The Nationalists’ Dead End

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, January 23, 2026

 

Pour one out for national conservatism. It’s over.

 

I’ve been pretty gloomy about the reckless, indefensible vandalism of l’affaire Greenland. But there’s an upside! Transnational nationalism—always close to an oxymoron outside hotel conference centers and little magazines—is over.

 

First, a small victory lap.

 

Shortly after the 2024 election, I went on a fascinating trip to India, where I met with a slew of high-ranking Indian officials and prominent intellectuals. I was a bit of a skunk at the garden party because many of these people believed that the incoming Trump administration would be a boon not just to India, but to the intellectual project around Narendra Modi. You see, some of them had attended “Nat Con” conferences and drank the Kool-Aid on the idea that an international movement of nationalism was not only possible, but was actually well underway, and they were the avant-garde of this new transnational national movement. I pointed out several times that the “nationalists” had hardly solidified their victory and that the future of the American right, never mind America itself, was hardly set in stone. Moreover, I noted in various conversations, transnational nationalism may sound cool in theory, but it doesn’t have a good record in practice, and—by the way—everyone who rests their intellectual, political, or geopolitical framework on the assumption Donald Trump is consistent on anything eventually gets humiliated. Everyone was very pleasant and we had great conversations, but suffice it to say this was an unwelcome perspective.

 

It didn’t take long for Trump to prove me right. He drenched India in tariffs on “Liberation Day.” But it got worse. He repeatedly claimed that he forced a peace between India and Pakistan (that’s one of the wars Trump claims to have ended). The Indians insist this is simply a lie, something Modi told Trump directly. Then Trump launched a rapprochement with Pakistan, which also ticked off the Indians. Then the administration cracked down on H-1B visas, which really offended them, given how many Indian immigrants use them. After that, there were further sanctions on India, ostensibly because it buys oil from Russia. Also, it may be relatively easy for Americans to ignore anti-Indian sentiment on social media from the extended MAGA universe, but it gets noticed in India. “The United States is the epicenter of anti-Indian digital hostility,” an expert told the Washington Post last year. When Trump came into office, 75 percent of Indians were upbeat about the new American president. Now a majority of Indians think he’s been bad for their country.

 

Now let’s talk about the aftermath of the Greenland debacle.

 

In Trump’s National Security Strategy, which never even mentioned Greenland, the authors embraced the nationalist parties in Europe. The language was couched, but that is how everyone in Europe interpreted the statement that America would “stand up” for “unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history. America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.” It further states that our policy toward Europe would be one of “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”

 

As John Gustavsson writes over at National Review, the nationalist-populist parties in Europe were appalled by Trump’s Greenland bullying. “Alice Weidel, co-chairman of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), compared Trump’s actions to those of Vladimir Putin. Jordan Bardella, leader of France’s National Rally, accused Trump of an attempted ‘vassalization’ of Europe. Nigel Farage, perhaps Trump’s closest ally in Europe, endorsed Greenland’s right to self-determination and condemned the president’s threat of tariffs as a ‘hostile act.’ Prime Minister of Italy Giorgia Meloni was likewise critical.”

 

And the Scandinavian right went ballistic, with one Danish conservative politician simply saying “f— off” to Trump.

 

Here’s the problem in a nutshell. Getting pushed around by a nationalist superpower doesn’t feel any less humiliating than getting pushed around by a globalist superpower. Trump’s treatment of Europe is wildly unpopular, and nationalist politicians are politicians who have their own constituencies to answer to.

 

Recall that conservatives were poised to win a historic victory in Canada earlier in 2025. Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party was leading by 25 points. Poilievre is an extremely impressive guy, but he made the mistake of associating himself too much with Trump and MAGA during the Biden years, even adopting the phrase “Canada First.” Then Trump got elected, declared a mindless trade war on Canada, and started talking about making it the 51^st state. The Conservatives got shellacked by the Liberal Party, and Poilievre even lost his own seat. The day after the election, a White House spokeswoman said the election “does not affect President Trump’s plan to make Canada America’s cherished 51st state.”

 

Fast forward to this week, and the guy who beat Poilievre, Mark Carney, was announcing trade deals with China and talking about creating a coalition of “middle powers” to stand up to the bullying of the U.S. because America is no longer a reliable ally. “The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it,” Carney said. “Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

 

I await the coming “Who Lost Canada?” think tank debates and journal articles.

