Isms and Experience: The Origins of Trump's Policy Part One
Militarism, protectionism and nativism are bankrupt old ideas. Combined with his brutal approach to business, they lead to Trump's policy and risk total war. Time for confidence in freedom.
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”
– John Maynard Keynes
Internationally, coming together as freedom-oriented democracies founded on open market economies to provide one another with mutual defence against powerful authoritarians is a good thing: the nations of NATO should be working hard to encourage one another to “safeguard the freedom and security of all its members”.
In the face of outright militarism and expansionism from Russia and an ambition for global dominance from their “no limits” strategic partner, China, it is a deeply undesirable thing for the President of the United States to consider military force to seize Greenland from NATO ally Denmark. When a senior US military commander in Greenland publicly distanced the base’s mission from these threats, she was removed.
Meanwhile, promptly deporting people with no right to be within a nation is necessary and right. But in the USA, 32 people died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in 2025, a 20-year record. ICE operations have become a matter of great controversy in the USA, with detentions reaching record highs as the administration takes a whole-of-government approach.
These are not disconnected episodes of policy excess. They are the visible expression of a system of political thinking that has been seen before: economic intervention at home spills into aggressive nationalism abroad, and the machinery of domestic control becomes indistinguishable from the apparatus of war.
In the face of such momentous events far beyond our control, it would be easy to despair. But the origins of the ideas leading to these policies have been set out, can be understood and can be reversed by populations determined to live in peace and prosperity.
Two books are especially relevant: Mises’ Omnipotent Government and his Theory and History. I will explore these books further in part two of this article. They are comprehensive analyses of the practical and ideological factors leading to the disaster of World War II. Their fundamental lesson for today is that history is not inevitable: it is the product of the ideas we hold and act upon.
