Why Isolationists and Interventionists Are Both Wrong | Yoram Hazony

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] For years, U.S. strategic missteps have empowered Tehran and Beijing, according to political theorist Yoram Hazony. Now, as a new strain of isolationism grows in America, Hazony says, both isolationism and hyper-interventionism have key flaws.

In this episode, we dive into President Donald Trump’s distinct foreign policy approach as well as what Hazony sees as an assault on nation-states and their right to independent decision-making.

Nationalism has been falsely vilified, and global governance has become the new mantra, he says.

Hazony recently released a revised edition of his 2018 seminal work, “The Virtue of Nationalism,” which played a key role in bolstering the global national conservatism movement. Hazony is also Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which hosts the National Conservatism Conference in the United States, Britain, and Europe.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Yoram Hazony, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Yoram Hazony:

Good morning. My pleasure, Jan.

Mr. Jekielek:

So I really want to talk to you about Trump’s foreign policy after we saw the reactions to his actions in Iran. There’s a kind of schism among his supporters. What happened and what is Trump’s foreign policy?

Mr. Hazony:

Well, there’s a lot of confusion about it, which stems from a very old misperception about foreign policy, which the American media constantly reinforces. The theory is that there are only two types of foreign policy. One of them is isolationist, which means the U.S. basically has no real significant interests in Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, or wherever. And therefore, whenever there’s trouble anywhere, the prescription is supposedly to stay out of it. So there’s that. 

And then opposed to that is neoconservatism, the neocons, sometimes also called neoliberalism, confusingly. But whatever you call this theory, the liberal internationalist theory is the one that says anytime anything happens anywhere, whether it’s Ukraine, Iran, Taiwan, or the Red Sea, anywhere, according to the liberal internationalist theory, the United States has primary responsibility for securing just about everything on earth. 

The problem with both of these theories is that they don’t work. I mean, the neoconservative theory ended up miring the United States in interventions in an endless series of conflicts; Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, in Egypt, with the change of government, but also in Europe, Ukraine, Georgia, and Serbia.

Most of the public, at least the public that supported Donald Trump and the Trump fans who brought him to power, correctly see these decades of American hyper-interventionism all over Europe and the Middle East and South Asia as a tragic mistake, an incredible waste of resources and human life, and without that much to show for it. So if you have to choose between hyperactive interventionist liberal internationalism, that’s one choice.  And the only alternative is that the United States should do nothing and let the world just go along its course. And if the Chinese want to take over, fine. If that’s the choice, there’s an awful lot of people who are going to choose the second one because we’ve already done the first one. 

I don’t think that President Trump or any of the principal members of his team, Vice President Vance, Secretary of State Rubio, and the top 20 people beyond them, see the world through the lens of that dichotomy. Even though the media, both the mainstream liberal media and also a lot of the media on the right, constantly talk in terms of that dichotomy, I don’t think the administration buys that.

And in fact, there has been, by this point, a tradition of how to talk about Trump’s foreign policy. In 2019, Michael Anton, who was in the first administration and is now an important figure in the State Department, coined a phrase: the Trump doctrine. And I think that his description was accurate. I recently commented on it in an essay that I wrote on the subject.

The Trump doctrine roughly begins with the assessment that the United States has to prioritize in thinking about foreign policy. It can’t be everywhere. It can’t invest its resources in every arena at all times, and especially just cognitively. The president and the administration cannot focus on all things simultaneously. And so there’s one security challenge which no other country on earth can deal with other than the United States, and that’s China. 

So the Trump doctrine begins by recognizing that China is the primary concern for Americans. And it goes from there to saying, well, so what should we do? Should we just ignore the rest of the world? Or is there an alternative? And the alternative that’s been developed under this Trump doctrine is to seek regional allies, independent countries that can be empowered to secure themselves, to defend themselves and secure their regions. 

In that way, if the United States allies with such powers, then the U.S. doesn’t have to take primary responsibility for the security of Europe. So let’s say if countries like Britain and Poland would shift from being effectively protectorates of the United States, they would dramatically increase their investment, both financially and culturally, in remilitarization, as powers that can be relied upon to take primary responsibility for a crisis like Ukraine. Then the United States would not have to be directly involved in it. 

So that is what we see Trump doing in the Middle East, where his theory is that you can create a security architecture, an alliance built on an alliance between Israel’s military abilities and technological abilities, marrying that to the wealth and prestige of the Gulf states. And between them, they can create an alliance system that’s capable of taking care of Iran, that’s capable of taking care of the Red Sea, and that’s capable of taking care of security issues in general, so that the United States doesn’t have to do it. So that is the Trump doctrine. And it is a third alternative to liberal internationalism and isolationism. 

