is attracted to some of these old models.
Yeah. You know, I probably shouldn't, but I do think about this. One way to understand politicians historically is to get a sense of their intellectual community. Who do they really trust? Who are they talking to regularly?
I think one of the major differences between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 is there's virtually none of the old guard around him anymore. The people who fundamentally believe in US institutions like USAID and the Foreign Service are gone.
And as to why the historical antecedents would appeal to him – this is the imperial presidency at its most powerful. Executive orders and tariff policy, potential annexations are actions presidents have reserved the right to do – these actions are unquestioned and cannot be questioned. I would argue he's pushed executive orders farther than any president has before. He learned in his first term that actually you can do a lot in this way, more than he thought.
He is also tapping into something that has been popular for 150, 200, maybe 250 years when we celebrate the US’s 250th in 2026. These policies and rhetorics about prioritizing the US are very popular. They are enduring in a visceral way. And, they are a throwback. The America First Committee between 1940 and 41 was shocked by its own popularity. They didn't expect to be a national membership organization. They never intended to endorse any parties or politics. They had just one issue: stay out of World War II. When they first came together, there were pacifists and socialists and major Jewish figures involved, as well as some of those who are better known today. Then it quickly moved towards a much more homogeneous white supremacist vision that we tend to associate with it. But not at first. At first it was really popular – 850,000 or so members, with 400-450 chapters across the US. That group had one singular goal, to keep the US out of the World War at all costs.
What role do you think fear plays in all this?
Fear is absolutely a huge part of this, and insecurity that are amplified in, frankly, in totally unfactual ways. So there's not been a rising—there was a blip of rising crime and murder in the pandemic, but other than that, the US is much more safe than it was when I was a kid or probably when you were a kid. It's a much safer country despite the mass killings and other things that have proliferated in the last generation.
We have tons of problems in American society, but so much of the data that Trump and others point to as the key centralizing dimensions of fear are just false. I think we've lived in a very insecure society for quite a while, and we're now just really accustomed to generating fear. And then the other piece that's pretty obvious, but I think people don't spend enough time thinking about is—it's just a sad political truism that fear generates votes, galvanized voters, and negative campaigning generates campaign donations and turnout in ways that positive messages don't.
Trump has mastered the negative message. He has mastered the message of grievance. And the primal emotional orientation of all of Donald Trump's messages along with the majority of his policies is fear. He's cutting jobs, cutting programs, saying we should fear waste and widespread corruption, and especially a bogey man “deep state.” His administration, in the interest of efficiency, is radically altering the structure of government, which makes everybody who works in the federal and state government afraid. And then there is fear about borders, or terrorist attacks, or China. There's fear written through all the different dimensions, real and imagined, as the emotional core of his domestic and foreign policy. In short, he argues for making the US more secure precisely by conjuring up threats of all sorts that generate insecurity and fear, particularly among his most dedicated followers, who, in turn, must turn to him and his policies to alleviate and ameliorate those conditions and concerns.
It also makes me think about how fear and strength are linked together, which confuses me. We are so militarized, but yet so, so afraid of a few people like, on foot, at the border. It feels so contradictory, but so appealing.
Right? Well he just invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport five or six Venezuelans who are alleged to have been in a gang. I mean, the US military is capable of executing a multi-front war around the world, and now we think we need to envoke a super emergency wartime action for a few alleged gang members?
When you look at like polling and data, a lot of Trump's winning-ness in these presidential elections has to do with small turnout. I think there's a lot of people on the left who identify with this sort of anti-war thinking and who might jump ship to a Republican party that right now presents seemingly more anti-war than the Democratic party. Do you feel like the left has a confused ideology at the moment? Is that a regular thing to see fluctuate?
Yeah, I think the Democratic Socialists, and a constellation of green voters or Stein voters hoped the US would withdraw from lots of conflicts, pull back its military structures. That is not likely to happen on the Trump watch. The evidence of the Trump administration before the election and now in the first months in office suggests that it's hardly an anti-war group, if anything, it is a unilateralist pro-war group, albeit with seemingly little desire to commit many American soldiers to any of the possible fights out there right now.
And this gets back to my beginning point. Isolationists and Unilateralists have not been pacifists. In the historical record, what they've tended to argue for is the US making war or helping allies on its own terms. They've actually been quite hawkish, building up the US' base structures and military capacity, being ready to wage war all over the place. My caution would be: beware anti-war folks, US isolationism can mean war making. It could mean more preemptive attacks. Trump very well may send the 101st airborne to the Panama Canal, as he's indicated he's ready to do. That seems absurd in the 21st century, but that's the sort of thing they would've ruled out as absolutely the worst of US imperialism in the hemisphere could come roaring back on the US' own terms—this sort of "America first, take the Panama Canal."
Why do you feel there is not a compelling counter to this sort of ideology at the moment? And by compelling, I guess I mean, in general, having a cohesive ideology that is not just a reaction to what is happening?
The US doesn't have an ethos of collective service or collectivity in the sense of a communal effort to sacrifice for others. There certainly have been moments when there was more cohesiveness, and right now we are at a low point. If we had a public service requirement where everyone, say, when they graduated from high school, had to do something – serve in the military, serve in the Peace Corps, serve in domestic programs, create gardens, urban and rural service, that might help.
People have proposed this for years, for well over one hundred years. In fact, William James, the great philosopher, who advanced the novel American philosophy of pragmatism, proposed this as what he called “the moral equivalent of war.” And I didn't think I would support something like that for the longest time, but people kept bringing it up in big community conversations, and I began to think that that's one of the things that is lacking. I wrote an essay on this during the pandemic about how the US used to believe in collective sacrifice. And the realization that regular Americans don't believe in that anymore helps explain arguments against individual mask mandates, against all kinds of closure policies, schools, churches, restaurants, bars – all kinds of related stuff, right? Unless you know them, Americans think hyper-locally, and about the “in group.” The pandemic reveals that at least a large number, if not a majority, aren’t going to sacrifice for a stranger, or at least not much if they perceive that it comes at much cost to them. It's the same thing with immigrants, like survey after survey show that if you know undocumented people, you're so much more likely to help them and support them than if you don’t or if they're not in your community or wider network. I think that is a huge part of this. And America First taps into a sense of those grievances and that us versus them, in-group, out-group logic and set of practices, with no compromise and no collectivist larger service orientation.
It's also a sense that something in the US has gone wrong, that has broken. That's the “vibe.” That's been around for a while, since de-industrialization and stagflation in the 1970s, but it's definitely amplified in recent years. Biden was not a great speech maker, but if you line up all of his speeches, the messaging he tried to convey across just about everything, from local speeches to state of the union addresses was “we are all in this together.” And that is just an extremely tough sell in today’s United States.