The trade and foreign policy agenda pursued by the second Trump administration has been widely interpreted as a rupture in the global international political economy, marking an apparently decisive break with post–Cold War liberal internationalism and principles of free trade and multilateralism. This article adopts an intellectual history approach to examine longstanding currents on the American right that can help understand what is genuinely new, and what remains constant, in our apparent moment of contemporary rupture. It focuses on one influential but understudied strand of the American right, namely, the union of paleo-conservatives and libertarians that emerged in the late 80s and 90s known as ‘the paleo-libertarian alliance’.
While existing scholarship has examined this alliance primarily in relation to social policy and domestic economic debates, far less attention has been paid to its implications for trade and foreign policy. Yet questions of non-intervention, nationalism, sovereignty, and opposition to global economic governance were central to paleolibertarian thought. Drawing on archival research of key sources including the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, the Ron Paul’s Freedom Report, and Chronicles, the article reconstructs the paleolibertarian approach to international political economy and foreign policy. Engaging with key thinkers including Murray Rothbard and Thomas Fleming, and institutional groupings including the John Randolph Club and the Rockford Institute, we trace how critiques of multilateral trade regimes, hostility to internationalism, and an emphasis on national sovereignty were theorised within the paleolibertarian alliance as part of a coherent ideological project. Rather than emerging today as ad hoc reactions to the downstream effects of globalisation, we suggest many of Trump’s America-first ideas were clearly articulated first in the 80s and 90s.
The article has two principal aims. First, it provides a systematic account of the paleolibertarian position on trade and foreign policy, clarifying its internal logics and tensions, and its strong opposition to neo-conservatism. Second, it evaluates the extent to which this intellectual inheritance illuminates the emerging trade and foreign policy strategy of the second Trump administration. Though we do not suggest that paleolibertarianism can explain the entirety of Trump era foreign policy, the movement provides a clear intellectual precursor to many aspects and can help illuminate the logic behind the apparent chaos and carnage currently engulfing our international political economy.