But among Trump’s supporters, there are at least some who are expecting non-involvement in the world entirely. Like, you know, we just shouldn’t be there, meaning why is Trump trying to build an alliance system in Europe that can defend Europe? Why is he trying to build an alliance system in the Middle East or in South Asia that can secure those regions? He should just ignore them. It’s been a pretty wild debate.

Mr. Jekielek:

The concept of peace through strength, I think some people just view it as militarism.

Mr. Hazony:

Yes, I’m not sure exactly what the word militarism means. I mean, people use it in different ways.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, you saw during the time when the Iran strikes were planned and so forth. This is World War III because military action is being taken. We’re starting a new war. It’s World War III.

Mr. Hazony:

Right. I think the camp that’s being called isolationist, and they themselves are now calling themselves restrainers, which is also not accurate. I actually think that the most accurate term is pacifist. The question of whether the use of military power is something to be avoided at all times, at all costs, leads you into the old pacifism discussion. And those of your viewers who are a little bit older, like me, remember what the anti-war movement was during the 1970s and 1980s, the anti-war movement that was a pacifist movement. It was associated with the Democratic Party. 

I mean, it really began with George McGovern and the Vietnam War. But by the time that Reagan and Thatcher were around, the Vietnam War was long gone. And the issue was whether the United States should be challenging the Soviet Union. And the debate was between liberal pacifists who made all the same exact arguments, you know, that somebody like, you know, Dave Smith is just a liberal pacifist. He is just George McGovern. If you’re a pacifist, your intuition is to say, you know, what’s the point of having any war since every time there’s military action, you’re always killing innocent people?

So there’s this kind of implication that the use of military force is always wrong. Because it’s okay as long as you don’t harm anybody, but you always harm somebody who didn’t deserve to be harmed. That old argument in which the Reagan administration and Thatcher and her people and Pope John Paul II, there was this strong leadership that supported confrontation with the Soviet Union, which was not primarily direct military confrontation, but it did involve a dramatic military buildup. It involved destabilizing technologies like the Strategic Defense Initiative.It involved a willingness to risk war in order to deter and ultimately defeat the Soviet Union. 

And, you know, that’s something I think that President Trump remembers those years, you know, just like we do, just like the older audience does. And I think he sees it as a model. President Reagan succeeded in defeating America’s greatest foes without war because of the fact that he was, the slogan, peace through strength, which was attached to Make America Great Again. Both of those slogans were Reagan slogans. And that policy worked. It succeeded in defeating the enemy, eliminating a horrific threat to America, but without going and invading, you know, a dozen foreign countries.

I mean, the largest thing that Reagan directly invaded was the island of Grenada. You know, it was a two-week operation. So I think that Trump is, in many ways, shaped by the Reagan presidency. And his war policies, his sense about what can you do with war and what do you need it for, for military action at all, is very Reagan-esque, that you need very great capacities in order to be able to deter war. And then you need to be willing to make it clear to everyone that you’re serious. You’re not scared of military power. 

And that’s what the Trump administration looks like right now. It is not anti-war in the pacifist sense. They’re willing to fight when necessary. But the goal is to minimize the direct reliance on force and to maximize the reliance on deterrence and diplomacy. And deterrence and diplomacy means constructing alliances that are capable of, that are strong enough to deter America’s rivals and enemies.

Mr. Jekielek:

What do you think the impact of what people call the 12-day war now was? Was this a success? 

Mr. Hazony:

Well, so far it’s a success. But I think that story is not over. We’re not done with it. But I think that if we just take a snapshot as of today, I would look at it this way: Israel, over the course of a war that’s lasted almost two years, which is by far Israel’s longest war, has succeeded in demolishing Iranian power across the Middle East, first in Gaza, then in Lebanon, then in Syria, finally in Iran itself. It’s an astonishingly successful campaign of taking a tyrannical and imperialistic regime, threatening both Israel and the Gulf regimes, and threatening to eliminate one proxy army after another and then began the job of eliminating Iran’s capacity to be a threat. 

So the centerpiece of that is Iran’s nuclear program and their ballistic missile program. They’re the primary threat that the Iranians were hoping to use in order to control events in the region. And for about 20 years, they were doing a pretty good job of pursuing that policy and controlling the course of events in the region. I mean, if you just think about the way that Iran got the Obama administration, and by the way, I shouldn’t just blame Obama. The appeasing Iran theory was actually born in the Republican Party.

