In an era of nationalism in American politics, can globalists still make an effective case? What do international institutions like the UN and EU even do for America in the first place? And why is it worth preserving them — besides the fact that we set many of them up in the first place? AEI’s Dalibor Rohac joins the podcast to answer these questions and more.

Dalibor is a Resident Scholar at AEI, where he studies
European political and economic trends. He is concurrently a visiting junior
fellow at the Max Beloff Centre for the Study of Liberty at the University of
Buckingham in the UK and a fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs in
London. Most recently, he is the author of In Defense of Globalism.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. You can download the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.

Pethokoukis: What’s
wrong with America First? It seems pretty straightforward — I’m not going to
have France First, or Europe First. So what’s wrong with America First as a
general proposition?

Rohac: I suppose there’s nothing wrong with it as a general
proposition. One question is, obviously, how US interests can be advanced in
the world — especially in a world that’s globalized and interconnected. A world
in which business activity is not confined to territories of particular nation
states, but are spread out and decentralized.

In that world, I don’t think a policy that’s organized
around nationalism, protectionism, and dismantling traditional alliances that
the US has relied on will bring about results that are aligned with US
interests.

But, in practice, all
countries try to put their interests first, right? Have other countries been
behaving in a way where they put their interests first in a way that we
haven’t?

Well, I think there was a discontinuity in US foreign policy
outlook at the end of the Second World War, in which a bipartisan consensus
emerged in Washington about the nature of these long-term US interests. So
everything that seemed to be immediately in the material US interests seemed was
also aligned with these more enlightened interests.

Rather than having US troops continue to come to Europe’s
rescue after two horrific World Wars, Americans decided to create this system
of international, collective security that would prevent these conflicts from
emerging in the first place. And that system, by and large, has been incredibly
successful.

It went hand-in-hand with institutions that promoted
economic openness and democracy, and they overall made the world a much better
place. In the meantime, I think they were, by and large, good for America’s
interests. They made the US the world’s uncontested leading superpower — they
placed it in a position in which its leverage can be exercised in every corner
of the world in a way that the world, guided by an America First mentality,
wouldn’t have produced the same outcomes.

It seems to me that
there are people who think that a globalist outlook has served America well,
but no longer. They think that people who believe in globalism are stuck in the
past — they refuse to acknowledge the changes. There’s no more Soviet Union,
the US is facing new economic competitors, we have big trade deficits — so
globalism is just a backwards-looking belief.

Then, there are
people who believe that it maybe wasn’t such a success. All it got us was a
bunch of hollowed-out communities in the Rust Belt, it got us the Iraq War,
while all the other countries did very well — I think the President said,
“Meanwhile, we’ve been bled dry.”

So either it’s
backwards-looking and you’re refusing to acknowledge a brand new set of
circumstances that requires a brand new point of view, or you’re just
overstating how valuable it was to begin with. Just then, you made the case
that globalism has been good for America, but what about those criticisms —
that it got us into these more recent costly wars, and that we’ve ended up with
30 years of a declining manufacturing base while other countries have built up
their capabilities?

I guess one could quibble about the particular propositions
that your question encapsulated. I think, by and large, the idea that America
today is worse off because of the US global leadership role is wrong.

That certainly seems
to be the president’s position — that we’re worse off.

I’m not sure that if the rules of global trade were written by the Chinese, or if the WTO [World Trade Organization] didn’t exist, or if Europe was trapped in a power competition between large countries like they were in the past, that it would be conducive to better prospects for US workers or industry. So, I’m not convinced by that line of thought.

The line of thought that might be more compelling is the one
which enquires about whether particular aspects of this system need updating.

That’s the Steve
Bannon argument. He thinks, “Great, the world was in shambles after WWII, and
we wanted those countries to catch up. We didn’t want those countries to have
terrible economies and to all become Communist, we wanted them to become
liberal, pro-American democracies. That’s great. Well, guess what? They caught
up — and in some cases, maybe they’ve even surpassed us, so now we need to
start thinking about ourselves.”

I think the President
frequently says this, but sometimes the countries change: “We rebuilt China, we
rebuilt this and that country — maybe it’s time we rebuild ourselves.”

The two are not mutually exclusive, right? You can have good
domestic policies without jeopardizing your international position. But I would
say that the world has certainly changed, and many of these institutions have
not adapted to those changing circumstances.

There needs to be a conversation within the context of
transatlantic relations with Europe about how that alliance should look —
whether the US should be the sole guarantor of Europe’s security, whether the
core of the relationship should not be oriented towards the new challenges
coming from the rise of China rather than European security narrowly
understood.

