The National Interest in Theory and Practice

As we pass peak globalization¹ and find ourselves in the midst of new proxy wars such as that in Ukraine, the ongoing restructuring of global order necessitates that we reframe a new concept of the national interest. The phrase is conspicuous by its muted appearance and sometimes even total absence from contemporary political discussion across the West. All too often, the very notion of a “national interest” is still seen as a parochial and egotistical notion fit only for populists. How did the national interest come to be effaced in public life?

The proposition I want to advance here is that the reemergence of the national interest is less about shifts in the global balance of power and first and foremost a matter of internal democratic politics. Reviving the national interest means deliberating on a nation’s public life and repre­sentative structures as much as its external alliances and foreign policy stances. Once we take an inside/out view of the national interest, as something that arises (and declines) in tandem with political relationships of authority and representation that are internal to the state rather than something that is thrust upon us by geopolitical rivals, we will be in a better position to revive national interests, and in so doing, revive our nations.

Despite the gravity of the challenges confronting democratic states—the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the energy crisis, growing geopolitical tension with China, and the broader shift in the global balance of power toward China—there is still remarkably little collective understanding of what the national interest is or what it might mean. As an example, national efforts to alleviate the energy crisis stemming from the Ukraine war are framed in terms of the global sacrifice needed to mount the green energy transition instead of making the claim that countries have a national interest in energy self-sufficiency. It is striking that Europe, the continent that gave birth to the modern nation-state and its attendant political concepts (sovereignty, national interest, balance of power, etc.) has been the most explicitly dedicated to the effort to transcend the national interest, even as its commitment to transnationalism continues to plunge the continent downward into deindustrialization and energy dependence. Contrary to the image of an independent Europe, for instance, eastern Europe has become a site for proxy war between the United States and a Sino-Russian axis.

In Europe, the national interest is still seen as an artifact of sovereign egotism and a war-torn past, a dangerous concept that threatens to undercut international cooperation. Yet we are persistently reminded that the member-states of the EU have only suppressed rather than transcended their respective national interests. When President Emmanuel Macron stated that France would only use its nuclear weapons if French territory itself was directly threatened, rather than in response to Russian use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine, this frank but ultimately unsurprising expression of a specifically French national interest was rare and bald enough to be seen as a shocking disruption of Western unity in the face of Russia’s invasion of a non-EU state.² The more that one looks back over the last thirty years, such examples could be multiplied indefinitely.

The American Exception?

The United States would seem to be the exception to this rule. At first glance, Washington seems to break from the pattern of European abjection of the nation-state. While discussion of national interest has been a significant component of American discourse for many years (there is even the magazine entitled The National Interest), it has also undergone striking changes of its own. If the national interest has been scooped out from inside the EU’s member-states, American national interest politics has rather bled out from the sides, adulterated and diluted to the point that it became indistinguishable from generic global interests. This was the view cultivated under the era of liberal hegemony in which the United States was cast as the “indispensable nation,” meaning that any international or domestic matter anywhere in the world could potentially fall under the ambit of U.S. interest and engagement. In the era of unipolarity, national interest simply became synonymous with American global leadership.³

It is only in recent years that an effort has been made to hem in the American national interest, prompting bitter public contestation. This is evident in the controversies surrounding, for instance, John Mearsheimer’s criticisms of U.S. foreign policy over Gaza and Ukraine, or in the public debates surrounding the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. This revival of public debate on the national interest reflects the fact that it was the Trump presidency that most pointedly politicized the question in recent times. Trump explicitly attacked globalism in his campaigns while questioning the value of bipartisan agreement on expanding free trade pacts, global integration, and military interventionism—the policies of liberal hegemony that had hitherto dominated U.S. foreign policy for the last thirty years.⁴

The period of liberal hegemony represented a solid cross-party consensus on consolidating an open global economy, furthering supranational integration (nafta, NATO, EU, etc.) and, in the absence of any countervailing power bloc to check U.S. power, recurrent military interventions around the world. These policies stretched across both Democratic and Republican administrations and continued independently of which party controlled Congress. Serious challenges to this consensus first began in response to the failures of the Iraq War and efforts by the Obama administration to execute a “pivot” to Asia, in which the United States would withdraw from the Middle East and turn its focus to containing China. This was a course continued, albeit with greater rhetorical effect, under the Trump administration. These changes reflected not only the erosion of unipolar supremacy, but also growing internal disquiet and disillusionment among ordinary Americans.

