In the past thirty years, skepticism of globalization has spread across the globe, a trend driven by the belief amongst various populaces that bureaucrats and elites have lost touch with a given country’s national interest. President Trump’s “America First” mantra has encapsulated this movement, an attempt to restore U.S. trade and foreign policy to national interest above all else. 

In his new book, The National Interest: Politics After Globalization, Philip Cunliffe explains the recent ascendance of ‘the national interest,’ positing it in opposition to both liberal globalism and populist demagoguery, and makes a case for forging nations anew as the key to democratic renewal in diverse societies. In making his case for a new statecraft based on the loadstar of the national interest, Cunliffe argues that the neoliberal era has eroded state authority but not necessarily the role of the state, and that liberal efforts to discredit nationalism have not succeeded in excising chauvinism from elite mainstream opinion.