It was a theory of Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton, which was then adopted by Obama. That’s a theory that says, look, Iran’s too big, it’s too strong. There’s nothing you can do to dismantle such a powerful state. And what needs to be done is to—people don’t like the word appeasement. I think it was appeasement, but let’s set that aside for a moment. From their perspective, the theory was if Israel were weaker and America were less present in the Middle East, then the Iranians would have no problem. They would love America. They might even accommodate Israel. I don’t think it’s possible to be more mistaken in a foreign policy theory. 

But I was talking to an Israeli official this week who said to me, you know, working with the Biden administration, everything was upside down. They knew that Iran was America’s enemy, but all they wanted to do was strengthen Iran so that Iran would like America better. And all they wanted to do was restrain Israel so that Iran would like America better. An absurd strategy. It’s like deciding that you’re going to build up communist China and make friends with them by making them as powerful as they can possibly be.

Mr. Jekielek:

Wait a second. Isn’t that what happened?

Mr. Hazony:

That’s what happened.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay, but please continue. We can get into that in a moment. 

Mr. Hazony:

But look, there are many young people who think, like, wow, that sounds good. I’m anti-war. I’m pro-peace. Right? The problem is that historically, they didn’t invent the peace camp. The peace camp has existed for a very, very long time. And what the peace camp was primarily responsible for in the last generation was the theory of, let’s build up the Soviet Union. After that, let’s build up communist China. 

And when Reagan came into office with this famous new theory, I have a new theory: they lose, we win. And everyone was saying he’s a warmonger. They were saying the same exact things that the pacifists on the nationalist right—all the same things—were unnecessarily provoking them. They have children too. Why can’t we just give peace a chance? And the result of that way of thinking was the building up of the Soviet Union until Reagan, Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II brought it down. Let’s just have peace. That was the theory. 

That’s what brought communist China into the World Trade Organization. That’s what created this entire structure, which hasn’t been fully dismantled yet, this entire structure of the United States trying to buy the Chinese by, sure, take our factories, take our industries, build up your military. You know what? We’ll share technologies with you. I think in the last few years, people have begun to realize that China has no interest in accommodating the United States. It’s only interested in defeating the United States. 

And so if that’s who your rival is, that’s who your enemy is. So being in the peace camp makes you kind of a fool because you’ll spend your time helping your enemies, trying to get them to like you, while harming your own friends and your own interests. This catastrophic policy with respect to China, that is what the peace camp on the American right, the pacifists, want as the policy towards Iran. 

Americans so far have zero casualties from this Israel-Iran war. There have been thousands of casualties, but those casualties have been shouldered by the Israeli military and Israel’s public. Israel has demonstrated that a strong regional power is capable of demolishing a tyrannical and imperialistic threat to the Middle East with minimal American involvement. 

I want to say minimal. It’s true for sure. American, European, Arab, and other Middle Eastern forces have been involved in defensive action. They’ve been involved in helping Israel shoot the missiles out of the sky so that Israel’s population centers have been largely, not entirely, but largely shielded from these ballistic missile attacks. And for that, Israelis are grateful. It’s something that is not 100 percent within Israel’s capacity to do. 

And so it turned out that it was very, very useful to have a defensive alliance with European, American, and Middle Eastern countries that could work together to eliminate, almost eliminate, the ballistic missile threat. But the offensive operations, these harrowing operations across the Middle East, have been shouldered entirely by Israel, with the exception of 37 hours of crucial United States involvement with weapon systems that Israel doesn’t have and that America prefers to operate itself: the B2s and the bunker buster munitions. 

So I think the right way to look at it is that Israel fought and won the war for two years by itself with logistical and intelligence assistance, but American troops were not in the fighting. What did happen is a regional power took responsibility for its own security and for the security of the region. And the United States played the same kind of role that the Reagan administration played when Margaret Thatcher went to war over the Falklands. 

The United States could have just taken over the Falklands easily, but Reagan preferred to build up Britain as a power, to build up Thatcher herself as a power. So they provided logistical and intelligence assistance. And the same kind of thing: the United States had Britain’s back, but all the fighting was British. All of the risk was British on the battlefield. And that’s what the Reagan administration considered a success. 

And I believe the Trump administration likewise considers Israel’s astonishing rollback of Iranian power to be a success. If Israel had not been succeeding, it’s not clear to me that it would have made sense for the United States to send in the B2s against the nuclear program. I think that Prime Minister Netanyahu can justifiably say, we did almost all of the work, and the Americans helped us, for sure, but we did almost all of the work, Israel. And Israel also could have gone after Fordow and Isfahan and Natanz.

