Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism (2018, updated 2022) argues that nation-states best safeguard freedom by preserving traditions and interests, unlike globalist or imperialist systems. He critiques liberal internationalism’s post-WWII decline—rooted in fear of Hitler and Stalin—and the World Economic Forum’s modern "universal peace" ambitions, calling them utopian. Hazony rejects U.S. global hegemony or isolationism, advocating instead for empowering regional democratic allies like Israel and Gulf States to handle threats independently, reducing costs while maintaining security. His framework challenges post-war liberalism’s instability, blending nationalism with pragmatic foreign policy. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Claven with this week's interview with Yoram Hazzoni, one of the most important voices on the right.
He's the author of the 2018 book, The Virtue of Nationalism and 2022's Conservatism, a Rediscovery.
The Virtue of Nationalism was one of the most influential books in the conservative movement, the movement to reclaim the idea of the nation-state, and it's now been reissued.
A second edition has been reissued.
It puts forward a philosophical underpinning to Trump's populist MAGA movement and the similar movements that have taken place in Italy and in other countries and in Eastern Europe.
And it's made the argument that the nation-state is still the greatest protector of freedom.
And now we have people within the MAGA movement arguing over what America first means and whether we should get involved in what's going on in Israel.
And since Joram is in Israel at this moment, he's in Jerusalem, I thought this would be a good time to talk about the whole subject.
So Joram, thank you for coming on.
I hope you all are safe over there.
Thank you, Andrew.
Good to see you again.
It's good to see you.
So let's start with, I think we ought to start from the beginning and just define what we're talking about, what nationalism is, because a lot of people conflate it with patriotism.
It really is a bigger thing than that.
Right.
Patriotism is usually used to refer to feelings, feeling, a sentiment that people have.
I love my country.
So people will say, I'm an American patriot.
It basically means I love the United States.
I'm willing to fight for the United States.
I share in its fate.
Nationalism, the word nationalism, you can also use it in pretty much that way.
People also say, I'm an American nationalist or I'm Italian or an Indian nationalist, and it can mean that.
But nationalism also has a much broader definition.
It's a political theory of the way the world should be ordered politically.
It's the idea that the world is governed best when many different nations each have their own independence and can pursue their own interests and cultivate their own constitutional and religious and linguistic traditions.
So nationalism is also used more broadly to say somebody who doesn't really believe in world government or world governance, doesn't believe that the European Union should erase all the borders or that the United States should have a new world order where basically America is responsible for imposing law on every corner of the planet using its armed forces.
So those kinds of globalist theories, which became extremely popular, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we had really a whole generation, I think,
up until around 2016, where most of the political parties in the Republicans and Democrats, the Tories and Labor, most of the political parties in Europe were committed to some kind of global governance or pooled sovereignty or rules-based international order.
All of these are synonyms for kind of a liberal empire with a single rule of law for everybody.
And the Trump movement and Brexit and movements in lots of other countries have reconstructed the politics of Western countries by Placing the nation, its traditions, its interests, and its independence, its sovereignty, back at the center of the politics of the right.
So that's what the virtue of nationalism was about, is making sense of that philosophically and historically.
One of the startling things in the book that I really like is the fact that you don't use the term globalism as much as you use the term imperialism.
Is that fair?
Are those the only choices between nationalism and imperialism?
Well, there is a third choice because before the existence of nation states and imperial states and city-states, I think for most of human history or pre-history, human beings lived in something that could be called like an order of tribes and clans.
Like families would be, you know, together with their extended family, they'd be a clan, and then in times of danger, they would gather together into a tribe.
That was most of the world for most of human history, but it did not include any kind of central government whatsoever.
So there's still, some anarchists think that that's kind of the ideal.
So that kind of an order is possible.
The big problem with it is that it basically puts foreign policy and decisions of life and death and when you're going to war in the hands of every cluster of families or every tribe, which means that humanity for most of its history lived with constant warfare.
The constant war.
This is sort of Hobbes' war of all against all, except it's on individuals, it's tribes.
And so the two alternatives to that that were invented with the creation of the centralized state, really not that long ago, maybe 5,000 years ago, 8,000, maybe 10.
So a few thousand years ago, this system of people became really, societies could become really wealthy because of agriculture.
