Luxury Nationalism

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, August 24, 2026

 

Today is D-Day for Iran—economically, that is.

 

An actual D-Day involving U.S. troops landing on the Iranian coast to liberate the Strait of Hormuz would be a disaster for the president, deepening the human cost of a war most Americans have never supported. So instead the White House intends to squeeze Iran into relinquishing the strait by choking its economy, promising sweeping sanctions on any nation that continues to do business with it.

 

Which presumably includes one very important nation with which the United States famously does a lot of business.

 

I’m skeptical that Donald Trump will follow through by leaving sanctions on China, and not just because doing so would make Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington next month more comically awkward than it’s already destined to be. The president learned a hard lesson last year when the Chinese responded to new U.S. tariffs by temporarily cutting off the supply of rare earth minerals and magnets on which American industry depends, forcing him to retreat. Now, less than three months before a midterm election Trump is desperate to win, we’re supposed to believe he’s going to start an economic war with Beijing to isolate Iran?

 

Unlikely. Trump doesn’t start fights unless he expects to win them easily.

 

To see how “D-Day” is likely to go, recall that Trump accused China on primetime television just last month of having hatched a scheme before the 2020 presidential election to potentially meddle with that election’s results. It was a sensational charge that logically required sensational consequences. “Diplomatic penalties, sanctions, maybe even war: Everything’s on the table when you meddle with the American people’s sovereignty,” I wrote at the time.

 

Trump did nothing. Days after his speech, he was asked how he planned to punish Beijing for its alleged election scheme. We might talk to them about it, he said, before noting that “it took place a long time ago. I think China is maybe a little bit different today than it was then.” (For an election that happened a “long time ago,” he sure does dwell on it a lot.) As it happened, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was set to discuss various matters with China’s foreign minister at around the same time. Did he seize the opportunity to raise the issue of the 2020 election during their conversation, at least?

 

He did not, it turns out. It wasn’t a priority.

 

There are two ways to understand the administration’s inaction in that episode (and they’re not mutually exclusive). One is that Trump deliberately overhyped the risk of election interference by China to plant a seed of doubt in Americans’ minds about the legitimacy of a Democratic victory this fall. He didn’t punish Beijing for its 2020 “meddling” because that meddling was little more than boob bait he manufactured for domestic consumption, to give right-wing “rigged election” rubes a way to rationalize defeat at the polls in November.

 

The other possibility is that Trump wanted to punish China and would have happily done so, whether or not it was actually guilty of anything, if it were a lesser power with weaker economic leverage over the United States. But it isn’t, so he didn’t. He couldn’t confront Beijing without triggering some sort of economically painful reprisal, so he TACO’d out. Once again, for emphasis: The president doesn’t start fights unless he expects to win them easily.

 

But nationalism isn’t supposed to be easy. Just ask America’s newest enemy: Canada.

 

Nationalism without sacrifice.

 

All strains of nationalism promise a return to national greatness. What they ask for in return is sacrifice. Individually and collectively, the people are encouraged to bear unusual burdens to restore the nation to glory. Suffering is the supreme proof of patriotism, especially the suffering of military-aged men cursed to live under nationalist regimes whose fantasies about greatness eventually metastasize into expansionist designs on their neighbors.

 

You don’t need to look back at the 1930s for examples. Gaze across the ocean at Ukraine, where Vladimir Putin’s hope of a three-day conquest long ago devolved into a yearslong romantic nationalist replay of World War II. The Russian state has mobilized to repel the “Nazi” threat in Kyiv; its leader will bear any burden to prove himself worthy of the Soviet legacy of indomitability 80 years ago. There’s seemingly no limit to the sacrifices Putin will ask Russians to make toward that end.

 

Nationalism isn’t supposed to be easy.

 

Trumpism is an unusual form of nationalism in that it promises the usual dreck—a return to “greatness,” domination of weaker rivals, expulsion of undesirables—but doesn’t ask for sacrifice. On the contrary. It pledges to make nationalism easy, replete with miracle cures.

 

Yes, sure, occasionally reality muscles in and forces the president to nod at traditional ideas about sacrifice. After his “Liberation Day” tariffs began driving up prices, he told Americans that their daughters might need to make do with owning two dolls instead of 30. Earlier this month he framed $4-per-gallon gas as a small price to pay for ensuring that Iran won’t have a nuclear weapon. (How the current war has ensured that is unclear.)

 

But those are exceptions to the rule. The rule was stated by the man himself in a famous tweet from 2018. “When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win,” he wrote. “Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore—we win big. It’s easy!”