Mr. Jekielek:

Those are the nuclear facilities.

Mr. Hazony:

Those are the nuclear facilities that are built under or into mountains so that in the normal course they’re impervious to Israeli munitions. Israel can’t simply bomb them. They’re out of reach. So Israel doesn’t have B2s, and it doesn’t have 30,000-pound bombs, which you need a B2 to deliver. And the question was, what would Israel do if the United States wants to stay out of it, which is defensible for all sorts of reasons? 

Israel drew up plans. There were various plans for the scenario where Israel goes it alone, and the Americans had those plans. And the Trump administration, knowing that Israel was willing to go it alone, made the decision that it would be less risky to use America’s weapon systems that are more appropriate to the task. I mean, what would Israel have done? I mean, there are basically two options. The third option is nukes, but those aren’t really on the table. So let’s say there are two options. 

One option is tunneling through the mountain, which we got to see Israel do in Lebanon with Hassan Nasrallah. That’s a technique where you take smaller munitions, you take 2,000-pound bombs, and you drop them one after another on the same spot. And so they did that 80 times, and they got the underground bunker that Nasrallah and the Hezbollah leadership were in to collapse on them. In theory, you could try to do that at a place like Fordow in Iran, but it’s a much, much deeper facility. How many hundreds of bombs would you have to drop that way? So nobody knew if that could possibly work. 

The other alternative is commando operations. Israel has done that also with sensitive nonconventional weapons facilities in Syria. We got to see some of that also in the last war. So again, a commando operation is possible. It’s possible to land a few hundred Israeli commandos at these different sites and, with proper air support, to be able to penetrate them and eliminate them. I’m pretty sure that what happened was the Trump administration looked at this. 

They said, what’s the point? These are incredibly risky operations. We’ll take 37 hours. We’ve got the technology to do this much more directly. We’ll get to show the world that we’re willing to use military force. We’ll get to demonstrate America’s absolute superiority in weapons technology, in addition to willingness to use it, which I think was probably a useful demonstration for Americans and for non-Americans.

So that was the decision. People who say that Israel dragged the United States into the war, they don’t know what they’re talking about. What actually happened was that the Trump administration, together with the Israelis, had all the options on the table. The Trump administration could easily have just said, no, this is Israel’s war. We’ll continue to support you with intelligence. You take care of this. And Israel would have taken care of it. The Americans didn’t want to do that. The administration looked at that option, and decided it wasn’t the best option for America. And that’s an American red, white, and blue decision that was made. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Why do you say this is an unfinished story? 

Mr. Hazony:

Well, it’s an unfinished story because we don’t actually know what the Iranians are going to do. We’ve seen a joint Israeli-American decision to leave the regime in place. The Israelis have demonstrated what the Israelis can do. The Americans have demonstrated what the Americans can do. At the moment, Iran is not in a position, doesn’t look like it’s in a position to inflict very much harm on others. But we don’t know that. We don’t. 

I mean, it would be a foolish bet to think that the Iranians don’t have assets in the United States capable of wreaking havoc in the United States if they choose to, if they go back to actively working towards nuclear weapons. So then there’s going to be another round in which Israel goes alone. There’s a possibility that President Trump will decide again to be involved in a limited way. Whatever the scenario is, we don’t know that it’s not going to happen. You know, it may be that in another six months or another year, there’s going to be another round. So my hope is that we don’t, you know, we don’t need that. But we don’t know.

Mr. Jekielek:

You identified in the Trump doctrine that China is the primary threat to the United States, I would argue, to the free world. And just thinking about what you are talking about, call it the peace camp, I guess. Something that strikes me, and I think this applies to the Chinese Communist Party and perhaps to Iran as well, is that there’s just like a fundamental misunderstanding with the nature of the regime. Like people imagine that they’re dealing with people like you or I who kind of think in like-minded ways and can, you know, have reasonable discussions and find solutions and find a win-win, you know, or something like that. And that’s just simply, at least with Communist China, it’s simply not the case. At least, I mean, but I’m, at least that’s what I believe, but I’m curious what you think. 

Mr. Hazony:

I read a lot about liberalism about the worldview that sees politics as being based on a concern, primarily, if not exclusively, with individual liberties and individual equality. And one of the problems with this political theory, which has become more and more obvious over the last century, is that when people are raised looking at the world like that, when they’re taught from childhood, look, everybody’s equal. They guarantee a certain significant amount of freedom for everybody in the society that grows up with it, not something that I can object to, but it also has side effects that people don’t tend to notice. 

