If there is a prize for the worst book of the year, then Jacob Heilbrunn’s America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators should be the runaway winner.1 The book is bad in every way a book can be bad: it is badly written, badly argued, and badly titled. It is also mostly wrong. Some might say it is dishonest. The publisher should offer a refund to anyone paying good money for this poor excuse for a book.
Heilbrunn offers up a potted history of conservative foreign-policy thinking over the past century, beginning with World War I and concluding with (of course) Donald Trump. By this quick and dirty history, he reaches an overwhelming—albeit ridiculous—conclusion: conservatives like dictators, dislike America, and are skeptical about democracy. These dispositions, he writes, account for Trump’s supposed infatuation with Vladimir Putin, his attacks on democracy, and his dark view of America. Viewed against this background, Trump is acting out impulses that conservatives have indulged for a century or more. It is the kind of thesis that should go over well in the precincts of cnn or msnbc, since Mr. Heilbrunn advances it with the subtlety and nuance of a deranged ideologue.
Heilbrunn has, since 2013, been the editor of The National Interest, a foreign-policy magazine housed in the Center for the National Interest and dedicated to “realism” in foreign affairs. It now stands for a hardheaded assessment of American interests in the world and against idealistic crusades to promote democracy and human rights abroad, such as those engaged in by Woodrow Wilson and, more recently, by neoconservatives who have sought to export American institutions to the Middle East. Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, and other foreign-policy “realists” have been associated with the magazine.
Prior to becoming the editor of The National Interest, Heilbrunn published a volume in 2008 containing a splenetic attack on Irving Kristol (who had founded the magazine in 1985), Norman Podhoretz, and other neoconservatives for supporting campaigns to promote democracy abroad. Heilbrunn’s was a popular position to take at that time, in view of how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had turned out. Yet he acknowledges that he had been attracted to neoconservative ideas early in his career, had friends in the movement, and had published articles in neoconservative magazines. He parted company with the neoconservatives when he concluded that their outlook was too rigid and ideological to serve as a guide to U.S. foreign policy—and that realists such as Kissinger and others had been right all along.
In this bewildering book, Heilbrunn appears to have switched sides once again, now attacking conservatives because of their long-running skepticism about campaigns to export American institutions abroad. He now admires Woodrow Wilson, the Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations, and contemporary neoconservatives who support the expansion of nato, intervention in the Russia–Ukraine war, and other efforts by the United States to promote democracy around the world. This takes him a good distance from the realism that is touted on the magazine’s website. Readers may wonder if Heilbrunn, in light of this book, will now reformulate the mission of his magazine in the direction of the views he once derided.
That may not be necessary, however, since the magazine phased out its print edition a few years ago as its subscriber base plummeted to fewer than two thousand readers, perhaps (on the evidence of this book) due to the less than stellar competence of its editor. It is, admittedly, unusual for an editor to tear apart the intellectual foundations of his own publication. Yet, partially in his defense, Heilbrunn may not be aware that this is what he has done.
The book reads as if the author formed his conclusions in advance, then ransacked the past for evidence to support them. He starts with Trump and searches the past to identify ideological prototypes. The evidence he finds is thin, and much of it is either wrong or meaningless.
He thinks, for example, that H. L. Mencken was a Trump-like figure before and after the Great War because Mencken was an early isolationist, opposed U.S. entry into the conflict, identified with German culture, and criticized Wilson and the Treaty of Versailles. Trump and Mencken is an off-the-wall linkage. Mencken liked nothing better than to lampoon Trump-like characters who emerged from the “booboisie.” While Mencken may have been something of a conservative, he was also a radical: he ridiculed Christianity, admired Nietzsche, and mocked the American middle class. He was not someone conservatives looked to for leadership—if, indeed, there was anything at that time resembling a conservative movement on par with Progressivism (which there was not). Nor has Mencken been a figure of any influence among conservatives in the post-war era. One doubts that Trump has any idea who Mencken was.
