Far-right foreign policy in the age of MAGA 2.0

Critical theories of neoliberalism from the mid-1990s tended to emerge from political science and, for good reasons, to focus on neoliberalism’s contemporary incarnations as a form of global economic governance. More recently, however, and in addition to these critiques, there has been a movement among historians to understand neoliberalism as a political ideology, from its beginnings in the mid-1940s through its multiple permutations to the present day. One of the leading thinkers in this movement is Quinn Slobodian, professor of international history at Boston University and the author of several studies of the history of neoliberalism and far right politics. Coinciding with the release of his new book Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, Slobodian talked to historian Aro Velmet, the editor of the Estonian cultural journal Vikerkaar. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation, which can also be heard as a podcast.

Aro Velmet: In a recent piece for the New York Review of Books, you wrote that the insanity and seemingly wildly contradictory domestic developments in the US right now represent ‘the convergence of three strains of politics that have never simultaneously been this proximate to power. Those projects come from different but related places, the Wall Street-Silicon Valley nexus of distressed debt and startup culture, anti-New Deal conservative think tanks, and the extremely online world of anarcho-capitalism and right-wing accelerationism.’ I’m convinced that this is true for domestic politics in the US. But I wonder if we can apply the same analysis also to US foreign policy, which seems at least as contradictory and flailing?

Quinn Slobodian: I think it plays out a little differently in foreign policy. There, I would see the three strains as being, first: neoconservatism, which is the most familiar form of American foreign policy thinking in the 21st century, and which seeks some combination of American military dominance with a selective use of international organizations to get its way and intimidate and cow opponents and adversaries globally. The approach that the United States has used in the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the way that they’ve been seeking to contain Iran and more recently Russia and China, has continued in certain ways. Signalgate shows us that there’s a faction of the cabinet that is still interested in disciplining what it sees as the insubordination of smaller powers through the exemplary actions of American bombing campaigns, in this case of the Houthi rebels in Yemen. There is still, I think, a neocon undertone with Michael Waltz and Marco Rubio in the central positions of foreign policy creation.

But a second and somewhat more distinctive strain is what you could call paleo-conservatism. That is better represented by J.D. Vance, who at least rhetorically wants to break entirely with the 1990s model of neoconservatism that speaks the language of promoting democracy, and that uses a mixture of hard and soft power to achieve its ends. Vance wants to be much more realist and blunt about America’s lack of interest in soft power. Based on his relationship to Zelenskyy, in particular, Vance seems to be happy with a ‘sphere of influence-style’ politics, which would say that the United States dominates its hemisphere and that other powers, whether they’re Turkish, Chinese or Russian, can have their own hinterlands to organize how they like.

Symptomatically, in the Signalgate example, Vance was a bit annoyed that the United States was stepping in at all because he thought that this was Europe’s problem. It was Europe’s backyard and they should be the ones dealing with it. So that’s already a second strain, one that is more ‘isolationist’ – which is the byword that’s used, although I don’t think it’s quite accurate because obviously the attempt to annex nearby countries (Canada, Greenland, Panama) is not exactly isolationist. Rather, it is a ‘sphere of influence’ thinking more akin to nineteenth-century politics than those of the twentieth century. There are people who want to use globalism for their own ends and people who are happy just doing American security policy through unilateralism. These warring impulses represent an old story in American foreign policy.

There is, though, a third part of the coalition, which is the technological Silicon Valley faction. It has its own interests, which are being given more than their fair share of attention and influence right now. You can see this in specific sectors like satellite communications, in the desire to secure sources of rare earths, opening markets for digital services for tech giants – all things that have become top of mind for foreign policy, whether that means leaning on European partners to open up space for Starlink satellites, or to decrease content moderation on American-provided tech platforms. Here the question is not just how America should exercise its power in the world, but also how to get those raw materials for high tech products. And then, how to force overseas markets to open themselves those core services from Facebook and X to Starlink and SpaceX.

Image: Gage Skidmore / Source: Wikimedia Commons

Velmet: I’m interested in the conflict between this last group, the Silicon Valley people, and the first two groups, because I think it illuminates a tension that has to do with ideas about state power. One thing that brings the neoconservatives and paleoconservatives together is this aggressive attitude towards foreign policy. Whether it is threatening to annex countries, or using state power to get the things that they want, raw materials from Ukraine or whatnot. On the other hand, you have the Silicon Valley faction, which is portrayed more as libertarian. They are supposed to be the people interested in opening international markets, in capital mobility, in the state getting out of the way of doing business. So there seems to be something resembling a tension there.

