The Trump administration is confronting multiple longtime U.S. allies on a long list of issues. From a practical point of view, this dust-up is long overdue. From trade imbalances to America’s massive defense outlays, from the degeneration of NATO into a nuclear suicide pact to the collusion of Western spy agencies with the American deep state in the suppression of domestic dissident parties, the tensions are real and won’t be resolved without some pain felt on all sides.

The way this shake-up is playing out also exposes profound tensions within the MAGA coalition and within the populist movements in Western countries. They are trying to displace toxic elites who act as national parasitoids, whose unchecked predation will result in the deaths of their hosts. There are bound to be structural problems in attempts to build coalitions among patriots of diverse nations, particularly when concrete interests come into conflict, as they must. Any given tariff Trump imposes might be good for workers in Michigan and bad for workers in Munich, even as both groups share the common interest of defeating their treasonous ruling classes. Elites in both countries have the advantage that they do not find their interests in conflict, so they can cooperate more smoothly in suppressing domestic dissent.

“America First” rhetoric and policies are likely to be good for most countries in the long run—damping down the hubris of foreign interventionists, hobbling the schemes of rootless speculators to pillage vulnerable countries, and halting the destabilizing effects of mass immigration. But in the short run, which in politics is almost all that matters, the U.S. government finally looking out for the interests of ordinary American citizens and workers—as opposed to our investor class—might hurt blue-collar workers in say, Canada. The occasional bluster with which Donald Trump delivers his policy agenda can end up helping the worst elements among the foreign elites to rally patriotic sentiment behind treasonous regimes. That recently happened in Canada, where Trump’s much-deserved public humiliation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau helped ensure he’d be replaced by an equally loathsome globalist, who was able to wrap himself briefly in the Canadian flag by squaring off against the perceived U.S. bully.

Stepping back and looking at the painful readjustment of our relations with other nations as if from outer space, we’d see some obvious truths. At the moment, nationalism is a much healthier, more positive alternative than the internationalism that’s been on offer. That’s not because nationalism, in itself, is always and everywhere ideal. As conservative thinkers from Wilhelm Röpke  to Erik von Kuenhelt-Leddihn have argued in detail, in past eras nationalism served as the agent of homogenizing, secularist, often tyrannical factions. Think of Prussian Junkers steamrolling over the venerable customs of Rhinelanders after 1870 and waging the Kulturkampf against Catholics. Or think of sneering Piedmontese Freemasons in Rome sending agents to pillage the pious Sicilians. Remember the cogent critiques which Southern apologists raised to Lincoln’s re-invention of America as a centralized nation-state.

More currently, few outside Putin’s inner circle wish to see Ukraine completely reconquered and reduced to the status of “Little Russia.” That ship of pan-Slavic unity sailed in the 1930s, when Ukraine was starved half to death in a famine ordered from Moscow.

It’s not just that nationalism can be worse than localism. Some forms of nationalism are worse than some forms of internationalism. Few who share my ancestry would prefer the bigoted, murderous Ustašethat ethnically cleansed Croatia from 1941-1945 to the tolerant, though foreign, Habsburgs who used to rule there. Rule by the British Crown was better for countless Third World nations than the narrow, grasping, corrupt tribal regimes that have replaced them.

In 2025, as we face a form of internationalism every bit as sinister as global Communism during the Cold War and before the Sino-Soviet split, such objections are almost academic. The “globalism” that millions of Westerners fear and resent is more slippery and hard to pin down than the dogmas once promulgated in Moscow. It’s less like a foreign bacillus than it is like a cancer—a disease that steals DNA to fool the immune system and hijack the body’s resources.

The current ideology considered respectable in the West—an ideology that dominates every institution and party has been dubbed the “Post War Consensus.” As David Gress showed in his classic work From Plato to NATO, this consensus began as a Cliffs Notes version of Whig history, which sifted out all the dogmatic elements of Christianity in favor of a cloying humanitarianism, forgave Marxists for being “liberals in a hurry,” and saw the “end of history” as a seamless global market where nation, race, faith, and every other value or attachment once central to human identity was trumped by consumption.