Heilbrunn writes, teasing out this alleged connection, that it was mainly conservatives who opposed entry into World War I and mainly conservatives who criticized Wilson and the Treaty of Versailles after the fact. This theme is advanced so as to blame conservatives for the rise of Hitler and the beginnings of the next war, and to show that conservatives today (along with Trump) are making the same error in their criticisms of the nato alliance and their reluctance to fund the war in Ukraine.
But Progressives and socialists attacked the war in far greater numbers than conservatives or Republicans. William Jennings Bryan resigned from Wilson’s cabinet when Wilson threatened war on Germany after the sinking of the Lusitania; John Maynard Keynes afterwards wrote the most influential critique of Wilson and the treaty. Heilbrunn rebukes Senator Henry Cabot Lodge for squashing the treaty in the Senate, though Lodge supported entry into the war and his objections to the treaty might have been satisfied if Wilson had not been too stubborn to entertain them. Nor was Lodge a conservative by the standards of the time, and he was anything but an admirer of Germany. Voters turned against Democrats in the 1920 election, though Heilbrunn suggests it was because German Americans flipped their vote to Republicans in repayment for their opposition to the war and the Treaty of Versailles. Perhaps they did, but the Republican Harding won the election by seven million votes and had little need for the “German vote.”
The book unfolds in a similarly tendentious fashion, linking conservatives with isolationism and anti-Americanism before World War II and throughout the post-war era. It contains extended attacks on Joseph McCarthy, William F. Buckley Jr., Henry Luce, and several minor figures whom few have heard of today. There is also a jeremiad against the late Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, a Democrat and neoconservative who wrote in the closing stages of the Cold War that, in opposition to Jimmy Carter’s human-rights approach, U.S. policy should support rather than destabilize authoritarian-style allies opposed to communism and the Soviet Union. That did not mean, as Heilbrunn implies, that she was herself an authoritarian or friendly to authoritarian regimes. Ronald Reagan followed that policy in the 1980s, successfully, as things turned out.
To advance his thesis, the author must skip over large events and developments that complicate the picture, such as nuclear weapons, Soviet Cold War policies, the upheavals of the 1960s, the economic troubles of the 1970s, President Reagan’s Cold War policies, and the challenges of terrorism after the Cold War. Much of what conservatives have said and done over the decades cannot be easily understood absent reference to such events and to ideas and policies promoted by liberals and leftists—all of which provide context for the evolution of conservative approaches to foreign affairs.
Heilbrunn pays a great deal of attention to minor figures of the past but does not acknowledge that Republican presidents going back to the 1930s have in all cases been internationalists in foreign affairs. Excluding Trump, there are no isolationists on the list of Republican presidents as far back as Herbert Hoover. As a rule, and perhaps as a vulnerability, Republican presidents have cared more about foreign than domestic policy. Between the two parties, Republicans have been more eager than Democrats to engage in the Cold War and fight the war on terrorism. Democrats, for the most part, withdrew from the Cold War at the end of the 1960s: George McGovern’s message in 1972 was “Come Home, America.” Democrats opposed Ronald Reagan’s military buildup in the 1980s, which brought the Cold War to an end. They voted against the use of military force against Iraq in 1991 but split on the same issue in 2002. Barack Obama may have won the presidency in 2008 because he said he would not have supported the war in Iraq, as Hillary Clinton had. By this point, voters had turned against those projections of American power, a development that Trump exploited, too, as Obama had.
There is an alternative hypothesis—that Donald Trump may be sui generis, a candidate who has deliberately broken with tradition and invented himself without regard to predecessors. If he has looked to the past, then surely it has not been to find instruction from Mencken, Lothrop Stoddard, and other minor figures dredged up by Heilbrunn. Trump emerged without being anointed by conservative think tanks and magazines, and without support from Republican leaders; they were mostly flabbergasted by his candidacy, and many remain so. Trump knew little about the post-war conservative movement, even less about the history Heilbrunn recounts in this book. Trump emerged because he won support from voters in Republican primaries and national elections, which is what counts in the end. He was a populist candidate for whom the voters alone (not the conservative establishment) were responsible. It is a good question why and how Trump happened, and also what he means now and for the future. One thing is certain: answers will not be found in the places Heilbrunn searched.
