Interview with Josiah Lippincott

Josiah Lippincott is a Ph.D. student at the Van Andel School of Statesmanship at Hillsdale College, and a writer for American Greatness and The Federalist. His writing can be found on Substack under the name Regime Critic. This is the transcript of his interview with Rafael Pinto Borges, a writer on Substack. Lippincott will be featured as the keynote speaker at the annual dinner of The St. Croix Review on October 17, 2025.

It once seemed that American nationalism, and Trumpism in particular, was lagging behind established European right-wing forces like the Rassemblement National or Orbán’s Fidesz. Now, if anything, Trumpism seems to be well to their right. Why do you think that is?

The problem is that Europe is in an entirely different political situation. The continent is divided among numerous petty powers. Since 1945, Europe has been a minor player in world affairs. Occupied between the Soviets and the United States, European nations became satrapies. No great vision, either politically or artistically, is possible within this framework. A genuine right-wing movement cannot flourish in such conditions.

Nationalism, in the European situation, means petty nationalism. It means squabbling over identities that were desiccated (if not wholly destroyed) in the two brutal world wars, and then in the subsequent occupation by the Communists and liberals. Europe’s only meaningful future lies in true political unity, in self-overcoming.

America can be more right-wing than Europe because real choices are available to us that are not available to the Europeans in their current divided state. For instance, Germany has more in common with Texas as a political entity than it does with the United States. Berlin is about as meaningful to world affairs as Austin, Texas. Maybe less.

Europe, as a political entity, does not exist but should. The EU is a disgusting simulacrum of what is needed. The future of the world, unless we should be thrown back into barbarism, lies in continent-spanning superpowers like the U.S., Russia, and China. These powers exist on a different plane than that of small parochial entities. It is a joke to pretend that a “nation” like Estonia or Montenegro is a meaningful player in geopolitics.

One might as well assert that New Hampshire should make its own foreign policy and be treated as serious power.

A serious right-wing movement in Europe would seek continental unification for the sake of the preservation and defense of the European peoples. It will require a leader, a man of Trump’s ability and charisma, perhaps even greater. Until such a man and such a movement appears, European politics will remain secondary. The European states will be acted upon, not actors.

I do not wish this future for Europe. For my part, I would immediately end the American military occupation of the continent and remove ourselves from NATO. The dynamic of hegemon and satrapy is spiritually corrosive for Europe and America alike.

Why do you prioritize issues like immigration, trade, war, and crime over cultural battles for conservatives, and how can conservatives avoid divisive cultural debates?

There is no point in fighting a culture war if you don’t have a country. Without a country there is no culture. The first and most crucial question is the distinction between friend and enemy, citizen and foreigner, stranger and neighbor. Immigration, therefore, is crucial. Who are my fellow citizens? Why? What is our shared understanding of justice? What is our common good?

We cannot do anything else politically until these questions are answered. I do not advise avoiding divisive cultural debates but rather to order them properly, and to address them in the proper time and place. I, for instance, do not approve of abortion. I think it is destructive of the family, which is a core element of the free society. But I also know that Americans are deeply divided on this question.

As it stands, most Americans seem to favor a position somewhere between full legalization of abortion at every stage of pregnancy, and a total ban on abortion (with maybe a few exceptions). This may not be “logical” from the point of view of either extreme, but it is an honest accounting of where the nation is now. I see no good in fighting this battle at present when our government cannot even figure out who should be a citizen, or how to get mentally ill drug addicts off the streets.

In other words, there is much lower hanging fruit that a defender of the American way of life can and should address before even discussing abortion. Solve the easy questions first. Solve the 90-10 and 70-30 issues before going after the 50-50 ones.

In your Substack, Regime Critic, you mention “spiritual warfare against the swamp.” What are the greatest threats from the political establishment, and how can they be countered? Do you believe, crucially, that Trumpism 2.0 is better equipped to actually capture the levers of the state than Trumpism 1.0, which so patently failed at it?

Trump “losing” the stolen election in 2020 was, in hindsight, a blessing in disguise. It provided Trump and his allies four years to perfect their strategy, weed out dissenters, and assess the lessons learned from the first administration. This time around, Trump’s advisors are much better equipped to implement his agenda. That doesn’t mean there are no problems, but I have seen numerous signs that Trump 2.0 is light years ahead of the first term.

For one, on immigration, the administration concentrated on delivering funding to the immigration judges (administrative tribunals) at the Department of Justice. This shows that they are aware of the intricacies of deportation law and the bottlenecks in the current system. Sending ICE agents into drug dens, weed farms, and illegal labor operations is one thing.

Actually getting migrants out is another and it is obvious that Trump’s people have learned crucial lessons.