There also has to be, I think, a broader conversation about
multilateral institutions.

Like the World Bank, the IMF [International Monetary Fund], and the WTO? Is that what you mean?

Right. So, those various institutions were created with
certain mandates in the past. In many cases, they have outlived their original
mandates.

The IMF was created to essentially manage the system of
exchange rates after the Second World War. That system of exchange rates hasn’t
existed for quite a few decades now. This means that some of these institutions
have reinvented their mandates anew — some have drifted into irrelevance, and
so this idea that we should probably look at them more closely and prune some
of these aspects of the international architecture that aren’t fit for purpose
anymore isn’t an offensive idea. But I don’t think that justifies a wholesale
cynicism about the system, which really is a radical departure from what
existed in the past. Overall, it’s something that’s served the US and the world
well.

The book is called In Defense of Globalism. So, what do you believe that you think a nationalist doesn’t? What are the key differences in your worldview?

If you want to use
President Trump as an example of nationalism, fine, but if there’s a more…
sophisticated and nuanced version of it, then you can use that.

So obviously, there are various ways in which one can be a
nationalist, and some of them are perhaps more compelling intellectually than
others.

But the book has a twofold aim: The first is to push against
the idea that nationalism in its various forms is an integral part of
conservative or center-right thought. It is to push against the idea that this
crude, narrowly-understood realism is the only way to think about global and
international affairs from a center-right perspective. That’s really a position
that’s been gaining traction and influence in center-right circles, especially
in the English-speaking world and particularly America.

The second goal of the book is to point out that many of
these international institutions, organizations, and the multilateral
architecture that we can call “globalism,” if you will, is not some sort of
top-down imposition created with the aim of dismantling or replacing the nation
state. Rather, it is a bottom-up evolution aimed at fixing particular policy
challenges that have emerged. I think it has implications about how we should
think about these systems.

There is an obsession with national sovereignty on the
political right, which has become rather unhealthy as of late, and which leads
people to ideologically-driven, knee-jerk refusal to even engage with policy
challenges that arise at the international level. That could be climate change,
or various questions of sustaining trade openness or financial stability.

How do you think about sovereignty compared to someone who calls themselves a nationalist? You’re not arguing for the dissolution of the nation state, so you believe in sovereignty to some degree. How do you think about it, versus how do you think a nationalist thinks about it?

Sovereignty is a tricky word, because it carries slightly
different meanings for different people. One understanding of sovereignty is
the traditional Westphalian sense, in which you have states that see each other
as equals. It’s sovereignty as an international norm, in the way that states
treat each other. Clearly, international cooperation has not eroded sovereignty
in that sense. You still have, mostly, governments that enter into various
international obligations and treat themselves as equals in those structures.

Westphalian sovereignty, by the way, is not an absolute
norm. It is always conditioned on the way governments treat their own citizens.
I could find you some quotes in the book coming from people like [conservative
South Carolina Senator] Jesse Helms and others who dismiss the idea that
sovereignty entitled Slobodan Milosevic to ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia.
Actually, sovereignty arguments are often invoked by authoritarian governments
to essentially justify whatever they’re doing to their own population. So this
is an argument that I think, in the past, has been summarily rejected by people
on the political right for good reasons. It’s not really an argument that would
jeopardize any possibility for international cooperation and creating
international institutions.

There is one way of thinking about sovereignty, especially among US conservatives, which does present a challenge for international cooperation. If you understand sovereignty through the lenses of self-governance and US constitutional order, there are a number of technical challenges that arise when the United States joins international treaties, organizations, or delegates decision-making to international bodies. People like Jeremy Rabkin or John Yoo at AEI have written about those subjects extensively, but these challenges are not materially different from the broader set of tensions that arise in US constitutional law with regard to the way we govern ourselves at home.

Federalism as practiced today looks very different today
than the way it was envisaged by the Founding Fathers. The executive branch has
taken on much more power, and congress has abdicated some of its
responsibilities. So to say that it’s international cooperation and
institutions that somehow pose a distinct threat to US constitutional order is
not very compelling to me.

This is part of a much broader story that different
countries have resolved in different ways. In Germany, you just pass a
constitutional amendment every time you need to do something, particularly
regarding the process of European integration. So many constitutional
amendments have been adopted by European countries — it’s harder in the US,
which I think is why some of these tensions arise. But these are not tensions
limited to international questions, but to the US systems of governance more
broadly.