 

So let’s get back to national conservatism. The fundamental, fatal flaw in the whole idea of a movement for “independent nations” is that it ignores the fact that in a world of independent nations, the weak ones get bullied or bloodied by stronger ones. That is not the world that Yoram Hazony and his crew want, but what they want is irrelevant—it’s the world they get. The irony of all of these eggheads heaping scorn on the idea of an international liberal order is that it was the American-led liberal international order that made their movement remotely possible. They took for granted the idea that the United States would prevent the prison-yard anarchy inherent in their ideology. In a world where American protection cannot be counted on, nations don’t triple down on their “nationalism” and “independence,” they look for allies, coalitions, blocs to protect themselves the same way new “independent” prison inmates either join or pay protection to prison gangs. Being all alone is dangerous. Like the free-riding nations of Europe they deplore, they took the peace and prosperity the transatlantic alliance provided for granted.

 

I think many—though certainly not all—of the intellectual national conservatives are basically decent people who don’t want to live in a world of devil-take-the-hindmost and might-makes-right aggression. It’s far less obvious that the same can be said of the people of the “nationalist street,” by which I mean the loudest jabronies on social media, on cable, or in real-world protests. The surest sign that these broader nationalist “movements” were unserious lay in the collective response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

 

The natcons want a system in which nation-states are autonomous and sovereign, with respected borders, not henpecked by “globalist” or “transnational” institutions like the U.N., the EU, etc. Okay, I can sign up for a lot of that. But as annoying as the U.N. and the EU are, they are not doing a lot of cross-border invading. But Putin is openly trying to erase Ukraine, and he’s murdering hundreds of thousands of people to do it. The response from the MAGA-coded nationalists has been at best muted and often celebratory. I mean Trump himself—the supposed avatar of American nationalism—first responded to the invasion as “genius” and “savvy.” Nationalist J.D. Vance said, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another …” Self-described nationalist Steve Bannon says Ukraine merely “is kind of a concept. It’s not even a country.” The deeper you wade into the self-proclaimed white or Christian nationalist swamp, the creepier it gets. Lauren Witzke, who won the 2020 GOP Senate primary in Delaware, said Putin was “compelled by God” to conquer Ukraine. “Russia is a Christian nation,” she insisted, as if Ukraine isn’t. “I identify more with Putin’s Christian values than I do with Joe Biden.” Nick Fuentes says he wishes Putin was president of America and calls him “my Czar.” If you ask me, that’s a weird “nationalism.”

 

Obviously, most serious or at least sincere “nationalists” in Congress or on TV don’t believe this kind of garbage. But their relative silence or triangulating makes it hard to take them seriously when they claim to care a lot about the sanctity of borders and national sovereignty. It’s like complaining about onerous regulations on banks, but shrugging at armed bank robbery.

 

The issue runs beyond just the reactions to Ukraine and the Greenland gambit, never mind the Canada-bullying. National sovereignty has been taking a beating for a while. China, which swallowed Tibet long ago, is harassing neighbors like the Philippines and Japan, and it is waiting for its moment to erase Taiwan as an independent nation. And don’t even get me started on the Middle East and Africa.

 

Whether, where, and how America should intervene is an entirely legitimate and difficult question, the answer to which depends on all manner of specifics. But if you’re an intellectual who claims to want to live in some postliberal global order of sovereign and independent states, I can’t take you very seriously if you don’t condemn actual violent violations of these principles while spending all of your time pounding the table about how the World Health Organization or the EU is an existential threat to them.

 

Trump’s version of nationalism has beclowned intellectual nationalism because it demonstrates that in a world where America only thinks about itself, transnational alliances that harm America’s interests become more attractive even as America becomes uglier. When America ceases to think of itself as the good guy, it gives bad guys more room to maneuver.

 

Oh, and one last point: As with so many agendas that depend on Trump, the political assumption again seems to be that the MAGA-tinged GOP will never be out of power, even as MAGA politics make the GOP less popular. You can talk to Americans about nationalism in theory all you like, but the only nationalism they see is the stuff Trump is doing.

 

When the Democrats get into power again, they will—rightly—try to repair the damage Trump has done. But they will find that many of our friends and former friends will be reluctant to mend fences or simply restore the status quo ante. One reason for this, again, is that those countries are run by politicians, and politicians have to answer to their voters, and even their nationalist voters think we’ve become thuggish and unreliable. At a minimum, those politicians will demand more favorable terms and stronger guarantees, on a host of issues from trade and security to support at the U.N. and elsewhere. Trust once lost is very expensive to restore. America will be weaker, less able to project power, less respected, and less liked. All because of a nationalism that has no respect for actual nations.