The GOP is still far from having been swallowed by the national-conservative wave. Despite figures like Trump and Vance, its leadership and elites (particularly in Congress) are still largely establishment holdouts. Does this bode ill for Trumpism as a long-term phenomenon? Or do you think Trumpism will succeed in shaping the GOP in its image in a more permanent way?

The American establishment is spiritually dead. It has nothing to offer the young and it refuses to address the problems it has itself created. For one, take the national debt. It is a product of the American global empire and its war machine on the one hand and the geriatric welfare state on the other.

It is obvious that we cannot keep spending profligate amounts of money indefinitely without raising taxes, devaluing the currency, or repudiating the debt. All three of these options will be very painful, if not outright catastrophic.

The only solution is to start again from first principles — to ask whether it is good for Americans that we have a network of bases all over the planet; is it good for the federal government to force Americans, at gunpoint, to transfer wealth from the young to the old? No one in power today, with the exception of Trump and those in his wake, shows any sign of even being willing to confront the reality of our disastrous foreign and domestic policy.

The Iraq War, COVID lockdowns, vaccine mandates, 2008 financial crisis, the post-2020 inflation wave, the demographic transformation of the country — all of these problems are a product of our sclerotic and corrupt establishment. The list of their sins could go on for a very long time. We need solutions. We need to think again from first principles. What are we doing and why? There is no way out of this question.

As a former Marine officer, how has your military experience shaped your views on U.S. foreign policy, especially regarding interventionism and global commitments? And how would you define a sensible, nationalistic, genuinely national interest-focused foreign policy for the U.S. at this time of history?

In 2019, while deployed to Okinawa, I had a Major tell me, with complete earnestness, that our presence in the Pacific was to serve as a “speed bump” for China when war broke out. I was shocked by the callousness and thoughtlessness of this “logic.”

I had been reduced to a cog in the machine. It was certainly not obvious to me that this was a wise use of the nation’s resources, both human and material for me and my men to occupy this station. Entirely lacking in any conversation on military strategy I ever had in the service was a clear and coherent articulation of America’s real foreign policy interests.

Why should we fight a war with China? Why should we fight wars at all? What is the point? I answer: To defend our life and liberty. America should only fight defensive wars when her territory and security is actually and literally being threatened by foreign invasion. Otherwise, we should seek peace and trade with all other powers.

We should have no preferences among foreigners during a time of peace. We should maintain no ongoing military alliances. The entire system of sanctions, embargoes, and military interventions in the name of “democracy” or “human rights” that have characterized American foreign policy since 1991 (and well before) should be done away with.

In order to preserve our sovereignty, we must limit foreign influence in our politics. This means we need to reduce the scope of our military action abroad and reduce the number of foreign migrants that we incorporate into our regime. The whole concept of foreign aid in peace time should be jettisoned. Wars should only be fought in emergency defense or as declared by Congress. The Constitution and its framework are superior to the moralizing crusading of the liberals.

America is currently involved in two major conflicts: one, in the Middle East, as it supports Israel against its enemies; the other, in Eastern Europe, with a nuclear-armed great power. How do you believe America ought to handle them?

We ought to disengage completely from the Middle East. By this I mean we should remove all of our troops from the region and relax all trade restrictions with the powers therein. I do not believe we gain any benefit from the sanctions on Iran, for instance. By preventing American firms from buying American oil, we hand a subsidy to China and India that they do not deserve.

It is of no concern to the American people whether the people in Iran live under a theocracy or a dictatorship. That is not our business. It is not our business whether Israel succeeds in her national defense or not. Before the Israelis occupied their current territory, the English did so, before them the Ottomans, before them the Mamluk Sultanate. When the Israelis are gone, another power will take their place. Such is human life. We should therefore mind our own interests only.

It is not our duty to make the Middle East safe for democracy but to protect our own rights and liberties. That is all we can reasonably do in this world of scarce resources. In Russia and Ukraine, a similar attitude should prevail. Russia is a dictatorship. So what? That has nothing to do with us.

The regional conflicts in eastern Europe are not our problem. No one during the Cold War thought it was a crisis that Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. That was sober-minded. It would have been manifestly insane to try and split off territory from the Soviets by violence during that period.

It is stupid to do so now, but in the interim our leaders have become drunk on “end of history” nonsense and a belief in their own righteousness. They go crusading all over the world in the name of anti-racism, feminism, homosexuality, “democracy,” and human rights. Meanwhile, they strip us of our rights at home. This is a toxic situation and should not be allowed to continue. They think they can do anything they want with no consequences. Foolish!

