Multipolar Neoconservatism

Alex Gourevitch assesses Donald Trump’s rapid and disruptive intervention into global politics, and exposes the evasion of domestic renewal that lurks in Trump’s apparent territorial ambitions.

Is there anything to celebrate about Trump’s national security policy? There is no doubt that he has checked off a number of items that would be on any real democrat or internationalist’s checklist. Just for starters, he has caused embarrassment and consternation for the deep state: Tulsi Gabbard is now confirmed as Director of National Intelligence; all files are to be released regarding the assassinations of MLK, RFK and JFK; he has taken the financial and institutional axe to USAID, a long-standing CIA front, hiding imperial hard power behind hegemonic soft power. He has even said that he is sending Musk’s DOGE team into the Pentagon budget – usually an untouchable item. So untouchable that the Pentagon has never passed an audit. 

In foreign policy, Trump has brought an end to the neoliberal free trade consensus and has indicated an unwillingness to support forever war in Ukraine, moving quickly to open negotiations with Vladimir Putin on how to end it. Perhaps most significant of all, Trump has proclaimed his hostility to NATO. He sent Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, to tell a meeting of NATO defense ministers that the US would not support Ukrainian entry to NATO, no US soldiers would be part of a post-war keeping mission, and any European soldiers involved could not be part of a NATO-mission. Trump has  intentionally antagonised a NATO ally, Denmark, by threatening to take its territory Greenland. This precipitated a constitutional crisis for NATO, forcing European powers to meet and discuss whether they should send forces to protect an ally from one of its own members. Not just any member, on the margins of the North Atlantic alliance, but its lynchpin: the United States. Then, not a week later, the Trump administration added fuel to the fire. In an astonishing speech to European political leaders assembled for the Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance declared the authoritarianism of the EU, German and British regimes to be the greatest threat to the democracy that the Atlantic alliance claimed to uphold. The NATO alliance has not been this fragile for decades. 

But almost nobody outside Trumpworld has welcomed any of these developments. Instead, there has been a mix of bewilderment and hostility. In part that is because so many of the moves, especially Trump’s sudden interest in territorial expansion, have been so unexpected and are of unclear seriousness. Trump gave no indication of any territorial ambitions during the campaign. Now they have become the centerpiece of a chaotic, hydra-headed diplomacy. The Greenland-initiated NATO tension is part of a wider set of Trump proposals to buy, annex or militarily seize the Panama Canal and Canada. The President who loves borders seems also to want to expand them, seemingly without any clear limit. 

In light of Trump’s amoebic ambitions, the generally negative view of leftists might look warranted. The difficulty, however, is that the anti-imperialist view seems unable to assimilate the facts with which we began, especially the NATO showdown. The most judicious response from the left has been Ryan Grim’s observation that weakness lurks behind the show of strength: “Seen in a context of strategic retreat, Trump’s belligerence toward Greenland and Canada, for example, appears more like an empire stepping back from the world stage and building trenches closer to home.” Whatever coherence there is in the strategy lies in trading globally hegemonic control for hemispheric domination. The headline-grabbing theatrics are part of a stage-managed “strategic retreat”. That retreat fits the gradual erosion of US-led unipolarity and the emergence of a multipolar world in which dealing with China is the USA’s top strategic priority (as Hegseth also told NATO leaders). 

The Marxist critic Chris Cutrone, however, proposes a more thoroughgoing embrace of Trump’s foreign policy. His argument helpfully, if unwittingly, exposes the logical error in neoconservatism and the evasive unseriousness of much political debate today. He sees its expansionist territorial ambitions as the extension of the highest ideals of the American Revolution. “The US-Canada border is the frontier of the American Revolution…This is not imperialism, but a reminder of the Empire of Liberty that Thomas Jefferson declared the mission of the new United States.” I wonder if this post-Left defence of Trump is honest about itself. It sounds like someone writing for the discourse. Does Cutrone genuinely support American territorial expansion by force, a prospect that Trump has refused to rule out? Does he literally mean Trump should send the American military to take land from other sovereign, democratic nations, like Denmark, Canada or Panama? If Trump is an American Napoleon, spreading the revolution, then that is what is meant. If not, then this is an unserious support of a policy: enthusiasm for everything but the material fact of it.

