The Dawn of International Nationalism?

For most of his first term, President Donald Trump was a relatively lonely figure on the world stage. Establishment figures considered him vulgar, and his unabashed nationalism found few allies among the political bien pensant of the day. In Europe particularly, things were more placid than they are now; the social democratic current of European politics was still dominant, even where it went by a conservative guise—as in the UK under the Tories, or in Germany under Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU). Trump was undoubtedly a major figure in the American political landscape, but an international leader? Less so.

Many things have changed in the years since 2016. Trump and the American nationalist right now find themselves in the vanguard of a vast international political movement. Friendly populist parties have come to power in a variety of countries in recent years, including Italy under Georgia Meloni and Argentina under Javier Milei. The ruling parties of the major European powers, France, Germany, and England, are all battling fruitlessly against the rapidly-growing popularity of their own right-wing populists—the fruit of many years Europe’s elites spent continuously ignoring the desires of the public and adopting ruinous and unpopular immigration and asylum policies.

For now, the cordons sanitaires are holding, but only barely. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally Party captured a slim plurality of votes in the snap election called by Macron in 2024, and won a quarter of the seats in the French Parliament—enough to block most legislation with the help of their allies and leave the French political process in a shambles. The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany is now the second-largest party in the country, having toppled the once-dominant Social Democrats from its perch as the principal opposition to the ostensibly conservative CDU. In the United Kingdom, on the other hand, while Reform UK failed to capitalize sufficiently on frustration with the British Tories to break through as a major parliamentary force, the haplessness of both Labour under the leadership of Keir Starmer and the Tory opposition under Kemi Badenoch has Nigel Farage’s upstarts positioned to win the next election outright.

As a result, Republicans—those aligned with Trump in particular—have become surprisingly popular abroad. The complete rout of the Democratic Party in 2024 and Trump’s triumphant return to the White House marked the U.S. as the prototype for successful populists everywhere, so anyone who wants to be someone has begun to feel their way to the conferences and cocktail parties where the American right gathers.

A prime example of this phenomenon is the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference, which took place last weekend. Though hosted by the American Conservative Union, its list of speakers was thick with visitors from overseas. Among the distinguished guests on the schedule were Farage; Meloni, the prime minister of Italy; Jordan Bardella, Marine Le Pen’s deputy in France; Robert Fico, the prime minister of Slovakia; Balázs Orbán, political director for Viktor Orbán of Hungary (despite having the same last name, the two are not related); Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil; Santiago Abascal, leader of the Spanish national populist party Vox; and Milei, the president of Argentina. That is not including a number of other speakers of less renown, representing countries as varied as Japan, North Macedonia, Australia, South Korea, Israel, and Mexico.

An international nationalism would seem to be a contradiction in terms—nationalism is, after all, the desire to place the interests of one’s own nation above international cooperation. And yet there are a number of commonalities between all of the nationalists in attendance at CPAC. The first and deepest tie is opposition to mass migration. Trump’s “build the wall” refrain was ridiculed by pundits and political commentators around the world, but it resonated deeply with a major frustration in the populations of nearly every modern developed country. Few things could be more foundational to the concept of a nation than that of a border, the ability to determine where it begins and ends. Trump made it very clear that he was in favor of taining that distinction, and by extension taining a cohesive sense of America and American identity.

This is felt most keenly in Europe, where years of open-border refugee and asylum policies have created vast ethnic underclasses, ghettoes, and religious and racial balkanization. The result has been social conflict and instability, a sense of alienation, and vast amounts of crime and terrorism. Sweden, once among the safest countries in the world, has recently suffered through a wave of bombings. In England, mass migration has resulted in the rape and torture of tens of thousands of British girls at the hands of largely Pakistani grooming gangs, horrifically sanctioned by the quiet complicity of the state. Stabbings and car attacks have become routine in Germany.

The nationalists of every stripe also share in their common opposition to the globalist perspective on identity and sovereignty common to the international liberal elite. This outlook, which views humans as fundamentally global citizens defined by their possession of certain human rights, is anathema to nationalists, who insist that identity and political authority must be particular. The ever-expanding list of human rights, on the other hand, they view as an attempt to end national sovereignty and substitute universal bureaucratic oversight of the type already employed widely within the EU.

All this creates a sense of good feelings and camaraderie between contemporary advocates for nationalism in the Western world that cannot be explained by reference to simple national interests. It also leads to some unusual political spectacles, like foreign politicians shouting Trump’s signature “Make America Great Again” slogan, or, perhaps even stranger, a European politician leading an American audience at a conference of American national populists in cheers to “Make Europe Great Again.”

That is not to say that all tensions between countries with diverging interests have been eliminated. The Poles, with their historical anxiety for defending their eastern border from Russian incursion, are noticeably cool towards the Hungarians under Orbán. The French right under Le Pen is wary of the German right under Weidel. Still, they come to the same conferences and have, apart from each other, many of the same enemies—which is often enough in politics.

What all of them see in Trump and the Republican Party is a supremely valuable ally in that fight. Nationalist or not, the United States of America is still the preeminent world power, and influence, power, and patronage are all to be found plentifully in Washington D.C. Milei may well be considering that the gift of a custom bureaucracy-massacring chainsaw to Elon Musk is a small price to pay for a free trade agreement opening the United States’ vast import market to the fruits of Argentine agriculture; Eduardo Verástigui, the would-be Mexican president, is certainly betting that an American fanbase (not to mention donor base) can bolster his political ambitions south of the border. 

On a less Machiavellian level, foreign nationalists simply see the American right as a political success worthy of modeling. “We’ve seen what Trump has done for America, and we want that in the UK,” said Liz Truss, the former Tory prime minister, in her speech at CPAC. For an astute observer, there well may be important political lessons that can be drawn from the U.S. and effectively applied elsewhere.

For their part, American nationalists seem to be enjoying the attention. The crowds at CPAC were certainly as happy to rile themselves up for visitors as they were for Americans speaking at the conference. Reciprocation has also come down from the highest levels of the government: Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, which was a prominent topic of his interview at his own CPAC appearance, can be read as a declaration of friendship for European nationalist governments yet to be.

The future of an American-led international nationalist movement is uncertain. Out of government, it’s easy to set aside potential differences, but once nationalists are actually in charge, they may find each others’ presence less agreeable. At least for now, though, it seems that nationalism is becoming more international every year.