Our most pressing need is for a new order of the earth to replace the moralistic globalism of the post-1945 era. From the Nuremberg trials onward, the sovereignty of states was denied by the liberals and the Communists as a matter of international law (rooted in arguments about the nature of the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war). The world was to be divvied up by the Communists and liberals as they saw fit.

Yet, in the Cold War this dynamic broke down. The two leftist factions that dominated the earth after 1945 could not get along. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States was left as the sole great power in the world. This post-1991 order has been characterized by liberal hubris and crusading. However, as China and Russia have recovered from their communism-induced material degradation they have re-asserted themselves on the world stage.

This is the core challenge of our time: How to integrate these two rising powers into a stable world order. The question of the new order of the earth is of paramount importance. Without an answer, we are left in the dark as to the meaning of sovereignty, citizenship, and even law itself.

The world is left in chaos and the prospects of new sources of conflict and war multiply daily. It is obvious that American “hegemony” is a false god. The United States could not win in Korea, in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, or now in Ukraine. Our aims have often been thwarted and at great cost to the American people.

For now, the citizenry has absorbed this drain on life and property as a necessary part of maintaining the “free world.” And yet this system is cracking. The global financial order that rests on American dollar hegemony maintained not by the free market but by American military power is vulnerable. Our debt burden is ever rising; domestic tensions resulting from the special privileges given to non-Whites over Whites, the elderly over the young, and the well-connected over the common man, are inflamed; radical ideologies proliferate in our public life.

None of this is good. A crisis is coming. In fact, it is already here. Those with the eyes to see must address it. The sooner the better.

How about China’s rise? Do you think war — either cold or hot — is inevitable? Or can the two superpowers somehow learn to coexist?

War is never inevitable. It is always a product of choices made by human beings. Those choices could be otherwise. China’s rise was the result of our involvement in WWII. We destroyed China’s nearest geopolitical competitor, the Empire of Japan, explicitly for the sake of preserving Chinese sovereignty. The United States had, from the Open Door Note onward, maintained a foreign policy of intervening in the Far East for the sake of protecting and promoting Chinese independence and sovereignty. The United States placed the de facto total embargo on Japanese oil and steel in 1941 in order to push Japan to cease her military invasion of China.

We are, without a doubt, the reason for China’s rise. Had we not intervened, China would have almost certainly splintered under Japanese pressure. Moreover, American support for Mao played a powerful role in his seizure of power — it was the manifest aim of American policy toward China after 1945 to integrate the Communists into the government of China. China’s rise is our fault and we should say as much.

But now that China has become once again a great power we must live in reality. We made this bed, time to lie in it. It is not in our interest to fight a war with China. Indeed, it isn’t even clear if war is possible. No two nuclear powers have ever fought a direct conflict.

But should such an exigency occur, the use of atomic weapons would almost certainly become inevitable if one side threatened to gain a decisive upper hand. In that moment, the resulting slaughter would make a mockery of the very concept of war as such. War, as opposed to mindless killing, is a structured activity that aims at procuring some good: National defense, peace, or conquest.

      Nuclear war, therefore, is a contradiction in terms unless it could somehow be limited in scope. I do not see how this is possible under current technical and political conditions. Therefore, peace with China is the obvious choice for our regime. Indeed, peace should always be the goal. We should only fight a war in defense of our common good, of our rights received from “Nature and Nature’s God.”

As I said above, I believe we must learn to co-exist with China. But it is obvious that the current arrangement is not working. The influx of Chinese students into American universities and Chinese immigrants into our polity has led to very real friction and problems. The Chinese way of life, with its rigidity and totalitarianism, is not aligned with the American way of life and our liberty.

We ought, therefore, to aim for minimal political interference with each other. Our relations should be economic only. American individuals purchasing from Chinese individuals is possible and would be good for us both. Trump wants tariffs. Fair enough. But these tariffs should be global and non-targeted. They should be the same on all foreign goods from everywhere.

I must re-iterate: It is simply out of the question that Chinese firms or individuals should ever lobby or seek political favor in the United States. This goes for all foreigners. They should never complain about American immigration policies, either. The composition of our political regime is our business, not theirs.

I have no desire to impose another century of humiliation on China, and they should not seek “revenge” for their grievances. What is needed now is a “forgetting” of the causes of discord and war. But this requires cooperation and peace. For instance, the chemical warfare waged by Chinese drug dealers against American citizens must end. This is a provocation, and it needs to stop.

However, China’s manifestly insane behavior during COVID should be set aside. If China is not trustworthy as a trading partner, then Americans should not invest there. That is their problem. To blame China for our own absurd response to the “pandemic” is to avoid much needed accountability. Xi Jinping did not force American governors to lockdown; he did not force Jerome Powell to print $3 trillion; he did not mandate that Americans get the vaccine.

