John M. Owen IV writes:

In trying to make sense of Donald Trump’s second presidential administration, analysts have looked near and far for models and sources. Near at hand is William McKinley, the twenty-fifth US president, a Republican fond of tariffs and empire.

Farther afield is Carl Schmitt, a German legal theorist who died in 1985 and was notorious for his anti-liberal arguments and his membership in the Nazi Party. Trump likely has never heard of Professor Schmitt, but some of the president’s advisors and prominent supporters are avid enthusiasts. Want a brilliant thinker to explain how politics is fundamentally about friends and enemies? Or why a nation is made up, in the end, not by principles but by its own particular “way of life”? Or why presidential invocation of emergency powers should be a normal event? Schmitt is your man. In the words of journalist James Traub, we are living in “Carl Schmitt’s moment.”

And it turns out that Schmitt can help us understand Trump’s international policies as well—his vaulting ambition to control the Western Hemisphere, his contempt for long-time democratic allies, his lurches, when it comes to China and Russia, from confrontation to chumminess and back. As scholars such as William Scheuerman, William Hooker, Lars Vinx, and Mira Hamad remind us, Schmitt knew in his bones that his mortal enemy, liberalism, was an international phenomenon. With its universal pretensions and its Anglo-American sponsorship, liberalism, in his view, was fundamentally an imposition from the outside. The Weimar Republic’s parliamentary democracy, its individual rights, and its commitment to international law all kept Germany weak and servile. Allowing Germany to be Germany would require a different world, one built on an alternative legal and political order. It is an order that we can begin to discern if we connect the dots that the Trump administration has drawn around the globe during the past year.

For Schmitt, a better world order would be built not on human rights, democracy, and market exchange but instead on “great spaces,” or large territorial zones, each dominated by a great power. A great space would be less centralized than an empire but more controlled than a mere sphere of influence. Its dominant state would impose a political and legal order on it. Schmitt’s prototype was none other than America’s own Monroe Doctrine, which asserted that Washington alone had the right impose order on the societies of the Western Hemisphere. [Continue reading…]