One of the side effects is that when you raise people like that, they actually come to think that everybody’s equal. They’re not saying, wouldn’t it be nice if everybody were fundamentally reasonable and decent and you could live with them? They’re not saying that. They’re saying, I look around the world and it seems to me that everybody’s fundamentally nice and reasonable. You can live with that. And if the Iranians chant death to America every day in their parliament, that must be a reasonable thing for them to be doing. 

So why would they be doing that? And they say, oh, because we Americans are evil or because the Jews are evil or the desire to turn everybody into potential liberals. It’s really a serious problem with liberalism as a political theory and the assumptions underlying globalism, which is another name for liberal internationalism. People are fundamentally reasonable. And if we allow everybody to trade with everybody else, they’ll see that they benefit, that everyone benefits. The Chinese will see that they benefit. So they’ll become like us. 

And, you know, I don’t think there was ever the slightest chance that the Chinese would become like Americans because the Chinese don’t want to be like Americans. I mean, they actually have their own worldview, their own civilization, the way that they do things, their own ideology, the way they understand what’s right and wrong with the world. 

And it’s such a condescending, you know, fundamentally just such a condescending worldview that all you need to do is give people, you know, material improvements to their lives, and then they’ll like you because they’re just like you, and then they’ll have a liberal democracy. Well, there was never any chance of that, not in China, not in Afghanistan, not in Iraq. It is a fundamentally destructive approach to foreign policy to assume that everybody can be turned into a nice guy like you.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, okay, so there’s that element. The other element is just the nature of communist totalitarianism.

Mr. Hazony:

That’s also true. The kinds of people that you get running a permanent tyranny, you know, which views its own population as a potentially hostile force all the time, with the famous social credit system and the tools for control of society that the Chinese are using. I don’t think you can make peace with a regime like that, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there has to be an all-out World War III-type shooting war with the Chinese. I think that the key to the Chinese is, if possible, deterring them until the United States recovers its industrial capacity, its military abilities, and its willingness to engage in limited effective military actions when necessary. 

So I agree with you. I think that given what the regime is, what they think and the way they think about politics, the way they think about their domestic politics and the way they think of foreign policy, I don’t think that there’s any hope of a genuine peace with China, something that’s based on friendship. But that doesn’t mean that there has to be a war. It just means that America has to prepare as though there could be a war to prepare to win it.

Mr. Jekielek:

This idea of imperialism is often conflated with the idea of nationalism. But you would argue they’re, you know, completely different things.

Mr. Hazony:

Yes, I think nationalism and imperialism are actually opposite things. Nationalism is a theory of political order. It’s a theory that says that the world is governed best when there are many independent nations, when different peoples can make their own decisions, they’ll have their own constitutional traditions and religious traditions, their own language and their own legal systems, and they’ll do things their way, and they’ll try to improve their lives according to their lights. That’s nationalism. 

And this is very much, I think, the worldview of the Trump administration, that there can be many different countries and America can wish them all well so long as they’re not a threat to the United States. And they can be allowed to proceed the way that they want to proceed in dealing with their own politics on the basis of their own traditions. 

By the way, that was George Washington’s policy. That was the founding foreign policy of the United States. And that view is the opposite of imperialism, which is a view that says, no, peace and prosperity will come to the world when there’s global governance, when there’s a single elite with a single set of principles and values and those are imposed by soft power if necessary by war on as much of the globe as possible. 

When my book, The Virtue of Nationalism, was published in 2018, people were telling us that with Trump and Brexit, this is some kind of mental illness. It’s a throwback to barbarism, or Trump doesn’t believe anything, or he doesn’t stand for anything. So now it’s seven years later, the second edition of the book has come out, and I’m grateful to my publisher for allowing this expanded and updated edition of the book. 

Now we know that the first edition of the book was correct. There actually is a political theory of nationalism. And there is a history, going all the way back to the Bible, a history of nationalism in the West that has contributed a great deal of positive things. And it’s the opposite of imperialism. 

Why do people confuse them? It’s actually pretty simple. Adolf Hitler wrote a book called Mein Kampf, which I don’t recommend to readers. I don’t suggest people read it. But if they did read it, what they would see is that Hitler’s worldview is what you could call biological imperialism. He’s concerned with races as the fundamental building block of politics, the different races competing with one another. And the goal is for the highest race, the master race, to become Lord of the Earth. That’s a quote from Mein Kampf, Lord of the Earth and Mistress of the Globe. That’s his theory. Does that theory leave any room for nationalism, for a world of independent nations? 