China is welcome to be crazy on their own territory. That is part of what it means to be sovereign. The Chinese have no right to bring their crazy here or to participate in our domestic affairs.

As it stands, I believe we need a 90 percent plus reduction in Chinese naturalizations and in Chinese presence in American universities. Personally, I stand with Trump. I think we should consider shifting the tax burden away from the income tax to tariffs, including on tourism. I will feel better about foreigners being here as workers or visitors if I know that their presence means eliminating the intrusive IRS surveillance apparatus.

What practical steps can the right take to challenge the Left’s dominance in media and academia without mimicking their tactics? Or is mimicking their tactics exactly what we should be doing, in your view?

Severely reduce copyright protections. Hollywood dominates the media environment because of the government subsidy embodied in copyright. Protections for life of the author plus 70 years is insane. Leftists in Hollywood are dominant because they quite literally own the culture by government fiat. Take away the subsidy and the quality and ideological diversity of media entertainment would increase immediately. Copyright should only be for, at most 15-20 years. Enough time for authors to profit from their work but not so long that they can claim ownership of ideas in perpetuity which is manifestly ridiculous. Intellectual property as such is a strange and, frankly, quasi-unnatural category. Such protections should therefore be minimal.

In terms of academia, the same attack on government subsidies applies. Today student loan debt is in excess of $1.7 trillion. Of this, 92 percent is held by the federal government through Sallie Mae. One way to get leftists out of academia is to stop giving them taxpayer money! Stop subsidizing leftists. If people really wanted crazy Communists in charge of educating the young, then they would be happy to pay for it. Since the universities need government money to be crazy, then we must assume the genuine market for leftist craze is not large.

More broadly, the power of academia is enhanced by government regulations requiring college degrees and credentials for all manner of professions. Credentialism inherently strengthens the left because it makes financial success dependent on passing through leftist-controlled institutions. Get rid of the gates and you weaken the gate keepers. The Right should do this. It is foolish not to.

I will mention here one critical example: Doctors. In 2020, the medical profession covered itself in shame in its hyperventilating response to the scamdemic. Doctors covered for government tyranny and called for it. Those who knew better often said nothing. This is due to the massive debt loads on doctors that come from the credentialling process required by the state.

None of those regulations is necessary. Doctors should not be required to get licenses to practice medicine. That is absurd. The science of the body and knowledge of healing is available to all who know how to think. Bureaucrats know less than nothing of such things. Consumers of medical care should be able to choose for themselves based on their own appraisal of competency and quality.

Doctors should have to prove themselves like everyone else: By delivering results. Laws against fraud are more than enough to protect American consumers. The result of our current system is grifting, massive expense, and low-quality care. This is the inevitable result of meddling by those with the power of violence and coercion.

Take away government subsidies and you shatter the power of the left to dominate our lives. This must be done.

From a nationalist perspective, what should a reformed U.S. immigration policy look like to balance economic needs and cultural cohesion? What should the goals be? And how should it be implemented?

American post-war immigration policy has never been about the economy. If that were true, then why are liberals so insistent on making migrants citizens? There is no reason that foreign workers who voluntarily come here for pay should receive the rights and privileges of citizenship. This is ridiculous.

Americans, if they wished, could adopt some kind of foreign guest worker program like the old Bracero model or the Kafala system in the UAE. Run properly, it would allow foreigners to come here to work, would tax them at a high rate (using the proceeds to reduce taxes on citizens), and would require employers to bear the burdens of any criminal misbehavior.

A guestworker system could produce economic benefits. Labor is an input variable in production. The more production we have, the cheaper prices on goods will be, and the wealthier we will become. Americans like getting the goods of life at the lowest expense possible. This is simply human nature.

But there is no cheap good worth giving up our freedom. The free society is the basis of a free market. If we allow the invasion of America by Communist foreigners, like Zohran Mamdani and Omar Fateh, to continue then we will lose our liberty. This cannot be allowed to happen. Our recent migrants overwhelmingly favor the Democratic Party and leftism. It does not matter how hard they work or how much this allegedly benefits us. That is not a price worth paying. Ever.

We need to stop the invasion. We need mass deportations. We need to get rid of birthright citizenship. We also need to get rid of Hart-Celler, and we need to massively reduce new naturalizations in the United States. Our recent immigrants have not made for good Americans. This is not sustainable. My country feels like the international terminal at the airport.

I don’t care how expensive lettuce becomes; it is better to have a free country. I would rather be poor and free than rich in material goods and a slave. I would rather have liberty and work 80 hours a week in a factory than to be a commissar in a Communist order.