Slobodian: I would say that’s an increasingly anachronistic way to talk about the politics of Silicon Valley. This is the whole point that Alexander Karp, the founder of Palantir, made in his New York Times bestseller The Technological Republic. The argument of the book is a rebuttal of exactly what you’re saying, in that Karp says that Silicon Valley has for too long been trying to not involve itself with the dirtier and more compromising parts of the national security state. For Karp, that’s exactly what needs to be turned around now. What characterizes this moment, he says, is a willingness to plunge in headlong into partnership with the national security state, both domestically and abroad. Any pretence of libertarianism has more or less been dropped by now.

From Marc Andreessen’s American Dynamism initiative, which he was already pushing through in the Biden years, to the very clear attempt to displace legacy partners like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon with new service providers and weapons manufacturers like Anduril and Palantir, Silicon Valley is no longer even speaking the rhetoric of anti-statism. Rather, it is saying that ‘we are it’. We are the new tech-industrial complex, as Biden called it in his outgoing statement. That’s what their whole portfolio is built on, on the assumption that they will be locked into federal contracts for some time to come. This is why even Musk, for example, can be a bit more blasé about losing, let’s say, the consumer EV market.

If you look at the period of the two Obama administrations and even all the way back to George W. Bush, there is a bifurcation in the way that global economic governance and global security strategy worked. The US was quite willing to be unilateral and, in some cases, to flout international law in military and security matters. But there still was a consensus around globalism and free-trade multilateralism. What’s really striking in this second Trump administration is how that has been completely shredded.

Foreign economic policy is now just part of foreign policy and treated with the same level of arbitrariness and unilateralism as the deployment of American military forces. Trump now uses tariffs for leverage just as he would have used military negotiations in the past. The complete abandonment of free trade, of global economic governance is something that has been brewing over the last few administrations, obviously. But I feel like we’ve reached a new a new level, where the idea of exercising power through tariffs has become indistinguishable from the idea of exercising power through bombers.

Velmet: The tariff policy, in particular, but also some parts of the immigration policy, seem to have ruffled a few feathers in the tech sector. One argument you can make about the previous free trade policy is that it was working very well for the United States. It’s not clear what US corporations have to win from this flailing tariff policy compared to the previous regime.

Slobodian: I would actually separate tariff policy and immigration policy, because I think the way that the immigration question is now being handled was arguably priced in qualitatively and quantitatively. In terms of raw numbers, it’s not a quantum leap from where Biden was or Obama before him. We don’t know where that’s going yet.

I think that the market jitters are not really about a fear of a vanishing work workforce in the country, but just about these extraordinary tariffs. This is what is now leading to predictions of recession. That scenario, I think, was previously assumed to be mostly bluff and bluster. But now that it seems more likely to come into existence, the relationship with the investor class is very different than in the first Trump administration. Take Arthur Laffer, who was one of the inspirations behind Ronald Reagan’s supply-side tax cuts in the early 1980s. He was a close advisor of Trump in the first administration, and he is now ringing the alarm about the effect that the tariffs are going to have on the American economy. So things have taken a sharp turn away from what would usually be considered responsible stewardship of rising stock prices and keeping inflation under control, towards a policy of, you know, fuck around and find out. I can’t think of another way of putting it.

Velmet: I wanted to come back to this striking level of comfort that the tech sector seems to have with the authoritarian turn in US politics, both domestically and internationally. This has really been a long time coming. It’s something that you’ve written about in Crack Up Capitalism, exemplified in the idea of the zone, which imagines this form of sovereignty that combines low or no regulation economics with authoritarian state power. The examples being Hong Kong or Dubai, regions where the tech billionaires of the world have gotten quite accustomed to this authoritarian mode of politics. Could you introduce that idea a little bit, and tell us why this has been so central to the fantasies of the tech sector for some time?