In contrast to arguments developed by the likes of Mearsheimer and other realists, the globalization of American interests was not merely a delusion, in the sense that it was something like a feverish error derived from the baleful influence of liberal ideology, nor was it simply a byproduct of American unipolarity. Rather, the diffusion of U.S. national interests to encompass global interests was also an effect of internal changes in American politics, notably the decline of national representation, which can be traced to the defeat of organized labor, beginning with the Volcker Shock in the 1980s and peaking with the entrenchment of free trade in the 1990s; that decade was bookended by the passage of nafta and by the U.S.-sponsored entry of China into the World Trade Organization, a move which led to the devastating economic displacement known as the “China Shock.” Having shed meaningful commitments to the American working class by the end of the Cold War, the American elite could go global in pursuit of financial gain, with the defeat of the Soviet Union and integration with China sealing its earlier victory over American labor.

The controversy that dogged Trumpian foreign policy in Trump’s first term indicates that even in the United States, probing or debating the parameters of what legitimately constitutes a U.S. national interest can be seen as scandalous, even treasonous, as Trump’s attempt to shift foreign policy priorities met with fierce criticisms over his supposed affinity for and political dependence on Russia’s Vladimir Putin.⁵ Indeed, the intensity of criticism leveled at realists and restrainers in the U.S. foreign policy debate more broadly indicates that there are still many in the United States committed not to a distinctly national alternative to the choices offered by Trumpists, restrainers, realists, and the like, but instead cling to maintaining liberal hegemony, in which the interests of the world at large and those of the United States are believed to directly coincide.

For all the intensity and controversy of this discussion in the United States, the fact that the national interest is being openly and vigorously debated is a sign of growing political vitality, at least by comparison to European states. Even in the American context, however, the national interest remains hemmed in, bound up with Trump’s increasingly personalist style of rule. Why did the resurgence of national interest become a partisan affair associated with the Republican Right? What are the implications for democracy when national interest politics becomes bound up with culture wars, or becomes associated with only one party or political tradition?

Europe and Britain: The Failure to Transcend Interests

The United States at least has the benefits of its oceanic defenses and global power to risk populist experimentation with a new national interest politics. As the travails of the EU’s core powers demonstrate, France, Germany, Italy, and Poland have no such luxuries. European alignment in terms of a common foreign, defense, and security policy has been at once facilitated and limited by the transformation of European nation-states into member-states of the EU. Supranational integration has allowed for alignment and integration at the European level, but the lack of democratic legitimacy for these ventures underscores their institutional fragility. The failure to establish European strategic autonomy separate from that of American-led NATO de­scribes this failed history. Beginning with the botched interventions in the former Yugoslav republics across the 1990s, which were eventually resolved through NATO intervention, European strategic independence was finally buried with NATO support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion of 2022.

This failure to construct foreign and defense policies with democratic input and accountability has led to a vicious circle in which Europe’s fragile member-states, lacking broad legitimacy, seek greater strength by binding themselves together more tightly through supranational commitments to the EU and NATO. The European leadership class thereby becomes increasingly politically dependent on external sources of legitimacy, which further undermines their credibility and claims to being the faithful representatives of their electors; this, of course, prompts further popular suspicion and resentment from below. Far from undermining European states, it is the absence of national interests formulated from within European states that stymies effective international cooperation and explains the failure to develop European political interests independent of Washington.