Cutrone seems to be confident that unlike, say, post-intervention Iraq or Afghanistan, Canada and Greenland would become new states of the US, their citizens entitled to the same rights as all other American citizens. That is the only reasonable, or at least defensible, interpretation of his favored Empire of Liberty. Given the current inability of the United States to democratically incorporate various territories and its populations, Cutrone never explains his confidence. None of the more than three million people in Puerto Rico nor the 700,000 living in the nation’s capital, Washington DC, have been allowed full rights and equal representation after decades of discussions. Other territories, like American Samoa and Guam, with populations the same or larger than Greenland, aren’t even allowed into that conversation. Not to mention that Republicans would never stand for admitting states that would tilt heavily Democratic. Once again, Cutrone seems less interested in the matter at hand than an idea he has about it. He passes over the details of genuine democratic inclusion, in favour of the outrage of defending expansion. ‘Why Not Greenland?’ is what MAGA Trotskyism asks when trapped in performative efforts to trigger the libs. It is not just childish, it participates in one of the worst tendencies of Trumpian politics – the bullshit.

But if we take Cutrone seriously, and regard this not as a mere performance for the Discourse, but a full-blooded defense of the use of American force in the name of Revolution, then it turns out the post-Left position betrays the very thing it claims to find in America: universalism. Cutrone supports universal human ideals by identifying America with some universal principles (freedom, revolution) and by then imagining those principles can only become universal through the actual, physical extension of American power. That is the classic, 20th century form of American nationalism. Namely, that the United States is the unique agent able to establish, defend and spread universal principles, which is why it must use force in its own interests. Its national interests are universal ones – which is why it must be prima inter pares. This is a self-undermining universalism: freedom requires American dominance, equality means the US is superior to the rest, revolution means preserving the Pax Americana against all those unwilling to submit.

Once you’ve taken anything like this step then you are bound to betray the only proper form of any universal politics: internationalism. For one, having done a culture war move of identifying the US with some abstract ideas, thereby identifying the extension of US power with the extension of those ideas, you fail to develop any political analysis of the actual role of the US in contemporary foreign affairs. The minute we think about the actual character and effects of contemporary US interventionism, from Iraq to Libya to Honduras to Haiti to Israel to Ukraine, we see that it has spread not revolution but chaos, not new liberating institutions but civil war and failed states. This destructive interventionism goes hand-in-hand with US indifference to the sovereignty of any other nation but its own. And, as I have pointed out here, we have no reason to believe that a new Trumpist strategy of American territorial expansion would have any democracy enhancing effects either. This kind of analysis simply disappears, however, when territorial expansion is reinterpreted through a culture wars debate about 1776.

Ironically, for an argument that attempts to own the libs, Cutrone’s way of thinking sounds essentially similar to the humanitarian liberalism of the 1990s and 2000s – the projection of moral fantasies onto the exercise of American power. Worse yet, welding ideals to American power means no other agents may appeal to the same universal principles to explain what is wrong with the US throwing its weight around. All other peoples and their nations are ruled out as potential bearers of the very ideals that are supposed to be available to all. Ironically, the very thing that is most welcome in Trump’s foreign policy – the pressure he is piling onto NATO – is not discussed at all by Cutrone. Yet the collapse of this archetypal entangling alliance under Trump’s pressure would not only be a blow to the US deep state, but also advance democratic internationalism by forcing all NATO’s member states to exercise their own sovereignty. No doubt this is one of the reasons European leaders have reacted to Trump with so much alarm: in forcing them out of America’s shadow, they must take responsibility for their own national security policy. The Trump administration’s refusal to participate in Ukraine peace-keeping, and insistence it not be a NATO mission, is already putting them to the test.

Which brings us to Cutrone’s final error. He misreads Trump’s expansionism as the advance of the nation’s purported universal ambition when it is as much a marker of its retreat from the delusions of that vision. This is an attempt to manage decline, to project power in retreat on a regional rather than a global level.

Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, recently stated in a high-profile interview, that ‘it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power’, and that the idea of the US ‘sort of becoming the global government… trying to solve every problem’ was a contingent result of the US victory in the Cold War. He claimed that foreign policy in his hands will be to pursue American national interests, recognising the existence of the (sometimes conflicting) interests of other powers. Former Marxists helped to drive US imperial crusading during the era of unipolarity – the invasion of Iraq was the pet project of the neoconservatives. Cutrone finds himself out of time, arguing for American expansion during an era of relative American decline: he is selling out at the bottom of the market. For all their delusions, at least the neocons were right that America was at the peak of its power in the early 2000s. Yet, like the neocons, Cutrone is extending his support for foreign adventures to deflect from the harder tasks of internal democratic renewal.