But that’s just the thing: Freedom is real wealth because freedom allows each man to pursue happiness as he sees fit, and happiness is genuine wealth. Therefore, measuring wealth in dollars or through averages like GDP is an absurdity. It is impossible to assign cardinal numbers to an individual’s scale of values; Ludwig von Mises demonstrated this point conclusively.

The pursuit of happiness is protected by the free society, by a regime dedicated to law and liberty. The American Founders gave us that free society. It is our birthright. We should defend it. This is our greatest source of wealth and prosperity. Give a free people a wilderness and they will make a paradise.

But to have this free society requires, in this world of wicked men and their schemes, borders and the relentless enforcement of our laws. Against criminals and Communists, against those who would rip apart our way of life, there is no “live and let live.” There is only the sword.

Those who would live in freedom must be prepared to fight to the death.

Alright, tricky question: Is the current architecture of the American state, in your view, compatible with the world as it is today? Is having the current people in charge sufficient for a project of national renewal or is it time for an institutional reset?

Our institutions are decaying. They are either zombified corpses or bloated monoliths to ineptitude and leftist hubris. The older institutional framework of the American Constitution is in every way superior.

Focus on institutional structures is of only secondary importance, however. What is needed now are men of action and conviction who will stand athwart the ossification of our time, who are willing to oppose gay race Communism in all its forms.

It is not offices which give honor to men but men who give honor to offices. National renewal is possible from all corners. It begins first at the individual and rises upwards. The new Golden Age starts with you! It starts in your own soul!

Despair has no place for us. We are already beings unto death. Mortality has always been our portion. For us then, the end is already set and known. What is left is to make the most of our time here, to carve out a good life for ourselves and our children, to plant trees in whose shade we shall not sit.

It is not our duty to bring about peace for all time or to remake the world. That is not within our grasp. But in political matters we can address many of the concrete problems of our own communities and nations here and now.

Even in the most labyrinth bureaucracy there is always a way to cut through red tape. It is incorrect to say that reform is not possible. No, it is very much possible. There is always a way to bring about political change. It may be difficult but that is not the same as saying it is impossible.

National renewal will inevitably require a change of leadership. It will require institutional reforms, as well. Our bloated bureaucracy in America must go. It is incompatible with republican government. To accomplish these tasks, we must convince the people of our rightness. We must show them how good things can be. We must be of hope and good cheer, laughing in the face of fear and crisis.

We civilized men, we men of the Right, should face the future with optimism and courage!     *

The Blessing of Neutrality

Josiah Lippincott

Josiah Lippincott is a PhD student at the Van Andel School of Statesmanship at Hillsdale College and a writer for American Greatness. His writing can be found on Substack under the name Regime Critic.

The right to not care is one of the most important rights we have. The world is full of troubles, demands, and needs. Each day, a thousand voices call for our attention, our interest, our concern, and our care.

It is impossible for one man to comprehend the whole world, much less give it the attention it deserves. There are too many problems and not enough time. We are mortal. This is the tragedy of life — and of politics. No human work lasts forever.

Given this fundamental limitation, we can either give up in despair or take a more hard-headed and rational view. We cannot do everything, but that does not mean we can do nothing. We can make real choices. We can make things that last, maybe not forever, but for a long time.

We can plant trees whose shade will shelter our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. That is not nothing. Our work in this life matters. Therefore, it is in our interest to stay away from utopian scheming and paralyzing despair. We must distinguish between what we can do and what we cannot.

In the realm of politics and war, we must be tough-minded as to what is possible and what is not. This means that there are times when we must simply say no to those who ask for our help. We must say no to care, say no to involvement, and say no to war.

We must use our limited political resources wisely. We must focus only on solving obvious problems. We must start with the most pressing problems first. Hardest of all is recognizing that some problems are too complex to solve — and that our intervention would only make them worse.

A friend of mine works in the emergency room of a hospital. One of his duties is to inform families when further medical intervention is no longer useful or wise. CPR is violent even in the best of circumstances. Restarting the heart takes force and pressure. On an elderly person, attempting to bring them back with these measures is violent and painful. Even if they survive, they will need to be heavily sedated to overcome the pain of a cracked ribcage and internal bruising.

Sometimes there is nothing more that can be done and to intervene is to inflict pain without purpose. The same is true in political life.

The war in Ukraine is such a situation. For decades, American policy planners and foreign policy insiders have been trying to “defend democracy” in Ukraine. This has meant launching political influence operations, overturning election results we didn’t like, and, ultimately, pouring massive sums of money and weapons into a years-long war with a nuclear power.