Although the absence of national interest politics might be expected in the case of EU member-states that are formally committed to collective alignment of their foreign policies through the EU’s common defense and security arrangements, the national interest is also conspicuous by its absence in one former member-state, namely Britain. Its status as a former global superpower in the nineteenth century, analogous to that enjoyed by the United States since the Cold War, and more recently, its secession from the EU, provide a laboratory in which to explore differing ideas of national interest and how it has evolved over time. Throughout the post-Brexit period, discussion of the national interest has been largely absent from British public life. The evolution of British foreign policy is a tale usually told in terms of Britain’s shifting position in the world and the corresponding pattern of its external choices and alignments. Rarely if ever is Britain’s national interest discussed in terms of shifts in its internal political life.

Given the fact that Britain explicitly opted to break from the EU nearly ten years ago, even though it only formally withdrew in 2020, it is remarkable how hazy the notion of a national interest is in British public debate. The drivers of Britain’s break from the EU were most often cast in terms of history (Britain’s relative isolation from Europe and global trading past), geography (Britain’s insular status), and identity (its historical and cultural separateness from continental Europe).

If interests were ever raised in the Brexit discussion, they were (often falsely) cast in terms of the impact on levels of employment, average living standards, wages, and the like. Never was there a substantive public debate about the relative benefits of maintaining the status quo as opposed to the national interest in reshaping the nation’s political economy to take advantage of new sources of global economic growth. Little wonder that British politicians have failed to capitalize on the national independence thrust upon them by their voters. When setting out his vision for foreign policy in advance of his party’s election win last year, the Labour Party’s former foreign secretary David Lammy discussed “common interests,” such as resolving global poverty, but made no mention of national interest.⁶

When the interests of the United Kingdom are discussed, they are almost always immediately conjoined to an assertion of “values,” which are, in turn, more often gestured toward rather than systematically elaborated. This modern fusion of interests and values emerged in the “ethical foreign policy” of Tony Blair’s first government but has continued across British governments since. Costly and protracted wars, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, were cast as wars over transcendent liberal values rather than wars over sordid material interests.

With Western victory in the Cold War, the reflexive alignment of British foreign policy with the United States was absorbed into the global unipolar moment. The rise of human rights and a values-based foreign policy moved in tandem with a corresponding decline in the articulation of national interest, registered as the shift to developmental and human rights priorities in British diplomacy, and the reduction of the Foreign Office to a glorified NGO. The ballot box and populist electoral insurgencies associated with Britain’s withdrawal from the EU have led to no meaningful political divergence from Britain’s supranational commitments nor an articulation of any new national interest. The failure to take advantage of the constitutional gains of Brexit underscores the continuing absence of any solid notion of national interest in guiding Britain’s secession from supranational structures.

Political leaders’ repeated efforts at spurring British renewal have wilted, often under the withering effect of domestic elite derision and contempt. Theresa May’s attempt to make the case for renewed national citizenship when she criticized those who saw themselves as “citizens of nowhere” in her party conference speech of 2016 was brushed off by Britain’s intelligentsia, who did not believe they had any obligations to their fellow citizens who had recently voted to leave the EU. Her successor Boris Johnson was elected in 2019 on a program of rebalancing the regions through focused investment outside of the London city-state, but the “levelling up” agenda has only been fitfully pursued and has since slowly dissipated in the face of Britain’s bureaucratic sclerosis. More recently, the current Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, staked a patriotic claim by arguing the need for Britain to swerve the risk of becoming an “island of strangers,” only to subsequently declare his regret for using the phrase. What is striking about all these efforts, apart from how derided they are by the liberal middle classes, is how little they rely on any concept of national interest, in the sense of meeting broadly shared concrete objectives that are understood to benefit the nation as a whole, rather than merely select constituencies.

In place of thinking of national interest politics in terms of shifts in the global balance of power or a country’s overall status in the international hierarchy, it is no less important to consider how internal changes in the United States and in European nation-states have shaped the failure to formulate and contest national interests in recent times. It is these internal political changes, at least as much as the technological and economic integration associated with globalization, which have effaced the general concept of the national interest.