No, it doesn’t. It’s completely opposed to that idea. Nationalism, as I mentioned, is about the independence and self-determination of various peoples, while imperialism seeks to dominate and control. The confusion arises because some have used nationalist sentiments to justify imperialist actions, but the core principles of nationalism advocate for the autonomy of nations, whereas imperialism inherently denies that autonomy.

In conclusion, it’s essential to recognize the distinction between nationalism, which promotes the flourishing of independent nations, and imperialism, which seeks to impose a singular worldview on a global scale. nations? No. He writes about independent nations. And he says this feat of corruption in politics is to have nations recognizing one another and allowing one another to be independent.

He has no interest in that at all. So what’s the shtick here? The shtick is that Hitler thought it would be convenient to take the word nationalism, which had meant a world of independent nations, and to, I guess today people say, appropriate it. So he appropriated the word nationalism for himself. Instead of saying, I’m a biological imperialist, which he was, he says, no, I’m a nationalist. The content is biological imperialism, but the word is nationalism.

It’s interesting to read speeches from FDR, from Cordell Hull, and from Eisenhower. I mean, that whole generation thought that nationalism was a good word and used it in the old sense as a positive thing, a world of independent nations. But after World War II, there was this cultural revolution in America that replaced the old, you know, Protestant Christian America with liberalism. Eventually, they invented the term liberal democracy. The liberals allowed the Nazis to take over the word nationalism.

You could say they allowed it; maybe they did it on purpose, whatever. The result was that post-World War II, liberal and Marxist writers pounced on this opportunity to say, look, nationalism is, you know, it’s the ultimate evil. It’s the devil itself, because Hitler used that word. And the result was fueling the move towards eliminating borders. In other words, Hitler was blamed for the nation-state.

You know, people didn’t say George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton were nationalists. They declared the independence of an American nation. They united the disparate tribes, the 13 colonies, and built them up as a new, independent national state. Instead of saying, wow, look, that’s a good thing. We should want that for other peoples, you know, like Greek independence, Polish independence, Indian independence, and the independence of the Jews. I mean, that was like the old nationalism: allowing peoples to be free, the freedom of nations. 

Instead, after World War II, the word nationalism was pushed into use by the 1960s by intellectuals, liberal and Marxists, and turned into a synonym for Nazism. So then the argument turned into, we’re going to go ahead and start eliminating all the borders among nations and having global governance. There was a bit of that in the 1960s through the 1980s, but it really got off the ground in 1990 when they finally got rid of Thatcher and Reagan, who were both nationalists, and then said, that’s it. 

The moment has come. European Union, we’re going to erase all the borders. A New World Order. George H.W. Bush called it the New World Order, where there was only going to be one law for all nations. And anybody who opposed it was like a Nazi. You say you want nationals, you want independent nations, so you’re some kind of Nazi. 

Now, that was never true. It was never fair. If it’s possible to speak about an exploitation of a redefined word for the sake of evil ends, that’s what happened: the old American, British, European value of having independent nations was eliminated after World War II through this despicable maneuver of allowing Hitler to teach us political theory.

Mr. Jekielek:

I mean, that’s fascinating. Also, this redefinition of words, a convenient redefinition of words to mean sometimes the exact opposite of what they originally meant without the populace realizing that that has happened. It seems to be a common Marxist and neo-Marxist ploy.

Mr. Hazony:

It turns out if you can get everybody to use the new definition, you can change what everybody’s thinking. I mean, today it’s not such a brilliant new insight. Orwell was famous for describing this in 1984, the way that Newspeak changes the way people are able to think, because you can only think using the words you have. Not being able to use the word nationalism is a particularly striking example. 

Let’s say that your view is the old view. You support a world of independent nations. You think that’s the best political order. So if you can’t use the word nationalism because nationalism means Nazism, then what word would you use to describe that? You can’t use patriotism because the word patriotism only means that I love my country. Being a patriot, an American patriot, does not turn you into somebody who has an opinion about the best political order. Nationalism is a theory of political order. And if you don’t have the word nationalism, then you don’t have any way of describing it.

Mr. Jekielek:

I know you don’t like to do this, Yoram, but I want to get you to tell me a little bit about your thought in reclaiming this word nationalism, which I think you’ve successfully done, at least in many circles, how that’s kind of influenced political realities today. I mean, things that you’re aware of.

Mr. Hazony:

Well, I think the impact has been very great. I mean, I’m obviously not the only person who wrote books on this subject, and there are many politicians and political figures who contributed. So it’s a team effort, although I do want to take some credit for it. The Virtue of Nationalism, seven years later, really does look like it was the most influential book on this subject. And it’s great that it’s still circulating and still having an effect. 