 

It’s easy. Trumpism is what we might call “luxury nationalism”: It supposes that the United States is so immensely powerful, economically and militarily, that whether it prevails in any conflict is purely a matter of will. To return to national greatness, all we had to do was elect a leader with the will to use national power to compel lesser rivals to serve our interests. No sacrifice required.

 

Luxury nationalism was destined to be alluring to a people as comfortable, decadent, and civically insensate as Americans. But it’s no match for authentic nationalism.

 

Trump was reminded of that on Friday when his nemesis, Canadian leader Mark Carney, pulled out of trade talks with the United States. Details of what caused the rupture remain hazy, but the prime minister’s rhetoric afterward was austere. “You’re at war when you’re attacked, and we got attacked,” he told reporters. Part of the problem allegedly involved American negotiators being at odds with each other, with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and White House trade adviser Peter Navarro demanding higher tariffs on Canadian aluminum than other U.S. envoys preferred.

 

If that’s true, it wouldn’t be the first time in this presidency that too many diplomatic cooks had spoiled the broth.

 

But the graver affront had to do with Canadian sovereignty, a sore subject up north after 18 months of half-jokes about “the 51^st state.” Carney claimed that the White House wanted to restrict his government’s ability to sign trade deals with other nations, “an attempted psychological annexation that could have turned Canada into an American client state, a sort of North American Belarus,” as the Toronto Star put it. One former European diplomat described the demand as “terms you ask for from an enemy after defeating them in a world war.”

 

So Carney walked away. He’s now committed to a trade conflict with a vastly bigger economy, knowing that the steep U.S. tariffs that have taken effect will do immense damage to his country. (“A full 40 percent of small Canadian exporters will be directly hit by these tariffs and nearly one-third expect their revenues will drop by 50 percent or more as a result,” one Canadian industry expert told the Financial Times.) Yet he expects to win.

 

And I’m confident that he will win, if we define a “win” as the White House blinking first.

 

Nationalism without luxury.

 

Carney has an advantage over Trump, and he knows it: Canadians are united by authentic nationalism in this matter, whereas the president has only luxury nationalism to offer his own constituents. “The decisions coming out of Washington, for most Canadians, feel deeply threatening,” one pollster told Politico. “The threat of Trump and the emotional reaction that people feel is far greater than the fear they have of the economic implications.”

 

Or, in the more piquant words of Canadian writer Stephen Marche, “For Canada, the choice [in trade talks] came down to either severe but temporary economic instability or binding itself to a pseudo-democratic fiscal basket case of a nation, whose only apparent foreign policy objective has become domination for the gratification of its president’s slapdash vanity.”

 

Repeated wounds to their sovereignty have left Canadians more willing to sacrifice economically to defend the honor of their nation than Americans who reelected Trump in the belief that his agenda wouldn’t ask them to sacrifice at all (and who don’t share his weird trade preferences or imperialist grievances). “Wars are not decided only by the question Who can inflict more pain? Wars are also decided by the question Who can endure more pain?” David Frum observed of Carney’s advantage.

 

I suspect Trump launched his trade “attack” on Canada expecting it to be the economic equivalent of his Venezuela operation, a shock-and-awe assault that would produce a quick capitulation and de facto pledge of fealty. Instead, Carney is set to deliver something that looks more like the Iran war (a comparison Frum also drew), a protracted test of wills to see which government can “endure more pain.”

 

But under luxury nationalism, Americans aren’t supposed to be enduring pain. Government by Trump is supposed to be easy.

 

The president is losing the test of wills in Iran because he’s pitted against a regime of fanatics that neither cares about the suffering of its people nor will answer to them for it. He’s going to lose that test with Canada for essentially the opposite reason, because he’s pitted against a democratic government whose constituents are solidly behind it, far more so than Americans are behind him. That government came to power last year with a mandate to stand up to Donald Trump’s bullying, you may recall; Trump’s own mandate when he was reelected the year before was to reduce the price of goods.

 

Which leader is fulfilling his respective mandate by engaging in this trade war?

 

As with Tehran, so too with Ottawa: The president started a fight because he expected to win it easily. He miscalculated, somehow failing to realize that threatening an adversary’s sovereignty will generate a surprising amount of nationalist resolve to resist. He’s now at grave risk of a backlash from an American electorate that’s facing more unexpected economic hardship in lieu of the easy wins it was promised.