Democratic Decay and the National Interest

Unfortunately, the modern academic study of the national interest provides little guidance. Much of the study of national interest has tended to devalue it, framing it as an intrinsically militaristic and egotistical concept, with a corresponding expectation that new processes of international cooperation could transform states in ways that would allow them to consolidate international integration. If we trace the evolution of theoretical discussions of the national interest, beginning with classic American texts by Charles Beard and Hans J. Morgenthau written in the middle of the last century, we can see how the theoretical esteem accorded to the national interest has declined precipitously since then.

If the evolution of the national interest can be told in terms of the foreign relations of states, it can also be told in terms of shifts in the weight and significance of mass politics, and how far governing elites succeed in keeping the formulation of policy insulated from democratic oversight. The classical “reason of state” deployed by Renaissance princes and courtiers gradually gave way to more encompassing notions of national interest in response to the massification of politics introduced by the political and economic changes flowing from the English, American, French, and Industrial Revolutions; these changes included but are not restricted to: representative government, national sovereignty, urbanization, expansion of industrial manufacturing, economic growth, and demographic explosion.

The era of elite foreign policy developed in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848 ended with the democratic incursions that resulted from the expansion of electoral franchises in European states and the growth of organized labor. This corresponded with an era of greater geopolitical rivalry, peaking in the aftermath of the First World War, when competing visions of postwar order were offered up in the ideological contestation of liberal internationalists like Woodrow Wilson and communist revolutionaries like Vladimir Lenin.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, political elites found the commitment to maintain democratic accountability and continuous economic growth unbearable. They responded by stripping back public expectations. The origins of this democratic decay can be found in what Charles Maier called the crisis of “overloaded democracy” of the 1970s–80s, in which industrialized states explicitly sought to shed the growing demands imposed on them by their citizens in response to the 1973 oil crisis, stagflation, and the start of deindustrialization in the developed world. Fritz Bartel has described the conflicts of this era as being resolved by shrinking the expanded social contract that emerged after 1945.⁷ Importantly, this involved not only shedding or curbing public goods hitherto provided by the state, but also transforming the representative structures of the postwar consensus, which had hitherto been negotiated through mass political parties, labor unions, corporatist bargaining, and other participatory civil institutions.

In place of mediating competing class interests through national political structures, political parties shifted to being either “catch-all” or single-issue parties. Peter Mair described this in terms of the “void” that emerged between rulers and ruled, as state structures drifted away from their moorings in civil society and citizens in turn retreated into private life.⁸ As the structures, practices, and institutions of representative politics withered and declined, so too inevitably would the concept and practice of a national interest, which had been predicated on a process of distilling and articulating the popular will at the national level.

As a result of this process of internal representative decay, foreign policy (and politics more broadly) came to be justified less and less in terms that relate to national concerns. To be sure, this was partly intentional, inasmuch as restricting citizens’ expectations of the national state entailed fewer burdens on rulers themselves. As states drifted free from their domestic popular foundations, they also had greater opportunity to advance integration across borders in a globalizing world economy; governing elites did this by committing to supranational forms of legal and political authority, spawning new formal and informal groupings for technical coordination, exemplified by the International Criminal Court, the World Trade Organization, and, of course, the European Union.

The result was that politics became increasingly conceived in global terms: resolving global poverty, addressing global environmental crises, fighting global terror, and so on. The growing global emphasis on, for example, meeting human rights concerns further helped to delegitimate the supposedly parochial concerns of citizens, whose rights existed at the merely national level. The eclipse of the national interest was consummated by the series of Western-led military operations that became a global norm in warfare following the collapse of the Eastern bloc. These interventions variously intended to defend human rights, relieve human suffering, eliminate terrorists, punish tyranny, spread democracy and so on; those who argued for these armed excursions discounted national interests in favor of justifying actions through altruistic and global claims.

Interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign states with explicit reference to human rights, such as was done in the interventions over Kosovo and Libya, naturally undermined the value of sovereignty in the state being intervened in; in so doing, the intervention also had the effect of squeezing out the principle of national interest politics in the states doing the intervening.