President Trump made this famous speech in 2018, a few months after the Wall Street Journal carried this essay based on my book that was sort of like the kickoff for launching the book. And it’s just a couple of months later that President Trump said, look, I’m a nationalist. Use that word. And that’s had a tremendous effect. I mean, that was President Trump’s decision, not mine. I don’t want to claim it. But in Britain, we see, I think, a very clear shift on the right in Britain to being willing to use the term national conservatism.

We do these conferences, usually one in the United States, the National Conservatism Conferences, usually one in the United States, and one in Europe every year. And we get people from countries, you know, from dozens of countries. And those are all people who come, they make friends from different countries, and eventually, all of them come out thinking, yes, now I realize I was a nationalist all along. I just didn’t have a word for it. 

Some political leaders are consciously active in spreading it, like President Trump. And you have to mention Prime Minister Orban from Hungary, whose book was translated at this point into 15 languages. But it was first translated by Bolsonaro’s people in Brazil and by Orban’s people in Hungary, and then spread to other places. So there are clearly political figures who find it useful. There’s this well-known clip where Giorgia Meloni says, Yoram, your book is going to scandalize Italy, and I’m going to do my best to scandalize Italy with you. 

And it’s been fun. It’s been productive and useful and definitely fun to be able to do something to help the public in so many different countries. I have to mention France right now, where the nationalist right in France has effectively been made illegal. The courts in France have banned Marine Le Pen from running for president. And she’s the leading candidate. She’s certainly the leader on the right. She’s the most likely person to succeed Macron, and they’ve banned her.

The same happened in Romania, where a nationalist figure named Georgescu won an election in December. Then they had the courts void the election, and they arrested him. It’s lawfare based on trumped-up charges, and it’s just destroying the ability of countries to maintain a democratic regime, because you can only have democracy if there are two different parties or more competing. If you keep arresting the opposition, which, you know, they tried to do this to Trump, then you can’t have democracy.

So I do feel at this point that people are being persecuted for being nationalists, where, you know, mostly what’s wrong with these people, the nationalists, is only that they want a world of independent nations. And so the book has become the clearest expression of a worldview that, you know, in our parents’ generation was completely commonplace and totally normal. And now it’s actually being made illegal because people want to go back to that.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, and just something strikes me as well. I don’t think, I think part of the reason might be that people don’t understand that this word was appropriated the way it was and how profound that is. I think, I mean, I think your book has helped people think more wholly about these sorts of questions, but perhaps there are a whole lot of people that simply haven’t entertained this thought or are stuck in the old way of thinking and are thinking, my God, we’re talking about, you know, Nazism here. There are people who believe that, but I don’t think that they’re just innocent of a mistaken category.

Mr. Hazony:

I mean, there are always some who just don’t understand what’s going on, and they just, as you’re suggesting, follow the connotations of the word. But that’s not really what’s happening. What’s happening is that, you know, one of the great strengths of the old liberalism was that it preached tolerance of alternative viewpoints. It was always cynical. It was always hypocritical. Fine. There was always, you know, some cynicism and some hypocrisy. 

But the bottom line is, when I went to graduate school to do a doctorate, I applied to a department. The department was full of liberals, and there were no conservatives on the faculty. I had a great semester studying Marxism with an actual Marxist for a whole semester. So it was like a typical university department with liberals. And I benefited from the old liberalism because they were willing to accept me as a conservative, as an Orthodox Jew, as somebody with views very different from what was accepted in the department. 

They accepted me into the doctoral program, and they gave me the doctorate. My final committee had two liberal professors and a Marxist on it, and they gave me a doctorate. That’s what was good about the old liberalism, that it really did have some degree of willingness to tolerate voices that were saying something different. And that has, at this point, almost disappeared. 

As the old liberalism kind of collapses into neo-Marxism, it just keeps moving further and further away from being able to tolerate a multi-party system. So as these formerly liberal institutions become more and more intolerant, more and more neo-Marxist and revolutionary in their content instead of being liberal, the more they do that, the more anybody who wants to go back to any of the old things. 

So independent nations are one thing. There’s God and scripture. There’s the family and something like its traditional construction, the constitution and its old traditional construction. And of course, you know, things like the traditional view of men, I mean, you can just keep going. The more neo-Marxist the liberals become, the less any of them can imagine tolerating people like me. 