And then they began building standing armies.
And we see this in scripture, where the Jews in the book of Judges are trying to live this sort of decentralized, anarchical kind of tribal existence.
And then all of a sudden, they realize that the neighboring states, imperial states and nation-states, keep invading them and destroying them.
They find out you can't live like this.
And so they say, we want a king.
So politically, what that's about is about we the Jews, we want centralized government like other people, which means taxation, bureaucracy, the draft that anytime the king wants, he can conscript us and take us into battle.
So this is really a central issue politically in the Bible.
So you get these two alternatives.
An imperial state is a lot like a nation-state, except that the imperial state, if you're talking about ancient imperial states like Assyria or Babylonia or Egypt, there's always some God telling the king that in order to bring peace and prosperity to the world, you got to go out and conquer all the four corners of the earth.
And so that's one big ancient theory.
And then the other is the theory of the prophets, is that this is murder.
This is theft and murder and rape.
Every great evil comes from empires deciding that they're going to rule the four corners of the earth.
So when you ask, is it fair to call the globalists imperialists?
Okay, I actually think it's completely fair because I'm not saying that they have exactly the same worldview as the Assyrians or something, but the big theory of political order for the European Union or any of the other global governance people is a single rule of law,
a single government or governance that is going to expand until it conquers everybody.
So that's an ancient thing.
In fact, the World Economic Forum, they're promising the same exact things that the Assyrians promised.
Peace, prosperity, the end to plagues that come with warfare.
Everybody's going to be happy because somebody's going to be in charge.
Some human worldwide system is going to be in charge.
I think it's really clear that it just is the new imperialism, this global governance thing.
So I can see why that is the opposite of freedom.
Why is it that nationalism is the best way to preserve freedom?
It's not a universalist theory of the way that liberalism or Marxism are.
So if you're a liberal or a Marxist, then the claim is that there's one correct, one best answer for all the societies in the world.
And nationalism, I think, is not utopian in that way.
I mean, there have been utopian nationalists, but most nationalists are much more limited in what it is that they're trying to do.
The nationalist theory is we should basically let other people run their own nations as much as possible according to their way of doing things.
They don't have to do things the way we want them to do things.
So this gives you a, on the one hand, it gives you an opportunity to have something that you could call national freedom, that you feel like your nation is free because you're able to live according to your own constitutional traditions and your own religion, your own language.
On the other hand, it is obvious that having national freedom, it's not identical to having individual liberties.
So the question is, what's the relationship?
Obviously, you can have an independent nation that's very oppressive internally.
The question is the opposite, is it necessary to have an independent nation in order to be able to have traditions of individual liberties, the way that we have in the Anglo-American tradition?
Necessary Independence?00:03:06
I think the answer is basically yes.
Because if you don't have a tremendous degree of internal solidarity, cohesion, the loyalty of the different tribes that make up the nation to one another, if you don't have that, if there isn't a great deal of trust, then you can't have peaceful transitions of power.
The moment that the tribes within a given nation don't trust one another, like is beginning to happen in the United States now, the moment that happens, you can't have democracy because whenever somebody's elected, it's the end of the world for the other guys.
And democracy is based on the idea that you say, listen, let's stop killing each other.
I mean, it's true, we totally disagree, but we can take turns, right?
Like, well, you know, you'll go four years, I'll go four years, and we'll let you govern and you'll let us govern.
So democracy requires this kind of national independence because it requires trust.
So just think of your, think, has there any ever been a democratic empire in the history of the world?
No, never, nowhere.
Because the empire has, it has 50 different nations and they don't trust one another.
So only force can order them.
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So how did, you know, when I lived in England, I used to remark to my British friends that there were no flags, that I never saw a union jack except on certain very rare holidays.
They would kind of decorate them all with them.
Post-War Liberalism00:09:22
And they would kind of answer me by being derogatory about Americans and all their flags and every house has a flag and they're all over the place.
And now I look at the UK and I see them, you know, covering up rape scandals in order to keep from insulting, you know, Pakistani Muslims in their country.
How did they get to the point where nationalism, the idea of the self as a nation, something you have to protect and love and tend to, how did we get to the point where that was put into disrepute, where that became a bad thing?