None of this was wise. America should have stayed out of Eastern Europe. Both World War I and World War II began in this region. The ancient rivalries, ethnic tensions, and political feuding of the boundary between East and West promise us nothing but pain, bloodshed, and loss.

The first goal of our foreign policy should be to defend our rights, specifically our rights to life and liberty. The second aim should be to preserve our way of life. This means that we should not wage wars that will undo the fabric of our Republic. We ought not only to preserve our rights, but also to defend the consent of the governed.

Americans deserve a say in what their government does abroad. This means that Congress and the president should never commit weapons or materiel to a foreign conflict without a declaration of war. The only time we should fight a war without a declaration is in the immediate aftermath of a direct attack on our homeland. Even then, Congress should meet as soon as possible to put the nation on a true war footing and to announce to the world the nation’s military goals and intentions.

This procedure was not followed in the Russo-Ukrainian War. The State Department, USAID, and the Department of Defense, along with American NGOs, spent the two decades prior to the 2022 outbreak of the war staging influence operations in Ukraine and seeking to interfere in the region. Eventually, Russia countered with hard military power. This conflict has been a complete disaster for the West.

And it was all avoidable. America should have remained neutral. We should have stayed out of Eastern Europe. The right to not care should have been invoked. Of course, there are problems with Putin’s government. Of course, there is suffering, injustice, and bloodshed abroad. Of course!

But that does not mean the United States should set itself up as a global supreme judge over all mankind. We have no right to do so, and it is bad for us that we have done so. Ordinary Americans pay the price of these stupid interventions abroad. We pay for sanctions through higher prices, for military aid through our taxes — and, if this conflict spreads, we may pay in blood.

Neutrality is a beautiful word. It is a relief. We should focus on doing the best we can here at home. We should focus on protecting our way of life and doing justice right here in our own communities and homes. Every single one of our politicians would be better off focusing on how to be more honest businessmen, fathers, husbands, wives, mothers, and friends than trying to rule the world in the name of democracy and human rights.

If each human being on the planet spent their time minding their own business, the world would be a better place. If the nations of the earth treated one another as true sovereigns — and if foreign wars remained contained — we would, in the end, have more peace. It would not be a perfect world, but it would be a better one.     *

America Needs Tariffs

Josiah Lippincott

Josiah Lippincott is a Ph.D. student at the Van Andel School of Statesmanship at Hillsdale College and a writer for American Greatness. His writing can be found on Substack under the name Regime Critic.

America’s national sovereignty depends on tariffs. Free trade advocates are wrong. Tariffs are a fundamental component of prosperity, not its enemy.

Tariffs are the necessary complement to a strong border. Tariffs control the flow of inanimate goods into our homeland. A strong border controls the flow of animate human beings into the same.

The inverse is also true. Free trade and open borders go together. Both are fundamentally globalist and anti-nationalist. Free trade is, quite literally, un-American. Free trade advocates, whether they admit it or not, want to unmake the traditional American political and economic character in order to replace it with something entirely different.

On the American Right, libertarians are the fiercest defenders of free trade. Indeed, before Trump, libertarian intellectual arguments for reducing tariffs had complete dominance over the post-war conservative movement.

The libertarian argument for free trade rests on the foundation of the alleged benefits of comparative advantage and a moral opposition to rent-seeking. Tariffs, libertarians insist, are a form of government overreach that harms the liberty of Americans to engage in private contractual relations for their own benefit. Tariffs, they insist, make us poorer by imposing inefficiencies into the market. Tariffs reduce competition in the marketplace, leading to less innovation and technological development.

These arguments are not without merit. Trade is obviously a good thing. Life in a world in which every man must make every single good from scratch by his own hands would be one of incredible drudgery and insecurity.

Specialization increases productivity. Doing one thing very well is more efficient than doing many things badly or in an average manner. If I am good at making nails and you are good at making t-shirts, then it makes sense for both of us to focus our efforts where we have the most talent and then trade for what we need.

This is the foundation of the principle of comparative advantage. Even if I am better at making t-shirts than you are, I should still focus on making nails because this is what I am really good at. This specialization makes both of us wealthier because it allows for maximal efficiency.

Libertarian free trade advocates extend this logic to the planet. At a national scale, America should focus its efforts on the most productive industries. Americans should design phones, airplanes, and computers — which is difficult and cognitively demanding — and leave the simpler but more grueling work of mining steel and assembling components to poorer countries like China. This system is more efficient — it produces greater wealth for everyone — because America focuses on what it is good at — designing things — and China focuses on what it is good at — building things. The stock market and GDP go up and hundreds of millions of third-worlders are lifted out of poverty. Everybody wins . . . in theory.

