Populist realism, civilizationalism, and the right: On the intellectual history of contemporary US foreign policy

Abstract This article aims to improve our understanding of the intellectual foundations and lineages of the Trumpian revolution in US foreign policy, focusing on the contribution of paleoconservatism. The first section examines the writings of paleoconservative thinkers and politicians who, after the end of the Cold War, articulated a distinctly populist form of political realism as part of their ‘America First’ nationalist agenda. These ideas prefigured and laid much of the ideological groundwork for the foreign policy vision later pursued by the Trump administration and its political entourage, including a bold reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine and threats to annex Greenland and absorb Canada into the United States. The analysis then turns to paleoconservative interventions in conservative debates over Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis in the 1990s and early 2000s. Although largely overlooked at the time, these critiques provide important insights into the civilizationalism shaping the worldview of the Trump administration and its supporting right-wing coalition. The ‘Clashes of civilizations: old and new’ and ‘Trumpism and the paleoconservative moment in US foreign policy’ sections argues that these paleo-Trumpian continuities have produced a volatile mode of cultural geopolitics that elides the conventional distinction between isolationism and internationalism, and which is unlikely to reverse the erosion of America’s global power.