Slobodian: I’ve been trying to come up with an intellectual genealogy of neoliberalism and ask what kinds of institutions most reflect its animating spirit. If you take the baseline definition of neoliberalism to be the ongoing effort to protect capitalism from democracy, then capitalism has faced different threats at different moments throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. At the beginning of the neoliberal project in the 1930s, the nation was seemingly a disruptive factor. There were collectivist efforts on the right in the form of fascism and collectivist efforts on the left in the form of socialism and communism. After the Second World War, those turned into projects of social democracy, which tried to put in place regulations and certain breaks on the free movement of capital over borders. This was the time of the Bretton Woods regime, which was designed to allow for both the welfare state and some level of free trade integration. Throughout that period, as I describe in my earlier book, Globalists, there was an effort to accommodate democracy, but also to put sharp constraints on it by imagining a set of multilateral institutions that would sit on top of nations and require nations to lock in certain rights beyond the control of lawmakers.

Velmet: Institutions such as the WTO and the European Economic Community…

Slobodian: Yes. You had to agree that you wouldn’t give state aid to your corporations, that you would allow international companies to compete with you. There was an effort to tie the hands of lawmakers at a certain level, because everyone agreed that this was the way to become most prosperous. If you were a weaker nation, you had to agree because this was the bargain that you were being offered. That is what you could call neoliberal globalism in the 20th century, culminating in the ’90s.

At the same time, there were other people who thought that capitalism could be better protected not by accommodating democracy, but by exiting the leviathan of the welfare state, by taking our investments and our profits and stashing them offshore, somewhere beyond Europe, beyond North America. The era of tax havens that really blew up in the 1970s and ’80s was accompanied by an era of outsourcing, when people started setting up factories in small, cheaper places around the world.

When they set up places to store taxes, they often set them up in things called special economic zones, which are jurisdictions inside nations that have a different set of laws and a different set of tax codes that are more favourable to investors. Places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai – small, nimble states that had minimal or no democracy – became the poster children of what this new kind of political arrangement could look like.

These zones became especially attractive to people from the tech sector, partially because of the nature of software engineering or writing code or coming up with new products. You didn’t need a large workforce the same way that someone like a Henry Ford needed a big hinterland of towns to supply the bodies to build his cars. The model of tech in the 21st century was captured when you pick up a new iPhone, which says on it ‘Designed in California, manufactured in China’. You do the top end of the value chain in one small place, and then you get some people somewhere else to put the thing together.

This fragmentation of sovereignty and this breakup of value and supply chains allowed for the fertilization of a different kind of political imagination. It promoted this idea of being able to vote with your feet, to vote with your dollars, and that there should be nations of consent rather than compulsion. In other words, social contracts should be literal contracts. Why can’t you set up new areas and zones to which people can migrate with their money and opt in or out of this or that condition? This remained a fantasy or thought experiment to some extent. But in some places they did manage to get it moving. Honduras is the prime example of one of these startup states that advanced quite far. By 2016, someone like Peter Thiel, who is a theorist of this sort of shattered sovereignty arrangement, goes from saying, hey, we need to exit politics and set up somewhere in the Caribbean to, saying, wait: what if we just move into the American state itself? Occupying an existing state might actually be easier than starting a new one.

That, I would say, is the move that has characterized the second Trump presidency: the cooptation of much of the American federal government apparatus by a small number of tech founders and CEOs, who are now figuring out how to use it for their own accumulation strategies and to reorient it for their own needs. Sometimes it’s unbelievably blatant. One example is NASA. The nominee for the head of NASA is a former SpaceX employee who shares Musk’s belief that we need to deprioritize the moon and reprioritize Mars. This means writing off many billions of dollars and many, many years of preparation for the so-called Artemis project to set up an orbiting space station around the moon to send down rovers and eventually set up a permanent settlement. This is now likely to be scrapped altogether, simply because of the individual desires and, of course, corporate interests of one man. It’s a pretty mind-boggling spectacle.

Velmet: This ideology of shopping around for favourable jurisdictions, and the state as being just a player in a kind of competitive marketplace of states, was at the heart of Estonian digital policy in the 2010s. Our e-residency program was essentially designed with this idea in mind and sold directly to the tech sector.

Slobodian: The guy who started that – Ott Vatter – was on the board of Prospera in Honduras! The Estonians were originally able to get some degree of devolved power from Moscow by saying, you know, we’re not trying to build up a freestanding democratic republic, we’re turning ourselves into a special economic zone. Estonia is a perfect example of how, in the ’80s and ’90s, sovereignty became commodified. This idea of a shopping mall of jurisdictions became the basis for a lot of the libertarian state cooptation we’re seeing now.