Well, there's a long story and a short story.
We probably stick to a short story.
Look, there's an argument, as you know, on the right and also on the left.
There's an argument about the question of whether the extent to which liberalism, which is the idea that politics is focused on the, you know, is focused almost entirely on the freedom of the, the freedom and equality of the individual.
So there's a, you know, there's a big debate that's been going on, you know, for a couple of centuries and certainly throughout the 20th century over the question of whether liberalism is actually can be any kind of a, whether it can create a stable political political order within a country.
And so a lot of the The critics of liberalism that we find in today's nationalist movement.
I'm one of these, and Rusty Reno and Patrick Denin, there's lots of others at this point have made versions of this argument.
The argument has been that at least in its post-World War II version, where liberalism was kind of taken to be the religion of the United States.
It replaced Christianity.
Before World War II, it was normal to still think of the United States as a Christian country.
That's the way FDR spoke of it in speeches.
That's the way the Supreme Court treated it.
But after World War II, we should really say after the two world wars and the Holocaust, there's an urge to radically revise Western democracies, Western republicanism.
And roughly what happened was that educated people, left and right, looked at the two world wars and the Holocaust and they said, never again, we can't do anything like this again.
And then the question was, okay, fine, nice, but what are you going to do about it?
And the answer was this post-war liberalism, which is a public liberalism in which ultimately anything Christian or Jewish, anything nationalist, historical, was privatized.
The theory was, let's take Enlightenment rationalism to its extreme and say, from now on, you want to have a religion or a nationality or patriotism, all those things.
Those are private.
The job of the state is to just do nothing other than to be neutral.
The job of the state is to prevent people from being discriminated against.
So like imposing total equality on everyone, total freedom on everyone, and otherwise the state should be neutral.
It took a little while for that to take off, but roughly that is the post-war liberal political theory.
And where does it come from?
It comes from Adolf Hitler calling himself a nationalist.
It comes from Stalin calling himself a patriot.
I mean, especially the Hitler thing, after World War II, an army of liberal intellectuals and Marxist intellectuals, they took the fact that Hitler used, I think, perverted the word nationalism, and they say, okay, that's it.
No more nationalism.
No more particularism.
States can't have religions.
There can't be a state religion anymore.
Or even state support of multiple religions.
That's over.
States can't be nationalists.
They can't be about cultivating a special, unique, particular constitutional or historical inheritance.
That's not what we're about.
All countries are supposed to be about being human.
And that theory, that post-war liberal theory of America doesn't stand for anything other than being neutral and everybody's going to be human and equal.
And they did the same thing in Britain, and they did the same thing in France and the same thing in Germany.
And it turns out, so it's now, you know, it's two generations later, three generations later.
And it turns out nobody can remember why you need God in scripture.
And nobody can remember why you need nation or family because everybody's perfectly free and perfectly equal.
And so also they don't remember why you need man and woman.
It just goes on and on.
They gave up on everything other than these liberal pillars of universal individual liberties and universal equality.
That's how I understand it.
Is there something organic about this?
I mean, you put forward these ideas in your books.
Again, the new book, the book is a reissue of the second edition of The Virtue of Nationalism.
You put forward these ideas and they have effects on people and they've started movements or they've inspired people in movements.
But is there something organic?
I mean, kind of like the cycle of regimes where this is just the way things go, that we pass from freedom to chaos to strong men to, you know, I mean, is there something unstoppable and inevitable about this?
Well, you know, obviously from, you know, if you're if you're really into into Greek political theory, then that is the way they see it, is that it's unstoppable and inevitable and it goes through these cycles.
The biblical view is, I think, a little bit different.
Not that the cycles don't exist, but that ultimately in scripture, it's possible for great human leaders and also societies to repent of their course and sometimes to save themselves.
So there's nothing inevitable about that either, but the biblical view about the fact that things rise and fall all the time.
Rising and falling is as a law of nature, that everything rises and falls, everything political rises and falls.
That's for sure biblical, that there is such a natural course.
But at the same time, it's accompanied with the theory that repentance, that human action and God's willingness to forgive, that combination can avert the inevitable decline.
So people ask me about America.
I mean, lots of people think the West is in steep decline.
America is in steep decline.
