When President Trump started talking about regaining control of the Panama Canal, colleagues and friends barraged me with questions. Where did this seemingly out-of-the-blue interest in a long-since-yielded area of control come from? How did a fit of pique about tolls and China grow into a threat to force Panama to cede its territory to the United States? Was there some kind of larger rationale that might explain it?
They asked me because for more than seven years, I have been studying conservative activists and their views of 20th-century foreign policy. If anyone should know, they reasoned, I should. But for all the time I’ve spent in libraries and archives, I was as flummoxed as anyone about the historical roots of Mr. Trump’s worldview.
The historical literature doesn’t provide much guidance. Historians tend to slot conservatives into three major, sometimes overlapping, groups: anti-communists, defense hawks and neoconservative nation builders. Those proved awkward fits for Mr. Trump in his first term, gesturing toward but not capturing his essence. Yes, he routinely called his enemies communists, but then embraced (and later spurned) the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Yes, he boasted about American military power, but then seemed to defer to Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. He claimed to want American troops out of Afghanistan, but failed to conclusively follow through. With his penchant for personal and transactional politics, and his often purposeful unpredictability, the man was almost impossible to categorize.
Historians instead pulled out a category that has rarely been used to describe anyone on the right for 75 years. Noting Mr. Trump’s rhetoric, they dubbed him an isolationist, like some of the conservatives who opposed the United States’ entrance into World War II.
Yet Mr. Trump’s recent moves demonstrated the limits of that moniker. Annexing Canada? Taking over Greenland? Demanding possession of the Panama Canal? How could those threats to take foreign territory square with isolationism?
There is, it turns out, a little examined strain of history that provides a fresh way to understand his instincts. Hidden in plain sight in the dusty papers and collections of everyday right-wing Americans lies a whole new way of thinking about Mr. Trump’s foreign policy. He is a “sovereigntist.”
American sovereigntist politics originated over 100 years ago in the moment of profound crisis and possibility of 1919, when the world undertook a referendum of sorts on the surge in globalization that preceded World War I. Nations, increasingly interconnected, were rocked by the halt in trade and migration that followed the war’s conclusion. At the same time, empires collapsed and new nationalist movements emerged or flourished, with the result that some states died and altogether new ones were born.
Amid this dramatic change emerged a proposal for a novel form of supranational government — the League of Nations. As diplomats and lawyers hammered out guidelines, they prompted fierce debate over the purpose of nation states and sovereignty. Advocates of global trade and migration, colonial independence movements, Black internationalists, socialists, communists and liberal Christians cheered the arrival of worldwide governance, in which many found the promise of self-determination, international public law and a subdued nationalism.
But many despised the idea, and here lie the origins of the American sovereigntist movement — and its modern heirs. In 1919, a group of senators known as the “irreconcilables” blocked the United States from joining the League of Nations. They were backed by a grass-roots movement of patriotic organizations, veterans’ groups and Protestant fundamentalists who argued that the League aimed to usurp American governance. In their words, it would replace the Constitution with world government, diminish America’s unique history and culture, and allow uncivilized, nonwhite and non-Christian states to exert power over its citizens.
“The welfare of the Nation has been made subordinate to Internationalism,” said Louis Coolidge, an ally of the League critic Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. “Our creed,” he said, “is to keep alive the fires of Nationality.”
Their movement aimed to preserve not only America’s formal sovereignty in international relations, but also the traditional forms of rule to which its white, native-born leaders were accustomed. Driven by a keen sense of the virtues of Anglo-Saxon self-governance, they understood international cooperation as a threat to their personal sovereignty as well as that of their nation.
Sovereigntist politics persisted and evolved as the features and scope of liberal and left-wing internationalism took new forms. In the 1930s, they helped lead the America First movement, which opposed entrance in World War II on the side of the Allies. Far from isolationism, sovereigntists openly championed the anti-internationalism of the fascists, supported Gen. Francisco Franco’s Nationalist rebellion in Spain, and accepted — even cheered — the regimes in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy that thumbed their noses at the collapsing League of Nations. The Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, the minister who married Mr. Trump and his first wife, Ivana, joined the sovereignty movement in this early period.
After World War II, sovereigntists launched a protracted battle against the United Nations. During Mr. Trump’s youth in the 1950s, that battle birthed a host of new organizations and leaders who took up anti-internationalist politics, many of which, like the John Birch Society, are familiar to Americans today. They resisted American participation in the International Court, which they dubbed the World Court; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the forerunner to the World Trade Organization; viewing them all as threats to American governance. In their view, the U.N.’s covenants and agencies undermined the civilizing authority of white, Christian nations by offering membership and influence to communists, Asians and Africans.
