The problem with Trump’s ‘doctrine of patriotism’
President Trump began his address to the United Nations last month with some of the boilerplate braggadocio that forms the basis of his rallies. The audience laughed. And, not surprisingly, this became the main story for most news networks and headline writers. That’s too bad, because no matter what you think of the president, it was a more serious speech than that.
Nearly all addresses to the U.N. by world leaders are primarily for domestic consumption, because world leaders, elected or not, are politicians.
The core argument in Trump’s address was that the nation-state is the indispensable unit of the world order. “We reject the ideology of globalism and accept the doctrine of patriotism,” the president declared.
“Each of us here today,” he stated, “is the emissary of a distinct culture, a rich history, and a people bound together by ties of memory, tradition, and the values that make our homelands like nowhere else on Earth. That is why America will always choose independence and cooperation over global governance.”
At times Trump’s depiction of globalism was a bit of a strawman. Cooperation with and participation in international institutions — NATO, NAFTA, the IMF, the World Bank and even the U.N. — are not examples of “global governance.” The United States took a lead role in creating these institutions not to outsource our sovereignty, but to extend our influence and magnify our leadership.
But the Trump administration has a good case that some of these institutions are in dire need of reform. Trump was right to reaffirm the administration’s decision to pull out of the U.N. Human Rights Council, which, like its predecessor, became captured by many of the world’s worst human rights abusers.
At the same time, much of what the president had to say was undoubtedly music to the ears of many of those nations. Nationalism, which Trump’s speechwriters called “the doctrine of patriotism,” is a lot like individualism. Everyone — liberals and conservatives alike — embraces individualism in the abstract because it implies that people are responsible for their own actions and should be free from unjust coercion. But liberals and conservatives typically have very different ideas about what individualism means in practice.
Similarly, everyone agrees in the abstract that nation-states should be “free” to do what is in their own interest and what is valued by their own cultures. But at times we have fierce disagreements about how to put it into practice.
Every culture is indeed unique, and every custom is rooted in tradition and history. But that does not mean all customs are worthy of respect or deference.
Nor, as the leader of the free world, should we pretend that just because every nation-state is sovereign, that the people of every unfree nation chose to live under despots and dictatorships.
Trump was right when he said, “Sovereign and independent nations are the only vehicle where freedom has ever survived, democracy has ever endured, or peace has ever prospered.” But we should not confuse necessity and sufficiency. Sovereign nations have also been among the leading vehicles of barbarism and tyranny. And that’s why countries such as North Korea, China, Russia and Iran were so happy to hear the leader of the free world champion the “doctrine of patriotism” instead of the doctrine of liberty.