There used to be a lot of people like me within living memory. It used to be just normal for people to be nationalists and to be religious Christians and Jews and to think that that should have an influence on public life. Ronald Reagan himself proposed a constitutional amendment to allow prayer in schools. And now you have all these people who may still call themselves liberals, but their worldview is revolutionary neo-Marxist. And you’re absolutely right. They think that people like me are fascists, but it’s not just because they made a mistake about the word. They really can’t tolerate what I believe. 

The Germans just made it illegal for members of the civil service in Germany to be members of the AfD. You can disagree with the AfD on all sorts of things they say and think and believe, but it’s the second largest political party in Germany. If you’re effectively banning it, then you’re ending democracy. And it’s not just because they’re afraid that they’re fascists. It’s because the people who are saying, oh, these are all fascists, those people are more and more like Bolsheviks in the actual content of the things that they think. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Everything you’re just telling me makes me think back to what we were talking about earlier, right? This idea of misunderstanding the nature of the Chinese Communist Party, imagining that through this engagement, through trade, forgiving everything, giving the money, giving the intellectual property, all of it, was going to change communist China. But in effect, you know, that absolutist, totalitarian viewpoint somehow worked in the other direction. And some people were convinced of it. That’s what strikes me as a possibility. And we don’t have a ton of time left in our conversation. But your thoughts?

Mr. Hazony:

To me it seems pretty clear at this point what happened. In the late 60s, America’s leading universities, including where I went to school, established programs. At Princeton, it was called the Third World Center. And there was a black studies program and international center. They established significant funding into creating wings of the university whose job was, in theory, to make it possible for black students and others who had suffered from communities that had suffered persecution in the past to be able to integrate and become part of the university. So that was the liberal administrators. That was their theory of what it was that they were doing. 

But in practice, that’s not what they did. In practice, what they did was that they brought in plenty of genuinely revolutionary neo-Marxists, you know, kind of the godfather at the time. It wasn’t just an abstract Marxist theory, like a theory, you know, maybe someday there should be a revolution. These departments were hothouses for teaching revolution to students. Just about everything that the woke neo-Marxist revolutionaries think today, we were already hearing it from our neo-Marxist friends back then, you know, in the 1980s. 

But in those days, they were like a tiny minority. There were like a couple of hundred of them. They had zero impact on the Democrats and the liberals on campus. It was just an oddity, like a curiosity. Okay, so there are people like this. 

And with time, these internal departments and organizations committed to Marcuse-style neo-Marxist revolution, they made one demand after another. They established more departments. They infiltrated the existing departments. They took over the administrations, and the liberals were completely, utterly incapable of understanding what was happening or doing anything to stop it. 

And so, having successfully taken over the universities, which I’m not saying everybody in the university is a neo-Marxist, it’s just that everybody’s under the thumb of the neo-Marxists and most people are too scared to say or do anything about it, including the board of trustees of these institutions. Between 1968 and 2020, they became a model, which then spilled out into the outside world. 

In the summer of 2020, they took over the New York Times, and they took over Princeton University, and they tore down the statues of the old liberals. I went to Wilson College, named after Woodrow Wilson. But no, they erased his name. It’s not there anymore. They demonstrated that it’s possible within one generation of neo-Marxist education and aggressive political expansionism inside the universities. They showed how you can take over a university and then went on, their graduates went on to take over newspapers and media and bureaucracies and sports teams and the military. 

They just knew how to do it, and they were just going to do it. It’s a horrific ideology, which has, in the form that we have it in America, it has no room for Jews, for sure, but it has no room for whites. It has no room for anybody who isn’t going to become one thousand percent hardcore committed to the revolution. If you’re slightly off, you’re out. And it’s, as you said, it is totalitarian.

 Mr. Jekielek:

You know, what you’re saying actually sounds to me like a call to action. But the final thought as we finish up?

Mr. Hazony:

Well, of course, it’s a call to action. I’m sorry if I wasn’t sufficiently explicit. The Trump administration is a very hopeful development. I mean, there are many, many good people in the administration. I don’t mean a handful. I mean dozens and dozens of people that I know personally from our movement. They’re wonderful people. They’re smart. They’re clear-headed. They are balanced and reasonable in the way that I think most Americans should want an American administration to be.

But they are nationalists, and they’re trying to restore the strengths of what America was before the neo-Marxists came close to taking it over. I don’t know how it’s going to end, but I do think that they’re doing very, very well right now. They are doing things that many of us thought nobody would ever do in order to actually fight the scourge. And there’s a good chance they’ll succeed, but we need to help them.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yoram Hazony, such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Hazony:

Thanks for having me.

 

This interview has been partially edited for clarity and brevity.