I can't argue with that.
If you're just looking at kind of like the surface indicators, it certainly looks like that.
But that's why in scripture we have all of these instances that Moses can save us.
David can save us, the Assyrians in the book of Jonah, the Assyrians are about as evil as you can get.
They've been waging war to conquer and destroy the other nations of the Middle East for 300 years.
And Jonah says, no, no, you can't save them.
They're too evil.
And God's view is different.
God says, look, give them a chance.
Maybe they'll repent.
And Jonah doesn't want that.
But God thinks repentance is possible.
So it's not exactly the Greek view.
Red Sea Coalition00:12:06
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you're an Israeli American.
You're in Jerusalem.
You guys do not have the luxury of debating nationalism because if you aren't nationalists, you'll be gone, basically.
And I have to tell you, I'm awestruck by the courage and the creativity with which you've been defending the country.
But now here we're having this debate within the MAGA movement.
This is not a left-right debate.
This is within the MAGA movement of what is America's role.
And so if you're a nationalist, do you say, well, I'm a nationalist, therefore other people's countries are none of my business?
Or do you say, because I'm the biggest nation, I have to enforce the law wherever my interests are concerned.
Where do you stand on this?
I mean, what is the rationale for America to get involved with anybody if we're supposed to be a nation unto ourselves?
It's a crucial question.
And there's a chapter on it in The Virtue of Nationalism in the new revised edition that deals with this directly.
But look, I think that there are three different positions here that are in play on sort of the center right in the United States right now.
One of them is familiar.
There's the, you know, what's frequently called the neoconservative position, which is, you know, I think is basically just a way of pasting the word conservative onto liberal internationalism.
It's the view that liberalism is the final idea.
It's the public religion.
It's the answer to most political questions, if not all.
And the job of the United States is to, and the Europeans is to establish one world order.
Charles Krauthammer in 1989 published with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
He published an essay called Universal Dominion.
And this was basically his argument was that, look, the communists are gone.
Now it's our job to have downgrade sovereignty.
We don't, national independence.
We don't need that.
What we need is a world where people are going to be liberals.
So that's a familiar worldview.
And everybody in the nationalist camp, both the ones who are in favor of helping Israel with Iran and the ones who are against helping Israel, all of us are in agreement.
The thing that on foreign policy that all of us got clear and agree on is that this aspiration to the world needs a policeman.
America is going to be it.
It needs an ideology.
It's going to be liberalism.
And therefore, forever wars.
And it's not just forever wars.
According to this theory, we have a moral obligation not only to invade Afghanistan, but also to make sure that they're good liberals.
We have to teach them all to be liberals.
That's our job.
And that worldview is repugnant to nationalists of all stripes.
And that's what the politics of democratic countries over the last 10 years have been rearranged in order for that specific concept of foreign policy to be challenged and hopefully defeated.
Now, within, with, yeah, go ahead.
No, no, go ahead.
No, so within the nationalist camp, right, within the broad supporters of Trump and Brexit and Maloney and Orban and Modi and various other nationalist characters.
Within the nationalist camp in the United States right now, there's a big argument of principle over which some people call it isolationism.
It may actually be more accurate to say pacifism.
I don't know exactly what label this camp would accept, but it reminds me a lot of the, you know, when you and I were young, there was, you know, there were liberals and the liberals, they were against any kind of foreign, you know, we should not be contending with the Soviet Union.
We shouldn't be fighting them.
We shouldn't be in any wars.
We should just stay home and be nice to one another and love's going to conquer everything.
And this, in those days, that was called liberalism.
And they were pacifists.
They were against nuclear weapons.
They were against nuclear energy.
We remember all this.
Younger people don't remember it.
So very strangely, this sort of liberal pacifism has appeared on the nationalist right and is sucking in all sorts of people who are not nationalists and not conservatives like Dave Smith and Greg Green and Glenn Greenwald and various others.
So look, I don't mean to put this down.
I understand the, and I'm very sympathetic to the impulse that says every time we go abroad and have any dealings with anybody, we end up invading countries and staying for 20 years and killing millions of people and spending trillions of dollars and not focusing on China that's the real foreign policy threat and on domestic issues.
I'm completely sympathetic.