In practice, free trade advocates ignore political reality. They misunderstand human nature. True — in a perfectly rational world, free trade would be the norm. Everyone should do what he is good at, trading with others all over the world without interference and without fraud.

We do not, however, live in a perfectly rational world. Human beings are selfish, stupid, and wicked. These impulses are controlled only with great difficulty. Civilization is the exception, barbarism the rule. Moreover, there are enormous politically relevant differences between individuals and between nations. Human beings are not interchangeable widgets.

I witnessed a good example of the errors of free trade advocates at last fall’s meeting of the Philadelphia Society. Daniel Hannan, Baron of Kingsclere and a Conservative Party member of the House of Lords, gave the keynote address. Hannan, an ardent Zionist, opened his talk by mocking Hezbollah for falling prey to the Mossad pager attack, in which Israeli intelligence killed and seriously wounded hundreds of Hezbollah fighters by remotely detonating small explosive charges implanted in their communication devices.

Hannan then, without skipping a beat, launched into a full-throated defense of free trade. Hannan mocked nationalist and pro-Trump arguments for tariffs. He pointed to North Korea and Singapore as examples of the paths available. North Korea, his premier example of an autarchic economy and closed society, is significantly poorer than Singapore, an open society built on free trade. Case closed.

But not so fast. Hannan lacked the self-awareness to link the two parts of his speech together. The reason Israel was able to plant explosives in Hezbollah’s pager network is precisely because Hezbollah does not make its own communication architecture. They depended on foreign trade to acquire what they needed. Unfortunately for them, those supply lines were not secure.

Mossad was able to infiltrate the manufacturing process and implant tiny explosives in these devices, turning each pager into a mini IED. Because Hezbollah has no organic communications manufacturing prowess, it lacked the expertise to check the devices for penetration. Even if they had opened up the pagers, it isn’t clear their technical “experts” would have been able to identify the problem.

Free trade was Hezbollah’s undoing. Their faith in foreigners was rewarded with death and destruction. Their dependency on others was their weakness. Free trade is maximally efficient until your trading partner wants to kill you. Then it isn’t. You can only have free trade with someone you trust. Trust, it turns out, is hard to come by.

Hannan’s example comparing North Korea and Singapore is also suspect. True, North Korea is much poorer than Singapore, but North Korea also has nuclear weapons. The hermit kingdom might not have all the trappings of life in a liberal democracy, but it is undoubtedly true that the nation is sovereign on its own territory.

Singapore, by contrast, is much wealthier but far more vulnerable. Its geopolitical situation at the heart of the Straits of Malacca is enormously valuable for trade. But Singapore is only a small island nation. It cannot grow its own food. Nor does it possess the organic resources it needs for its self-defense. Virtually all necessities have to be imported to the island. Nor does it possess nuclear weapons.

This fundamental weakness and dependency were well known to Singapore’s wisest leaders. Lee Kwan Yew himself described Singapore as a mansion surrounded by beggars. Singapore, in other words, has a big target on its back. It needs powerful patrons, like the United States, in order to maintain itself. This fundamental geopolitical reality dominates Singapore’s ongoing existence.

Sovereignty is the power to make real choices. Money is a kind of sovereignty. If you walk into a store with a thousand dollars, you can make all kinds of choices with that money. It is a form of power. But if you walk through a dark alley and a thug puts a knife to your back and demands everything you have, that money is no longer an asset but a vulnerability. For protection, you would need a gun.

Weapons, like money, are another form of sovereignty. Weapons provide an individual and a nation with options in times of crisis. Libertarians and free trade advocates gloss over the reality of such exigencies.

In the talk I attended, Daniel Hannan, for instance, zeroed in on the value of free trade in creating wealth but entirely ignored the potential downsides that dependence on trade had for national security. Ideally, we would not need to spend money on defense and fraud protection — it is, in the libertarian framework, irrational to steal or to go to war. They are right that war is irrational. They are wrong to then suggest we can be rid of war.

Human beings have a powerful desire to have their cake and eat it too.

Trading goods freely sounds wonderful. You make t-shirts and I make nails, but what if I could get your t-shirts without making any nails at all? What if I just took them from you without working? The thug can, with a few knife strokes, make mincemeat of the earnest sucker who spent his days toiling away. The thief acquires with a little blood what the now-dead peasant spent much sweat to produce.

Free trade advocates treat their own moral impulses as the dominant mode of human life. They have a very hard time putting themselves in the shoes of a human being who wants to be a criminal or a tyrant.

“But engaging in mutually beneficial trade is good for the long-term betterment of mankind,” they say. But criminals don’t care. The temptation of living life without needing to work for one’s bread is very potent. The world is full of people who confuse short-term pleasure for long-term gain.