 

Beware the voter who chose luxury nationalism and didn’t get much luxury in return.

 

Fear of visiting further hardship upon those disappointed voters explains the administration’s current behavior in ways both large and small. For instance, it certainly explains why Trump hasn’t followed through on his many threats to bomb Iran’s infrastructure en masse if it doesn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

 

"American actions have made plain that Washington fears escalation more than Iran does—not just for now, but for the future,” Robert Kagan noted today at The Atlantic, arguing that Iran has become the dominant power in the Middle East. “The Iranians have struck at several UAE ships this month and even fired ballistic missiles at the country, but the United States has not responded since July—a fact undoubtedly noted by the UAE and Iran’s other neighbors." Escalation by the U.S. at this point would invite an Iranian attack on Gulf states’ oil facilities, destabilizing energy markets shortly before the midterms.

 

And $6-a-gallon gas is emphatically not what luxury nationalism promised.

 

Neither is hardship for the military, which is why Pete Hegseth’s Defense Department chose last week to purge the editor and publisher of its newspaper for service members, Stars and Stripes. For decades that paper was allowed to exercise independent editorial judgment, but earlier this year the Pentagon rescinded a regulation that protected its ability to do sor. In April, its ombudsman was dismissed for objecting to the Pentagon’s attempts to meddle in its coverage. Now its leadership is out. There’s nothing surprising about any of that: Fascists will always steer information outlets under their control toward propaganda.

 

But it’s notable that the purge was carried out so soon after Stars and Stripes exposed the poor conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln and the ordeal faced by Navy families who were hurriedly forced to evacuate Bahrain. (The reporter who wrote the latter story was also fired.) That coverage revealed the Pentagon’s shocking failure to protect America’s naval hub in Bahrain, a key resupply point for the Lincoln, from Iranian attack.

 

The world’s greatest military having its bases blown up and being chased out of the Middle East by a middling power is also very much not what luxury nationalism promised. Dominating rivals was supposed to be effortless now that we had a “strong” leader with a supposedly iron will in charge. When it turned out not to be, Trumpists had no way to explain it. So instead they’re making clear to all personnel that there will be severe consequences for anyone who calls public attention to unexpected hardship on the president’s watch.

 

Lame-duck nationalism.

 

What does luxury nationalism look like once the man in charge of it has shed his last bit of accountability to public opinion?

 

America will get the answer to that question in two and a half months. After the midterm elections, Trump will no longer have any reason apart from his “legacy” to worry about voters suffering under his policies. If he wants to dispense with the “luxury” part and give the country a hard dose of old-fashioned “bear any burden” sacrificial nationalism, congressional Republicans will see to it that no one restrains him.

 

That’s what Stephen Marche meant by his dig at “pseudo-democratic” America, I assume. Ironically, at a moment when Canadians are uniting around their shared commitment to sovereignty, Americans functionally have no way to work their own will on a president whose job approval is flirting with 37 percent.

 

If Trump decides he wants to have certain fights, like invading Greenland, he’ll no longer need to worry about how easy those fights are on his constituents. And if it’s true, as some have theorized, that he gets more aggressive with people he can bully as he grows frustrated with those whom he can’t, he might prove more callous than expected about imposing new sacrifices on Americans during his final two years in office. He can bully us without consequence—and if we elect a bunch of Democrats this fall, why, it’ll serve us right.

 

Future historians will argue over whether America’s experiment with luxury nationalism was an earnest if stupid attempt to address national decline or a descent into outright denial about it. On the one hand, electing a guy who ran on rebuilding the industrial base via tariffs, “ending endless wars” by pulling back abroad, and easing downward pressure on wages by deporting every illegal immigrant in sight sounds like a semiserious program to retrench—to put America first, to borrow a phrase.

 

On the other hand, the idea that any of that might be done without serious pain—higher prices, Chinese aggression, labor shortfalls, and slower growth—is so idiotic that it feels more like delusion than stupidity, particularly when it came packaged in the persona of an oafish con artist like Trump. Maybe Americans grasped on some level that our era of greatness had passed (polls suggest as much) and coped with it by resorting to a grotesquely childish fantasy sold by a buffoon. We’re a country that’s $40 trillion in debt and counting; dealing soberly with long-term threats isn’t really our thing.

 

There’s no such thing as luxury nationalism, but the idea may have been inevitable in a population that imagines inexhaustible wealth and power as its birthright. And given Donald Trump’s upbringing and approach to the world, that he’d end up as the face of it may have been inevitable too.