I totally agree with that critique of the forever wars.
But there was already in Trump's first term, there was something called the Trump Doctrine.
The Trump Doctrine was, that was a name that was given to it by Mike Anton and he and my nationalism book and various others.
We were defending a doctrine that is not, it's not globalist, it's not liberal internationalist, that's out.
But it's also a theory that is sharply at odds with the theory of pacifism or isolationism on the right.
To make it simple, the theory, the Trump doctrine, which I would say is a nationalist foreign policy rather than isolationist or pacifist one.
The nationalist foreign policy, what it says is, look, America can't be the world's policeman.
America has to focus.
It has to deal with China.
It has to deal with problems at home.
Can't be everywhere.
Financially, it can't be everywhere.
In terms of sending boys and girls off to fight, can't be everywhere.
In terms of morale, just the ability of the nation to America to hold together and fight one war after another, indefinitely impossible.
So what's the alternative?
And the nationalists who supported this Trump doctrine, their theory was the United States needs regional to help regional powers take responsibility for security in their region.
So we're talking about countries like Japan or India, but also Poland, Britain, Israel, you could say Greece.
I mean, there's different candidates, but the theory is find peoples who share not every last value with the United States, but they share most values.
They're democratic countries.
Find allies that are capable of building themselves up so that they will take care of security.
In a particular, they and their local allies, they'll need to do what needs to be done.
And uh the, the idea was this, will, this will cost the United States much less financially, because the Us doesn't have to pay to be everywhere and and and it means that when there's trouble, that that there are local powers that you can rely on to advance America's interests.
So you know, like just an obvious example that that I include in the new edition of the Virtue of nationalism, the Red Sea.
The Red Sea is 7 000 miles from the United States.
So if you're a liberal internationalist, um and uh, or Neocon, and and, and and there's attacks on ships uh, American ships, or ships going to the United States.
Or if you're Neocon, you'll say, any ships, whose job is it to defeat the the, the attacks on, on the ships in the Red Sea?
So, so the neocons like well, obviously it's America's, because we're the hegemon, it's our job, you know, it's our empire.
And and and it's our job, so we'll do it we'll, we have to be everywhere, we'll defeat them.
And if you're a, an isolationist pacifist on the Natcon you know the Natcon right these days then I, I guess what you're saying is something like, either you're saying no, America has no interests in the Red Sea whatsoever, which is, you know, ridiculous.
I'm not saying it's the most important thing for the United States, but the idea that the United States has has no interests, like its ships never go there.
You know that that's not true.
So if you're an isolationist, then either you say, anytime somebody attacks America, either either you have to retreat back to the United States and not be there at all, or what's the alternative?
Every time there's an attack, the United States has to gather up like like a, a force, go out there and take care of it itself, so that that ends up being the same theory as the liberal internationalist theory.
You sit behind your borders until you can't take anymore and then you have to go conquer everything in the world.
So this nationalist theory is supposed to, is supposed to overcome both of those utopian, unworkable theories right, and say, look, let's be practical about this with the Iran is a problem.
It, you know.
No, I don't think that Iran is going to, like you know, drop nuclear weapons on the United States in the next 10 years or the next 20 years.
That that's not the point.
The point is that if you want the world to be somewhat safe in its various regions, so Americans can go there and so business can take care, then somebody's going to be taking care of it, and the Red Sea is not a place where the United States has to be.
We've got we've got Israel there.
We've got Ethiopia in the area.
We've, you know, the Gulf States.
We have India.
There's is Greece.
So it's not ready to go this minute, but the theory is what should the United States as a nationalist in that there should be a coalition of powers that are built up with the capacity to take care of business in the Red Sea.
So the United States doesn't have to be there.
I have to stop here.
That's a very complete answer, and I appreciate it.
Yoram Hazzoni, the author of The Virtue of Nationalism, now in its second edition.
A really interesting conversation.
Thank you so much for coming.
I hope we get to talk again.
I got a million more questions, but I have to end it there.
Okay, next time.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Very sensible and intelligent interpretation of the situation we're in now and the situation we're in in the larger picture from Yoram Hazzoni, author of The Virtue of Nationalism.
Really good to talk to him.
And I hope you will come on Friday for the Andrew Clavin Show.