There is one significant exception to the point that Donald Trump did not have support from think tanks and magazines in his ascent to the presidency in 2016. There was, in fact, one Washington magazine that assisted Trump in his rise to power—and it happened to be The National Interest, edited by Heilbrunn himself. For this reason, he should know better than anyone why it is beside the point to look into the distant past for the sources of Trump’s influence.
Heilbrunn acknowledges this episode in a bizarre introduction to his book, perhaps in the way of an apologia, in which he recounts how the Center for the National Interest came to be involved in Trump’s campaign in 2016. This was done through the work of Dimitri Simes, who was the director of the center from 1994 to 2022 and (one assumes) the person who hired Heilbrunn as the editor of The National Interest. It was Simes who pushed the center and the magazine in the direction of realism and toward accommodating relations with Putin and the Kremlin. Putin in 2013 referred to Simes as his “American friend and colleague.”
Well before Trump came along, Simes pushed Heilbrunn to publish pro-Putin articles, which he appeared perfectly willing to do. One such piece was penned in 2015 by Maria Butina, a Russian exchange student at American University, who, in an article titled “The Bear and the Elephant,” called for better relations between the Russian Federation and the United States. It was a sophisticated, even scholarly essay, which recounted the respective histories of the two superpowers and outlined how much both had to gain from better relations. After Trump’s election, some claimed that Butina’s article must have been part of a Russian scheme to gain influence over U.S. policy. A few years later, Butina entered a guilty plea for conspiring to infiltrate U.S. think tanks and advocacy groups for the purpose of advancing Russian interests.
When Trump announced his candidacy for president, Simes cozied up to him and arranged for the candidate to use the Center for the National Interest as the stage on which to deliver a major foreign-policy address. In that address, given on April 27, 2016, Trump outlined his “America first” foreign policy, put America’s nato allies on notice that they would have to pay their fair share for their defense, and made friendly gestures in the direction of Russia. It was an influential speech, gaining wide attention. It was also a coup for Trump to deliver the remarks under the sponsorship of a magazine with links to influential experts in foreign affairs, including Kissinger, Richard Burt, and several others.
The magazine came in for criticism for sponsoring Trump’s speech, and for giving Trump a megaphone to announce his ideas. Politico published an article the next day describing The National Interest as one of the most “Kremlin-sympathetic institutions in the nation’s capital.” Others chimed in with similar complaints. The center even fired a twenty-five-year-old junior fellow who criticized the magazine for staging Trump’s speech. Robert Mueller, in his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, looked into the circumstances surrounding the speech but found nothing to pursue in regard to illegal or improper links among Trump, the magazine, and Russia. Heilbrunn was called to testify in front of Mueller’s panel.
It is strange, then, in light of this background, for Heilbrunn to waste reams of paper attacking conservatives for supporting Donald Trump and his ideas about Russia, when he was as instrumental as anyone in promoting them. There were few conservatives in Trump’s corner at that time; indeed, most supported Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or Jeb Bush while keeping a safe distance from a candidate whom they judged to be incapable of winning a national election and whose views on foreign policy they generally rejected. Yet there was Heilbrunn, providing a platform for Trump’s speech while sitting attentively nearby as he delivered it.
Heilbrunn did nothing wrong here, certainly nothing illegal or improper: Trump deserved a forum to outline his views. As a popular candidate for president, he should have been welcomed to speak by other think tanks, magazines, and newspapers. While many disagreed, Trump’s views did fit in with the “realist” approach taken by The National Interest. In many ways, the magazine deserves credit for stepping forward to give Trump a platform when others at the time preferred to censor his views or wish them away.
Nevertheless, if Heilbrunn was so offended by Trump’s speech, as he claims to have been in this book, he could have resigned as the editor of the magazine. Others might have done so, but he did not. Worse still, it appears he sat by as a young assistant was dismissed for daring to criticize Trump’s appearance. Now he has gone further in this book by attacking conservatives and Trump supporters for doing more or less what he did in 2016.
It may yet be June, with six months left to go in 2024, but it is all but assured that America Last will stand the test of time as the worst book of the year.
America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators, by Jacob Heilbrunn; W. W. Norton, 264 pages, $28.99 ↩