Selfishness, stupidity, and wickedness are endemic among human beings. There is no inexorable movement toward freedom or greater reasonability. At best, the human condition is one of cycles of rise and fall. Barbarism is the rule. Civilization is the exception.

Moreover, there is a universal disagreement between human beings about fundamental, existential matters. Human beings regularly kill each other over access to wealth, honor, and sex. They kill each other over religion, ideology, and tradition.

Many modern libertarians have never felt the deep attachments to a way of life that would drive them to war. They are irreligious and concerned with material goods. Spiritual values are of only secondary importance to this human type. They are living in John Lennon’s “Imagine” with nothing to “kill or die for.” Liberalism is triumphant and obviously correct. The only person who could possibly disagree is a fool or a fascist.

The arrogance and ignorance of this view create an enormous blind spot. In order to have a functioning economy, human beings need a functioning political regime to restrain the wicked. This political order needs weapons and men to wield them. It must have power — power to tax citizens, administer justice, and defend members from outsiders.

Such a regime requires that the members feel patriotic allegiance to their shared commonwealth and that they be prepared to sacrifice themselves in its defense. It is fundamentally unfair for some men to sacrifice their lives and treasure to protect others who do not fight or sacrifice. Therefore, the regime must distribute honors and power unevenly, giving a greater share to those who fight than to those who do not.

Fundamental human wickedness creates a demand that the righteous and industrious band together for self-defense. Free trade cannot exist where there is no trust. Trust is built on force because reason alone cannot govern human beings. That is why we have laws and nations.

Free trade requires certain preconditions in order to exist. It requires a society where men keep their word, where fraud is punished, and where men may labor in peace. These conditions can only exist within bounded political orders that sharply distinguish between friends and enemies, citizens and strangers.

Economics is subordinate to politics. Economics comes from the Greek words oikos, meaning “household,” and nomos, meaning “way” or “law.” Politics comes from the word polis, meaning “regime” or “city.” Cities are stronger than households. The gang is stronger than the individual.

For individuals and households to have freedom, they need allies. Our word society therefore comes from the Latin socii, meaning “allies.” The mutual alliance that preserves our liberty from foreign threats, natural disasters, and the winds of fortune requires certain duties between citizens.

My neighbor, for instance, builds automobiles. Let’s say I import a Chinese car for 75 percent of the price of his vehicle. That would make me wealthier, of course, but it would put my neighbor out of business. It would destroy his livelihood and threaten his family’s long-term security.

An open border might benefit me but it costs my neighbor a great deal. It has shattered the social contract between us. Replacing my neighbor’s business with the product of foreign labor might boost GDP in the short run but it now means my neighbor needs to uproot his whole life. The “creative destruction” from free trade has enormous costs for those getting destroyed. The type of man who makes for a good assembly line worker may not make a good computer programmer.

Before free trade and open borders, my neighbor and I both could live good middle-class lives. After my neighbor’s displacement by more “efficient” Chinese labor, I am slightly wealthier but my neighbor now has nothing. I have harmed my former friend and ally. Our alliance is broken because of my selfish desire for gain.

Free trade and mass migration operate on the same fundamental principle. Both destroy the social cohesion and political alliances that make genuine liberty possible.

This is not to say America should have no foreign trade. We should. But that trade should never come at the expense of the preservation of our national sovereignty. Tariffs ensure that does not happen; they prevent our enemies and competitors from flooding our markets with cheap goods to destroy our native industry. Tariff rates are a matter of prudence. At times it may be better to favor producers and, at others, consumers. Such decisions should be made as a matter of public policy and in accordance with the will of the people.

A strong political regime makes productive trade possible. Americans have free trade within their borders and rightly so. Businesses in Michigan can compete with businesses in Wisconsin and Texas because those competitors are our fellow citizens. This competition is bounded. In a nation with a tight labor market and high wages, losing your job to a domestic competitor isn’t that big of a deal — you can easily pick yourself back up.

Even when you don’t win, you know that your neighbor, who is bound to you by oaths of loyalty, has won. His private benefit accrues to you, too. It is better to be a poor man with rich friends than a rich man with no friends.

A strong political order is the foundation of real freedom. It makes genuine liberty and productive trade possible. Tariffs, like government itself, are a concession to man’s weakness, to the precarious position he finds himself in by nature. Tariffs secure our borders. They are protectionist. This is good! Protecting our fellow Americans is good.

Without a border, we do not have a country. Without a country, we are left naked and alone in a world full of strangers and enemies.

Liberty depends on sovereignty.     *