Let me ask the
question in a different way: What are globalist approaches or policies that you
would advocate for that, as you understand it, a nationalist would say, “I
disagree with that,” and vice versa? Is it just trade, or is it about American
troops stationed overseas? What are the salient differences?

I suppose one way to answer that questions would be to say
that these two understandings of sovereignty — whether it’s the Westphalian one
or the one that arises from questions of US constitutional law — are probably
not what animate most people and turn them nationalist.

I think that what people perceive sometimes at the very
intuitive, perhaps emotional level, is that the sovereignty they understand is
the ability to control things, policy outcomes, or various features of economic
and social life. I think there’s a naïve idea that, “If only we repatriated
powers, we could somehow gather better control of things. We could perhaps
return to some sort of nostalgic version of what the imagined 1950s look like.”
I think that’s very much the animus behind the Brexit movement, and I think it
explains a lot of the appeal that president Trump had in his campaign.

That instinct is mistaken — this sense of control is simply
not on the menu in a world as complex and interconnected as ours. Efforts to
repatriate control — like how the British are trying to do with Brexit — might
paradoxically result in less control and reduce these countries into positions as
rule-takers. It’s just very difficult to disentangle a country from the
globalized world by trying to withdraw from these various institutions.

I think that’s the big distinction — I as a globalist, so to
speak, accept that these institutions exist for a reason. Although we can
quibble over the details, and maybe seek to exit from some aspects of the
system, there is no going back without imposing dramatic economic costs on the population
or resigning on any kind of control over policy outcomes.

What do you
understand the nationalist agenda to be? Is it dramatically reducing
immigration, or much more protectionist trade policy?

What do you sense is
the key element — bringing all of the troops home, and not worrying about it
unless enemy ships start landing at Virginia Beach? Not caring about what goes
on in other countries — that we shouldn’t care about the Uighurs because it’s
not our business? “We’re there to make a trade deal, why should we care about
Hong Kong?”

What is the agenda,
as you understand it, and what about it do you reject?

The question really reveals how multilayered this problem is. Obviously, for some of the supporters, if not with some of the movers and shakers in the nationalist movement, it is about things like migration and domestic demographics of the US or Western Europe. It’s much less about trade agreements or alliances.

For others, it’s about these technical questions of
constitutional law and how these countries govern themselves. But what I think
unites these approaches is the rejection of the idea that countries and nation
states should be able to pool sovereignty and decision-making and create common
structures that potentially constrain the discretion that the elected officials
in these nation states posse.

I think it’s an idea that’s actually a striking departure
from what has been the baseline of classical liberal thought for many years,
even in conservative Catholic thought in Europe in the early 20th century. For
them, the nation state was perceived — I think rightly so — not as a God-given
fact, but simply as a result of the processes of unification that occurred in
the 19th century.

So for example: The Catholic Personalists, this Catholic social thought movement in the early part of the 20th century, were very explicit in rejecting the sort of Jacobinic nature of the nation state as a centralizing entity.

This is something I’m trying to explain to Americans — part
of the European condition has to do with trying to reconcile diversity and
unity. The European continent lived through a millennium and a half of efforts
to secure coexistence for a great number of highly decentralized political
units. The best answer that the thinkers on the conservative, classically
liberal center-right was able to come up with was some version of international
federalism.

That notion is reflected in the architecture of the EU to
some extent, but it’s also reflected more broadly in the institutions that the
US helped to set up after the Second World War.

I’m guessing that a
lot of people who might call themselves nationalists are ultimately wondering
about what America continues to get from this.

Again, the Soviet
Union is gone — that’s why there were troops in Europe, so why do we still have
troops there? What are we getting from these trade deals?

Maybe I’m misstating
your views, but I guess they don’t see what America is getting from this
perspective. We’re already the richest country in the world, and we don’t seem
to have any immediate threats. Again, this seems to be an architecture built
for an earlier era. So how does globalism need to update itself for a new era,
in a way that people will see as relevant?

I think it needs to update, but at the same time it’s pretty
obvious to me that an international trading system in which countries are
mostly held to high standards in terms of economic openness and
nondiscrimination is one that also benefits US exporters and companies that
have been doing business overseas and that rely on very complicated value
chains. Apple products are being built all over the world.

I think that nationalists would like to bring those supply chains back to the United States. They’d like all of these products to be made here. If you listen to the president, it almost sounds as if all American products should be manufactured in the United States. And, if you want to sell to the United States, other countries should manufacture their products here as well.

