The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 81, November 2025 Page 13 From the series Chronicles of the new American nationalism With the slogan America First , Donald Trump evokes the past of American imperialism, more or less consciously recalling both the forces that, in the 1930s, advocated a foreign policy of hemispheric restraint and the era of undisputed American global primacy. He does so while bargaining with partners and adversaries alike over the degree of trade openness that the United States is willing to maintain, and while negotiating security guarantees with allies in Europe and Asia, without renouncing unilateral demonstrations of force in all directions. This aggressive posturing ranges from renaming the Pentagon the Department of War, to military operations against Iran and in Latin America, to increasing a military budget that is already by far the largest in the world. Kurt Campbell, co-founder of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), inspirer...

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 2 In the past we used to say that anything that is exaggerated is irrelevant, and this was especially true for the hard facts of international politics. Now, with the rise of television and social media democracy and their misdeeds, one must accept that they inherently favour provocation and exaggeration as a communication style. This combines with the technical capability of the world wide web to give an immediate and universal audience to every narcissistic impulse to draw attention to oneself through provocative theatrical shows. If “the medium is the message” — as Marshall McLuhan argued about television, which transformed communication into the town square of a “global village” then we must consider how the combination of television with social media transforms interventions, impromptu or not, into global political facts. These interventions are carried out through a process of disintermediation — bypassing the fil...