Reconstructing the National Interest

Toward the end of the Cold War and under the influence of constructionist theories imported from sociology, International Relations (IR) theory came to view the national interest as no longer something meaningful or concrete. Instead of expressing a set of claims that were open to analysis and empirical validation, it was understood as expressing confected identity claims. The new theories emphasized flexibility, agency, and contingency in the historic process, seemingly validated by the unexpectedly abrupt and largely peaceful collapse of the Soviet-led Eastern bloc. It was argued that these identities could be reshaped through new processes of international interaction. Given that identities were more meaningful and important than interests, state interests would correspondingly shift to match these newly confected identities, and all this would lead to new, cooperative forms of politics. In this view, the national interest could be progressively blended away through global-scale homogenization and more diffuse, cosmopolitan identities. In actuality, the elan of these new theories reflected the hubris of liberal hegemony and unipolarity.

These intellectual shifts were less scientific or theoretical breakthroughs as much as they were symptomatic of shifts in the underlying distribution of power in the international order and the internal democratic decay of Western states. It was these shifts that made representation based on national interest redundant. The belief in the greater flexibility and freedom that constructivists offered reflected U.S. unipolarity more than it did the vigor of new identities, as it was all ultimately contingent on the power structures that this new generation of liberal idealists tended to scorn.

In claiming that interests were driven by identity, constructivist social science had the effect of collapsing the vertical, integrating structures involved in national political representation and that would otherwise filter popular will through various mediating layers of civic and political life. In its place, they asserted nations as gelatinous identity groups, usually bound up with benighted and misguided notions of national chauvinism or racial supremacy. What such views overlooked is that, as a concept, the national interest necessarily implies representation. By its nature, the national interest pertains to a political collectivity and its claims and interests on the world stage. Thus, changes in the structure of representative politics not only made it unnecessary for state elites to appeal to national interests as an expression of popular aspirations but also correspondingly made any notion of a national interest harder to articulate.

This is the significance of adopting an inside-out view of the national interest.⁹ Just as much as U.S. national interest can be understood in terms of the rise and fall of geopolitical peers and rivals like the Soviet Union and China, it can also be understood in terms of ballot box revolts like Brexit and the rise of Trump. More than merely something that changes along with a state’s position in the international hierarchy or distribution of power, the waxing and waning of national interest can be traced with reference to changes in the internal politics of nation-states.

Much of intra-Western international diplomacy over the latter half of the twentieth century can be understood as a sustained campaign aimed at containing the incursions of mass politics that peaked in the interwar era. The turn to neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s allowed for the demassification of democratic politics and the corresponding decline in expectations that were placed on the state. As with the rise of the Congress system in the aftermath of the Napoleonic era, politics became less ideologically contested by the end of the twentieth century, and it became correspondingly easier for ruling elites to align their national policies and mount projects of international cooperation. These trends were further solidified with the end of the geopolitical rivalries of the Cold War. This era of public passivity and quiescence began to end with the populist challenges spurred by the global financial crisis of 2008.

And as the subsequent era of political turbulence has made clear, the national interest is a necessary component of democratic politics. This immediately poses the question of whether national interest can be recovered, given the depletion of the various social bases that had hitherto formed the basis for national democracy across the twentieth century. This is the nub of the problem—recovering the national interest is more than just formulating the right policy at the right time—the absence of a national interest also has a deep sociological dimension, manifested in the atomized, postindustrial, disembodied, and hyper-digitized reality of contemporary Western societies. Notwithstanding tentative indications of revived religiosity among younger cohorts, the fact remains that most people simply don’t care to join mass organizations, pay dues, or attend meetings at churches and union halls. The kind of mediated and consensual politics these civic institutions once enabled appears impossible not only to recreate but to even imagine.

