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The writer directs the Center on the US and Europe at the Brookings Institution
Sweltering heat notwithstanding, Nato’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington went off with no disasters and some moderate successes. Ukraine got no closer to joining, but was told its entry path was “irreversible”; it did get €40bn and badly needed fighter jets and anti-aircraft systems. Two-thirds of Nato’s states are now spending 2 per cent or more of gross domestic product on defence. Nato called China a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war. Above all, President Joe Biden, 81, presided over this secular high mass of transatlanticism in a strong, unfaltering voice.
At an accompanying conference, administration officials, European leaders and non-MAGA Republican senators intoned messages of resolve. Asked about support for Ukraine after the US election, Idaho’s Jim Risch, senior Republican on the Senate foreign relations committee, remarked soothingly: “America generally does the right thing.”
But does it? Outside the air-conditioned Nato bubble, the US capital is consumed by an overpowering sense of constitutional crisis. A growing chorus of Democrats is voicing fear and rage at Biden’s insistence that his disastrous debate performance last month is immaterial to his fitness to serve a second term. His confusion of Putin and Zelenskyy’s names at his press conference on Thursday evening only amplified the calls.
The GOP’s Make America Great Again camp, meanwhile, appears gleefully certain of victory in November — and aware of the need to look prepared. Washington’s summit week saw several efforts at conservative counter-programming. The goal: to stake out ownership of the murky terrain of MAGA foreign policy, to discipline a churning hard-right movement and project coherence (hello, swing voters), to normalise its foreign policy proposals, to cordon them off from the movement’s more disruptive domestic policy ideas — and, most daringly, to attempt to contain Donald Trump, the party’s mercurial candidate.
On Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson laid out his views at the conservative Hudson Institute. Mellifluously, he executed a series of pirouettes that positioned him on both sides of his party’s divides: Reagan-style internationalist and America Firster; a firm Nato supporter who sees China as the main long-term challenge; hard-nosed realist and scripture-quoting Baptist.
That day, his party issued a platform resembling a 5,400-word social media post from Trump himself: idiosyncratically capitalised, vague on content and promising to “PREVENT WORLD WAR THREE, RESTORE PEACE IN EUROPE AND IN THE MIDDLE EAST”. Like practically every other recent Republican foreign policy uttering, it invoked Ronald Reagan’s mantra of “peace through strength”.
Yet this MAGA vision has little in common with the 40th president’s belief in America as a shining city upon a hill, or his trust in alliances, markets and civil society. This was in evidence when Republican senator Josh Hawley of Missouri spoke at the opening dinner of a conference of the NatCons, or National Conservatives, who dream of establishing themselves as the west’s dominant rightwing movement.
Hawley called himself a “Christian nationalist” and compared today’s America to the year 410, when imperial Rome fell to the Visigoths. It was left — in his telling — to the Christians to lead the west through the Dark Ages. (For the declining empire, read “establishment Republicans”, and for the invading barbarians the “woke left”.) But the senator knew his audience. He also warned of conservatives hankering after “an established church, ethnonationalism, a ‘protestant Franco’”.
Some NatCon speakers such as Elbridge Colby, an evangelist for prioritising China, and Sumantra Maitra, who has advocated that Washington “pivot away” from the European alliance, stressed they did not want to see the US leave Nato. (Trump, meanwhile, posted that Europeans owed “at least 100 Billion” to “EQUALISE” US support for Ukraine.)
But in an assembly that was notably pale and male, the collective focus was not on foreign policy, or for that matter on moderation. In a shrill mixture of venom and victim-playing, movement leaders instead inveighed on behalf of those “demonised” by “the regime” — “1. Whites 2. Men 3. Christians,” according to one speaker.
Ohio senator JD Vance, a leading hopeful for the about to be named vice-presidential pick, closed the conference by criticising US support of Ukraine and decrying immigration as the greatest danger to national security. The NatCon movement was winning, he said, and Trump would be its president.
It is tempting to dismiss national conservatism as illiberal, kooky or malevolent. But as Suzanne Schneider has observed, its critiques hit home. The NatCon pitch fuses nationalism, reactionary social policies and a forceful government — the opposite of Reagan’s “three-legged stool” of foreign interventionism, social conservatism and laissez-faire economics. Similar movements are challenging mainstream politics in many of Nato’s European states, as well. How much appeal the NatCon’s version has could be tested at the GOP convention next week.
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