I think it’s a fundamental misunderstanding, not just of how
international trade but also modern business models operate. So, maybe it was
the case 100 years ago that you had companies operating as ‘boxes” combined to
the territory of one state, and they would purchase the inputs, capital, and
labor, and they’d produce something. Shoes, or cars, or something. Those would
then get exported. But that’s nothing like what corporations and value chains
look like these days.

You have thousands of intermediate products and suppliers
stepping in at every point of the way. I think there are over 1000 suppliers
that Boeing uses to build the Dreamliner plane. Car manufacturers in the US and
Europe constantly ship intermediate parts back and forth, and that’s made the
world so prosperous.

I think a lot of
nationalists would say that it’s made some
people prosperous — that it’s made companies and executives very prosperous.
But there’s a question as to whether or not it’s continuing to work for the
United States.

I don’t see why not. I’m not an expert in US manufacturing,
but my understanding is that the US economy is in far better shape than it was
50 years ago.

I don’t think the
nationalists believe that’s the case. They believe that we were prosperous in
the 1950s and 60s. But then we opened ourselves up to more trade, plus we
started getting a lot more immigrants, and it’s been downhill ever since.

To me, I don’t know
if that’s the smart nationalist take, but it seems that that’s the common one —
that we started worrying too much about the welfare of people in other
countries. We were going to let them come here, because if you’re an immigrant,
you come to the United States and you’re immediately better off if you’re
coming from a poorer country. We worried a lot about those people and about
these other countries, and now we just need to worry about the United States.

Is there a smarter nationalist take that I’m missing?

I’m not sure, but I think that’s contradicted by heaps of
evidence about US real incomes, longevity, et cetera. On any metric, the US is
a far better society than it was 50 years ago. I think that the nostalgia
simply misplaced.

But if there is a grain of truth to that, it probably has to
do with the fact that maybe there could’ve been domestic policies that could’ve
worked differently in terms of the social safety net and helping people move
between jobs and geographic locations.

This book is kind of
aimed towards people on the center-right.

Yes.

What do you want
those people to know, where they might be getting things about nationalism and
globalism wrong? What’s the core thing you want them to understand going
forward?

If there’s just one message, it really has to do with the
fact that, for all the problems we’ve seen over the past 20 years — whether
it’s the Iraq War, or the financial crisis, or the European migration crisis in
2015, or indeed the high numbers of asylum seekers coming to the United States
— by and large, this system built internationally under US leadership after the
War has served the United States, the West at large, and the world in general
extremely well.

It used to be a central tenet of conservatism to tinker with
things that mostly work very, very carefully, and I think that prudence has
gone out the window in recent years. There’s this almost revolutionary zeal to
dismantle or destroy existing institutions without having anything remotely
resembling a strategy about how they should be replaced. And I’d like to revive
that sense of prudence in center-right circles.

There’s a lot at stake. There are conflicts around the world
that can come back easily — there are things that are done under the flag of
bringing our troops back home, for example, that have massively destabilizing
repercussions. I’m talking about what happened in northern Syria recently,
right? I mean, these are things that the next administration will have to deal
with that will cost, maybe, a lot in terms of US lives — and treasure, as well.

I would just like to see more prudent thinking on many of
these decisions.

Last question: An
America that withdraws from the world, with the “drawbridge up” approach, what
does that world end up looking like? With an America that doesn’t exercise
leadership — “We’re just one country among many. We’re going to take care of
our own. We’re not going to worry about this conflict over here, or about
what’s happening to those people in that country. We’re not going to let them
migrate.” What does that world look like a decade or two later?

I think it’s a world that is much less attuned to US
interests. It would be a world that’s much less friendly to whatever voters in
the Midwest care about.

If you have these vacuums created in different parts of the
world, you have ruthless powers stepping in and filling those voids. So I
firmly believe that part of responsible leadership with America right now is to
work with America allies in France and in countries with whom the United States
share values and broad outlooks on governance and markets, and help to remake
the world. Not necessarily in our image, but in a way that’s aligned with
American interests. That’s true for trade, and that’s true for security
questions.

The idea that the US can just tackle the China challenge on
its own is, I think, a naïve one. The EU is the world’s largest economy with
over 500 million consumers. So even if you see China as the one major challenge
that maybe Trump has correctly identified and brought attention to, the idea
that the US can do it alone is very naïve.

Dalibor, thanks for
coming on the podcast.

Thanks, Jim.

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