Trump inspires a new wave of nationalism — from Japan to Argentina

From Argentina to Japan, MAGA is going global.

President Donald Trump’s slogan has long been “America First,” and his movement is all about making America great again — language the president’s foes misunderstand as meaning “isolationism.”

In fact, strengthening America requires strengthening our friends and allies as well — and Trump sets an example for those leaders in Latin America, Asia and Europe who want to make their nations great again, too.

There’s no paradox here.

A robust international order is impossible if America has to sacrifice its own industrial capacity, and our people’s economic security, to global free trade.

That leads to a weaker and more dependent America, even as our allies, in the era before Trump, expected us to shoulder the lion’s share of the burden for their defense.

The “liberal international order” was a suicide pact, building up China while wearing down America, and the system perversely incentivized our friends to prioritize welfare spending over basic national-security needs.

The alternative to that failed order isn’t anarchy or Chinese hegemony: it’s cooperation among stronger nations that take their responsibilities—both to their own people and to the United States — more seriously.

Japan is a critical case in point.

Its new prime minister Sanae Takaichi represents a right turn for the dominant Liberal Democratic Party, which is Japan’s leading conservative party, despite what the name might suggest in the English-speaking world.

More than 80 years after the end of World War II, Japan remains constitutionally forbidden to rearm: It has defense forces, but not a true military. 

Takaichi belongs to a wing of the Japanese right that would change that — and thereby make Japan not a threat to anyone else but a better ally for America.

The superpower threat in the Pacific today comes from Beijing, and the more constrained Japan is, the less constrained that China is.

Rearmament is highly controversial within Japan, but just as Trump has taken controversial but necessary steps to address America’s weaknesses — from imposing tariffs to cracking down on illegal immigration — a leader like Takaichi can bring great changes to her country, too.

She’s already restricting immigration, before it becomes the kind of problem that it has long been in the West.

Takaichi is a protégé of Shinzo Abe, who was Japan’s prime minister during Trump’s first term and had a uniquely strong bond with the president.

As the first woman to lead Japan, she’s also drawn comparisons to Britain’s Iron Lady of the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher.

The tariffs that serve America’s industrial policy can be a strain upon trading partners like Japan, of course — although the land of the rising sun has long practiced its own forms of industrial and agricultural protection.

Japanese rice production, for example, is heavily protected, which means Japan has enough domestic capacity to endure shortages in the event of war or other emergencies disrupting international trade.

Although Japan isn’t self-sufficient, it’s a boon to American security that the country can provide for itself better than other friends in the region, such as Taiwan, which could be starved into submission by a Chinese blockade.

Trump not only shows leaders like Takaichi that boldness can succeed in throwing out the playbook of establishment politics, his return to the White House prods allies like Japan to pick leaders who are simpatico with his right-leaning nationalist worldview — the kind of leaders America needs among its allies in the 21st century.

Right-of-center, anti-establishment politics also plays well at home, both with voters and the stock market: Takaichi’s ascent sent the Nikkei stock index soaring to a new record.

Half a world away, the success of President Javier Milei’s right-leaning party in Argentina’s midterm elections on Sunday produced a similar result: Stock indexes boomed by as much as 23%.

It baffles Trump’s critics that America’s self-declared “Tariff Man” can have such good relations with Milei, a self-described “anarcho-capitalist.”

But Trump thinks in terms of interests, not ideology, and it’s in America’s interests that Milei succeed in making Argentina freer, more prosperous, and friendlier to us, in a region — our own hemisphere — where socialism, anti-“Yanqui” sentiment and Chinese influence continually threaten to align against us.

There’s no contradiction in nationalists from different nations working in parallel to make their own countries stronger individually and more secure collectively.

Likewise, there’s nothing strange about populist reformers from different countries with different needs having a great deal of sympathy with one another — Trump is fighting an establishment bent upon globalization; Milei faces an establishment in Argentina that wants an all-powerful state sector.

What brings different philosophies together to advance shared interests is simply the art of the deal.

Trump’s the master of that, and other right-leaning leaders around the world are quickly learning from him.

They’re advancing a global realignment that will help make America great again, even as it makes their own nations greater as well.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and a contributing editor of The American Conservative.