Given how empty and uninspiring this cult of creature comforts has been, it is not surprising that it began to give way. The God-shaped hole in the human heart always finds something to fill it. The enforcers of the consensus (intelligence agencies, judges, government commissions, and academic credential manufacturers) couldn’t prevent this, and didn’t try. They imposed just one condition: The old beliefs need not apply. Western patriotism, Christian morality, European traditions—these were all verboten, discredited by the squalor of Nazi crimes, for which they were held somehow responsible. (Peter Brimelow called this bitter historical joke “Hitler’s revenge.”) Black nationalism, Brahmin Hindutva intolerance, and of course jihadi Islam, were all certified as safe.

Ecclesial post-Christianity could be tolerated, so long as it surrendered every vestige of resistance to sterile sexual experimentation and recast itself as a branch of the consensus’ enforcement mechanism—issuing encyclicals and appeals for open borders, ecumenism, and pansexual “inclusion.” Think I’m kidding? The current dogma watchdog at the Vatican, a Pope Francis appointee named Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, recently taught that capital punishment and deportation of illegal immigrants are always and everywhere wrong. But he recently also taught that sex-change operations can be moral, if they reduce the chance of suicide. (They don’t, but he doesn’t care.)

This ideological con job has been staggeringly effective, especially in Europe. How else can we explain the fact that political parties well to the left of Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer are currently suppressed as “extremist,” Nazi-adjacent movements? If either of those heroic enemies of Adolf Hitler were alive and vocal today, he’d be brought up on hate crime charges. And there is no question that Winston Churchill, whose only respite from being pilloried for racism and imperialism comes when he must be trotted out to tar some skeptic of a regime change war with the sobriquet “appeaser,” would suffer the same fate.

Chronicles readers are probably all too conscious of the relentless war against populists, nationalists, and orthodox Christians in Western Europe—from the legal persecution of pro-lifers for silently praying near abortion clinics, to the trumped-up imprisonment of the French nationalist politician Marine le Pen, to the recent proposal of a war-hungry British government to exempt Muslim migrants from conscription. British anti-Islamist activist Tommy Robinson rots in prison, while Pakistani rape-gang veterans walk free. You likely know about Canadian hate crimes laws that permit house arrest of suspects and the legal persecution of Christian preachers for reading aloud from the Book of Leviticus.

How can we ride the legitimate wave of America First advocacy and advance the interests of our native working class while remaining in solidarity with our persecuted cousins in London, England, and London, Ontario? For once, I think we can find our model in the Cold War.

I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s and felt a keen sympathy for the imprisoned peoples of nations such as Poland. Because I loved the Poles, I hated their government, which suppressed and poisoned their culture. (I will say, to give the Communists credit, at least they didn’t try to replace the native population there with Muslim colonists.) Likewise with Russia, China, and a long list of “captive nations.”

When I marched with Polish-Americans outside the red-flagged Polish Consulate in Manhattan in 1981, none of those people thought I was “anti-Polish.” We must make equally sure that no one thinks MAGA Americans are anti-European, or anti-Canadian. Love for the imprisoned entails a healthy hatred for the jailor. This might require policies that harm an evil government—accidentally imposing short-term costs on their captive people.

Vice President JD Vance struck precisely the right note in his brilliant Feb. 15 speech in Munich, where he dropped a cluster of truth bombs about the atrophy of freedom in Europe, and the impact that would have on American support for increasingly illiberal regimes:

You cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail—whether that’s the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news. Nor can you win one by disregarding your basic electorate on questions like who gets to be a part of our shared society.

We must cast America First policies as a natural extension of America’s longtime commitment to being, like the Marquis de Lafayette, a “friend of liberty.” Even in the most unlikely places, such as American blue states, and Western Europe.