Velmet: To return to the foreign policy question: how does this tech fascination with the zone fit into this current foreign policy moment? In some ways, you can see how when Trump talks about turning Gaza into a US-occupied Riviera existing outside the framework of normal international relations. There is a degree of this in the way he talks about Ukraine signing away its rights to minerals. It is putting foreign policy in the service of specific economic interests. In other cases, it seems to crash into the vision in which economic policy is subordinated to foreign policy. I’m mostly thinking about the tariff policy here.

Slobodian: I actually think that there’s a real primacy of economic policy right now. This is where historians are in a position to understand some of this, because a lot of what is happening looks a lot like the nineteenth century. When there’s discussion about taking over Greenland or Panama, people assume that means that these would become 51st and 52nd states. But the history of empire shows us that there are many more things on the menu besides being absorbed into the homogeneous blob of the metropole. Empire works more often through diversity than sameness.

The interplay of private and public interest becomes really important. The way that things have already been provisionally settled in Panama is a very good illustration of this. The huge shipping conglomerate Hutchison, owned by Li Ka-shing, the richest man in Hong Kong, has been compelled, it seems, to sell its management of the Panama Canal to the American asset manager Blackrock. Since that deal was floated, we’ve heard nothing about the occupation or annexation of Panama. In other words, what began as something like a colonization project turns out as a more run-of-the-mill business deal, in which a Chinese affiliated company is now displaced by an American one.

The Ukraine minerals deal again has echoes of England and Egypt in 1882, where, as a result of some problem of conflict or mismanagement, a larger power not only comes in and takes over this role of stewardship, extracting extreme concessions in the process, but also divests itself of a lot of the basic obligations of protecting citizenship, providing for the population, even security. It’s classic 19^th-century style gunboat diplomacy, bullying. I would predict that some halfway point like that will be found in Greenland and perhaps Canada, too, where uneven treaties will allow for sweetheart deals for American satellite downlink station operators or rare earth mining companies in the north of Greenland, which, when satisfied, will then lift this demand for outright colonization.

Velmet: Another issue where foreign policy and US domestic policy have been kept analytically separate, but I think could be more integrated, is the way in which the US administration has been learning from the experience of far-right leaders abroad. The examples often cited are Hungary and Argentina. The strategies that Viktor Orbán uses to stifle civil dissent in Hungary, in particular the assault on universities, is being clearly repeated in the US right now. Javier Milei’s attack on state bureaucracy, again, is being played out in the US in ways that are quite directly referencing him, with Elon Musk wielding a chainsaw and suchlike. Do you want to open that box a little bit? There is a long history, after all, of American neo-reactionaries looking to people like Orbán for inspiration.

Slobodian: Partially, one of the errors in trying to import Milei’s strategy is that Argentina occupies a quite different place in the world economic system than the United States. Even in the political centre there are people who grudgingly applaud some of the things that Milei is doing. This is obviously not a position I would take. But one can make the argument that there are structural economic problems in Argentina that have been persistent from decade to decade. And that through these draconian means, Milei has come closer to solving these problems and making Argentina more credit worthy, etc.

In the process, Milei’s obviously also been targeting what he sees as political enemies, by specifically gutting cultural institutions and universities, targeting the right to protest, targeting women’s groups. As is often the case with these cycles of far-right politics, this emerged in part as a counter-reaction to a very successful mobilization of women against the very restrictive abortion laws in Argentina. This then created a reservoir of resentment and misogynistic anger, which has helped fuel Milei’s momentum. So there’s a cultural aspect to it too. But in Argentina it does seem to be mostly a kind of fiscal cleaning of the Augean stables, a quandary that the United States simply does not share.

I mean, the American government has issues, but it holds the world’s reserve currency and has an extraordinary amount of latitude in the economic actions it takes. But Musk misrepresenting America as Argentina is leading him down a path of self-destruction, and destruction for the many people that rely on the employment of the United States. We’re only going to find out in coming weeks and months what the effect of trying to rapidly change the entire programming language of the federal government is going to have. But this wild austerity maximalism will certainly pan out with unexpected consequences.