Later, many fought international sanctions on the “brave little country” of Rhodesia, as the right-wing lawyer and radio host Clarence Manion called it, likening its fight to preserve white rule to the American fight for independence. Sovereigntists led the mobilization against the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the law that loosened immigration for the first time in four decades, which, they argued, embodied the ultimate plot of internationalists — eliminating national borders.
Here the Panama Canal comes into the frame. In the 1950s and 1960s, Panamanians began to invoke U.N. charters and the International Court’s rules on disputed territories to challenge the United States’ authority over the canal and gain support of the U.N. to transfer it to Panama. Sovereigntists called this a plot to steal American territory that was, in the words of the Patrick Henry League of New York, “ours, just as much ours as the Capitol dome and the national anthem.”
From the late 1950s through the 1960s, a coalition of groups such as the Committee on Pan American Policy and the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies chastised Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson for making concessions to Panamanian demands. The critics would lose. In 1973, the Panamanian leader, Omar Torrijos, delivered the coup de grâce when he hosted the U.N. Security Council in Panama for a hearing on the “colony in the heart of my country.” Alongside significant local protests, the event pressured the United States to negotiate a treaty that would grant Panama full control. President Jimmy Carter signed it in 1977, enraging sovereigntists, whose decades-old cause finally caught the interest of influential new conservatives including the presidential candidate Ronald Reagan.
The sovereigntist movement went on in the 1980s to defend South Africa against U.N. sanctions, and successfully pressured Mr. Reagan, then the president, to withdraw from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which promoted peace and human rights through culture and education. When the Cold War ended, their crusade became even more relevant. Internationalism was the only game in town — the “New World Order” as President George H.W. Bush and others called it. The United States pursued multilateral trade agreements, forged a new neoliberal consensus and engaged its military in international peacekeeping efforts in Somalia and later the Balkans.
That was exactly what sovereigntists had always feared, and in their resistance they anticipated the wider populist backlash against globalization that helped drive Mr. Trump’s popularity. Viewed from the perspective of the recurring battles between those who accept international governance as a tool to project American power and those who fear it as a humiliating surrender of American autonomy, Mr. Trump’s threat to retake the Panama Canal shows how sovereignty politics today suffuses the re-energized Right.
In Mr. Trump, this movement has found its most influential champion. Well before Mr. Trump’s talk of the U.S. taking over the canal, his reanimation of the sovereigntist agenda was clearly visible. In his first term and during his four years out of office, sovereignty politics featured in his attacks on the U.N., NATO and international agreements on trade and climate. They drove his restrictionist zeal to protect national borders against immigration. And they fueled Mr. Trump’s love affairs with other skeptics of international organizations, such as Viktor Orban of Hungary or Georgia Meloni of Italy.
There is little to be won predicting foreign policy in a second Trump administration. The influence of the sovereigntist movement may recede in the face of a president who is changeable and distracted. And some members of Mr. Trump’s coalition do not subscribe to a purely sovereigntist standpoint, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But sovereigntists will surely double down. “International organizations and agreements that erode our Constitution, rule of law or popular sovereignty should not be reformed,” Project 2025 explains. “They should be abandoned.”
The most vigorous sovereigntists openly say they will seek withdrawal from the U.N. if necessary. They already oppose many proposed pacts and conventions, including the U.N.’s Pact for the Future, which addresses climate change and inequality. The Trump administration has said it intends to withdraw from the World Health Organization and has taken steps toward a near ban on immigration. It’s likely to weaken the European Union, enfeeble NATO and oppose multicountry trade agreements like the revamped NAFTA. And it will seek to regain a kind of Monroe Doctrine-era control of the Western Hemisphere, no matter what happens with the canal.
Mr. Trump’s embrace of sovereignty politics will only embolden similar regimes around the world. Brexit was a harbinger of other potential E.U. exits. Nearly every right-wing party across Europe would consider one if they came to power.
Look for other countries, buoyed by Mr. Trump’s scorn, to put the brakes on internationalism and instead build new, separate relationships with each other. What we would be left with is an unruly period for international relations, one that is less centralized and less governed by the shared principles and operating modes that lasted from the end of World War II until just a few years ago.
The post Why Does Trump Threaten America’s Allies? Hint: It Starts in 1919. appeared first on New York Times.
