Why True Nationalism Rejects Empire-Building | Yoram Hazony

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This is what a lot of people get wrong about nationalism, says Yoram Hazony:

"Nationalism and imperialism are actually opposite things. Nationalism is a theory of political order.

It's a theory that says that the world is governed best when there are many independent nations, when different peoples can make their own decisions.

They'll have their own constitutional traditions and religious traditions, their own language and their own legal systems. And they'll do things their way, and they'll try to improve their lives according to their lights.

That's nationalism, and this is very much, I think, the world view of the Trump administration - that there can be many different countries and America can wish them all well, so long as they're not a threat to the United States. And they can be allowed to proceed the way that they want to proceed, in dealing with their own politics on the basis of their own traditions.

By the way, that was George Washington's policy. That was the founding foreign policy of the United States.

And that view is the opposite of imperialism, which is a view that says: No, peace and prosperity will come to the world when there's global governance, when there's a single elite with a single set of principles and values, and those are imposed by soft power and, if necessary, by war, on as much of the globe as possible.'"

The term “nationalism” was co-opted by Hitler and vilified as a result, says Yoram Hazony. But that is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what nationalism actually means, he argues.

He recently released a revised edition of his 2018 seminal work, “The Virtue of Nationalism.”