By contrast, I think the cultural war borrowed from Hungary and Poland is more likely to be successful. I think there are levers that can be used to disable the functioning of what the Trump administration sees – in some ways correctly – as the institutions that reproduce a certain set of elites, a certain set of opinions, a certain set of politics: the cultural outlets that allow dissent to be heard in this country. As people who organize bombing campaigns say, ‘there are a lot of good targets’. What they’ve been doing so far is to use exemplary action against top Ivy League institutions, Columbia in particular, followed closely by Harvard, to force the kind of pre-emptive obedience and internal purges of what are seen as deviant beliefs and diversity and principles of social justice.

So far, it’s working. What they’re trying to do, they’re achieving. This is to create a sense of discipline, dismay and demoralization across the landscape of higher education. They are using the choke points of federal funding around USAID, which single-handedly funds all schools of public health in the United States, the National Institutes of Health funding, and Health and Human Services funding. Without these it’s very hard to imagine most medical schools functioning in the United States. The budgets of all universities that don’t finance themselves solely through tuition dollars, in other words all research universities, are going to be massively disrupted in the next six to twelve months. I am sure that no university president in the country has any idea how they’re going to deal with this.

What’s been done in Hungary and Poland to destroy independent academic inquiry and then take over the commanding heights of cultural institutions like museums and archives and research institutes is underway here in the US too. It’s underway at the Smithsonian and it will be underway elsewhere. It’s hard to transform the American state. It’s hard to transform the American manufacturing base. But I think it would be relatively easy to gut the ecologies of free inquiry and free expression. I wish I could say I disagree.

Velmet: I wanted to play this in the other direction as well and think about the impact of the American far right on the global far right. In Europe, this combination of culture wars, maximalist austerity and 19^th-century imperialism caught people on the European far right by surprise. They are perfectly happy to sign on to the culture wars agenda. But they diverge quite a bit when it comes to the austerity and the imperialist parts of this equation. A lot of the European far right wants to build up the welfare state, albeit only for a specific set of people. And being caught in the middle of superpowers has completely fractured far-right movements. Estonia is a good example. A party like EKRE, which historically has been quite Trumpy, has now realized that the zones of influence politics leaves them stranded in the wrong zone.

Slobodian: This also happened in Canada with the Conservative Party. It’s a really good point. I think that the way that MAGA 2.0 is developing is indeed at odds with how most of the European far right has been trending in the last decade. After Brexit, it didn’t take too long for them to realize that they could get more out of Brussels by staying in the EU than by getting out of it. In fact, rather than split from the EU, they could just take it over. This has been a very effective strategy for them. The Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is a perfect representative of this way of thinking. I would say she’s the leading figure on the far right in Europe right now, especially since the Le Pen verdict.

The fact that Orbán has done what he’s done and, apart from having some transfer funds suspended, is still a member of the EU, shows you how far you can go without experiencing any real consequences. He’s been able to play things both ways by welcoming Chinese and Korean investment, remaining relatively close to Russia, despite sanctions, and opening up special economic zones, despite these not being allowed by European economic policies. The European far right was smart to realize that it didn’t need to conduct a of war of manoeuvres, that it could just do a slow kind of trench warfare over time, clean out the cultural obstacles internally, remain connected, and create this reactionary international model, which was working for their side.

MAGA 2.0 is so disruptive and unpredictable, and so anti-incumbent institutionally, that it only resembles one thing – which is Putin invading Ukraine in 2022. I mean, that’s what it looks most like, right? It’s much less like Bolsonaro, China, anyone else, and it’s much more like an action designed to shatter preconceptions of what normal behaviour by states ought to be. I don’t think that’s coincidental. I think that Putin and Russia have set a certain bar for what it looks like to exercise real power and sovereignty and defiance of global norms and still to succeed. That move has been inspirational to parts of the American right, for sure. And what that does to all the people in the shatterlands in between, whether it’s Estonia or Canada, is seemingly just collateral damage.

What the European far right does in response is going to be interesting to watch. So far, someone like Meloni is trying to play it both ways, having meetings with Musk about introducing Starlink, but also being interested in big investment projects that could benefit Italian manufacturing. Going along with the idea of ending the war in Ukraine, but also wanting to make sure it’s not on overly asymmetrical terms. It galls me to say it, but many people on the European far right are acting more like responsible statespeople than the American cabinet right now, which is mostly behaving like a chaos agent without a real sense of what the long-term strategy is.