by AMY GOODMAN, JUAN GONZALES & JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER
What is MAGA imperialism? Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster says that, despite its feints toward anti-imperialist isolationism, President Donald Trump’s foreign policy has coalesced into a “hyper-nationalist” form of populism that rejects the U.S.’s post-WWII adherence to liberal internationalism and promotes dominance over other countries via military power rather than through economic globalization. Foster explains that this “Trump doctrine is opposed to multi-ethnic empires and multi-ethnic nations,” operating under a “racial definition of foreign policy, with the notion that the United States is a white country and other ethnicities don’t belong.” And while some analyses of the Trump coalition locate its base in the “white working class,” in reality this ideology is rooted in the lower middle class, which owns more property and is less opposed to the wealthy capitalist class. “If you go back to the 1930s, to Italy and Germany, it’s the same constituency that drove the fascist movement, but it’s a result of an alliance between big capital… and the lower middle class.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
Amy Goodman: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
President Trump announced on social media Monday a new round of threatened tariffs, ranging from 25 to 40% on imports from 14 countries, including Bangladesh, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, set to take effect August 1st, barring new deals. Meanwhile, Trump has threatened to impose an additional 10% tariff on countries that align themselves with the BRICS group of nations, led by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Trump cited the group’s, quote, “anti-American policies.” The threat came as Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva kicked off a two-day BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro.
PRESIDENT LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA: [translated] So, we don’t want an emperor. Our countries are sovereign. If Trump issues tariffs, other countries have the right to do the same. There is the reciprocity law. I think it’s not responsible for a president from a country like the United States to threaten the world with tariffs on social media. Honestly, there are other forums for the president of a country the size of the United States to talk to other countries.
AG: : This comes as Vice President JD Vance has been promoting Trump’s new foreign policy approach. Vance addressed the Ohio Republican Party last month.
VICE PRESIDENT JD VANCE: What I call the Trump doctrine is quite simple. Number one, you articulate a clear American interest. And that’s, in this case, that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon. Number two, you try to aggressively, diplomatically solve that problem. And number three, when you can’t solve it diplomatically, you use overwhelming military power to solve it, and then you get the hell out of there, before it ever becomes a protracted conflict.
AG: For more, we’re joined by John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at University of Oregon, editor of the Monthly Review, where his new article is headlined “The Trump Doctrine and the New MAGA Imperialism.”
Well, why don’t you lay out your thesis for us, professor John Bellamy Foster? And welcome to Democracy Now!
JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER: Well, thank you.
The Trump doctrine was articulated in the first Trump administration. Normally, the presidential doctrines are determined by the press, who see the administrations operating in a certain way, according to a certain principle, and they designate that as a doctrine. The Trump administration has been different. There was a lot of confusion about Trump foreign policy. Was it–was it isolationist? Was it anti-imperialist?
In the first Trump administration, Michael Anton, who is one of the main MAGAideologues and came from the Claremont Institute, which is one of the primary MAGA institutions, was in the National Security Council, and they basically had him leave the National Security Council in order to formally articulate a Trump doctrine that the media would take seriously and foreign policy experts would take seriously. So, he gave a lecture. He was appointed at Hillsdale College, which is a MAGAinstitution, and he gave a lecture at Princeton University, where he articulated the Trump doctrine, and then that was published in Foreign Policy, the leading foreign policy journal in the United States. And the Trump doctrine is said–and now Michael Anton is the deputy–well, he’s the director of policy planning for the State Department, so he’s the main idea man, essentially assistant secretary of state. He’s the main idea man in the State Department. And he articulated, on behalf of Trump, a doctrine, a Trump doctrine, with four pillars.
The first one was national populism, which is the way in which the MAGA movement designates itself, sort of a neofascist designation, as it resonates with the National Socialism of the Nazi movement. But national populism is the first pillar.
The second pillar is that all nations should be primarily nationalistic in their orientation.
The third one is the opposition to liberal internationalism and to the liberal hegemony of the United States over the world order that was established after the Second World War and has continued to this day. Instead, what is defined is a hyper-nationalist “America first” imperium, where the United States essentially rules the world on its own.
But the fourth pillar is the most important. And Anton went back to Aristotle, who said there were two–three forms of political organization: the tribe or ethnicity, the city-state or the state, and the empire. And empires are defined as multi-ethnic. And the Trump doctrine is opposed to multi-ethnic empires and multi-ethnic nations, and argues that we should–we should determine our foreign policy by ethnicity and, essentially, the tribe. In fact, it’s a racial definition of foreign policy, with the notion that the United States is a white country, and other ethnicities don’t belong, and we’re going to organize our foreign policy, as well as our domestic policy, on that basis.
So, the Trump doctrine was very important. Remember, Anton is now the number one policymaker within the State Department, so this is not a secondary matter.
Monthly Review Online for more