There have been many formulations of this problem in academic sociology, ranging from the work of Robert Putnam to Anton Jäger. Putnam’s classic Bowling Alone diagnosed the collapse of the deep social capital accumulated over the course of the twentieth century, and Putnam had already identified the risk to democracy in the collapse of volunteering, attendance at church, even family dinners, as manifested in declining voter turnout.¹⁰ Putnam worried that the atomizing trends he had diagnosed would exacerbate problems of collective action and erode civic trust.

More recently, in his 2022 essay “From Bowling Alone to Posting Alone,” Jäger showed that the febrile waves of seeming politicization that have swept Western societies over the last two decades are in fact shallow squalls. These disruptions roil the surface of society with the performative outrage of social media but do not form durable social solidarities that could act as the basis of new political formations.¹¹

Both Putnam and Jäger have their favored solutions to the problem. Putnam envisaged technocratic and even technical solutions, “social capital investments,” civic education, urban design, subsidized community centers, and the like. Jäger, coming from the Left, identified the problem in the decline of union density across the Western world since the 1970s. The Left tends to put their hope in labor renewal, seeing revived unions as dual engines of civic and political integration. From the viewpoint of the nation, the problem with these solutions is that they offer sociological solutions to political problems, and politics will not wait for social revival. Regularly eating dinner with your family may well be a good thing to do, but it will obviously not be enough to set the interests of the nation on a secure footing.

There may be some limited scope for national states to effect policies that may help to aggregate new forms of collective political identity. Putnam and his followers have floated the prospect of reviving mandatory national service. Yet whatever the merits of such a policy, it will only go so far. State bureaucracies attempting to retrofit collective political identities around the needs of a given government and state apparatus would only invert the process through which national interest originally emerged as a viable form of politics. The earlier prototypical form of national interest, reason of state, emerged as the reason of the apparatus of rule associated with the early modern state, formed around the fledging bureaucracies and royal courts of absolutist monarchies. Early modern reason of state was converted into the modern national interest as a result of civil society organizing itself to imprint its own interests, those of the nation, on those of the state.

What made this possible was the prior claim of monarchical representation asserted on behalf of the larger population, i.e., the fact that the dynasts claimed that they could protect the interests of their subjects without need of secular oversight or meaningful popular input; this then led to the popular uprisings of their subjects. Globalist ideologies weakened even the most tenuous claims for the primacy of national representation. When states claimed a responsibility to protect the human rights of the vulnerable wherever they might be in the world or stressed the need to fulfill planetary responsibilities to maintain the global environment, they were explicitly voiding the contract with their electors and constituents, contributing to the political deracination that we now struggle with. We may see a similar cunning of reason at work in the populist assault on globalism.

Populism is unlikely to create enduring new political solidarities. By its nature, populism is antithetical to representative politics, fostering suspicion of stable elites and substituting charismatic leadership for institutionalized chains of representation that bind the state and civil society together. But if populists do at least manage to boost the cultural status of national claims over global ones, they may lay the grounds for a revived national interest inasmuch as they will allow nations and their civil societies to once again legitimately assert and imprint their interests on the behavior of states, perhaps even as part of a revolt against the derelictions of populist rule.

If we have no national interests to speak of, we have no political representation to speak of. And if we have no political representation, we have no democracy. No less important, the fact that national interest is a way of legitimating democratic decision-making at the national level also makes it an integral component of a functioning future global order. As the failures of transnational global civil society and the instability resulting from populist insurrections at the ballot box demonstrate, democratic politics cannot function without politically integrated nation‑states. So, too, collective interests at the national level cannot be formulated without a distinctive concept of national interest, for the concept presupposes that governing elites are able to justify decision-making to their constituents and be held accountable to them.

The growing tensions of international politics, with increasingly high stakes regarding the risk of nuclear conflict and rolling energy crises, make clear that foreign policy decisions need to be reformulated and contested in terms of an explicit national interest if we are to ensure that citizens’ collective interests are expressed, debated, and filtered upward to international decision-making bodies. Such a regrounding and rebalancing of international order cannot be realized without the concept of national interest.  

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 4 (Winter 2025): 197–210.

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Notes