American Nationalism as an Israeli Import

A review of Yoram Hazony's The Virtue of Nationalism

Conservatives love conspiracy theories these days, including ones that are antisemitic, so it’s kind of weird that there aren’t any centered around Yoram Hazony. Here is a guy who comes to America from Israel to tell conservatives that nationalism was invented by Jews and that Americans should be nationalists, and starts putting together conferences attended by the biggest names in conservatism. Moreover, Hazony has a long history as an Israeli nationalist thinker that predated his time in American politics. The 2025 National Conservatism Conference, which just concluded, included several officials from the Trump administration, two senators, and Steve Bannon. In previous years, JD Vance and Peter Thiel have been speakers.

Where exactly did this come from? Why do so many leading lights of conservatism now make a pilgrimage to the conferences of this once obscure Israeli academic? If I were inclined towards conspiratorial thinking, I’d begin by looking at National Conservatism.

In The Virtue of Nationalism, Hazony even tells us that “I see Britain, America, the Netherlands, and others as forming part of a family of nations whose continued independent existence is meaningful to me personally. Nevertheless, my first concern is for Israel.” If that is the case, someone might ask him in what ways he thinks Israeli and American interests diverge. And if he is building a National Conservative movement in the United States, it would be interesting to know whether he is doing so because he has an interest in American nationalism, or he sees it as a means to accomplish what he sees as Israeli goals.

Perhaps it’s a bit too on the nose. It’s fun to speculate whether someone might be a quarter Jewish and therefore have an ulterior agenda behind what they present as a set of principled political positions. But if you just fly in from Israel and teach that Judaism is the entire basis for Western Civilization while establishing intellectual hegemony over the conservative movement, where’s the fun in coming up with a complicated story explaining that?

The second edition of The Virtue of Nationalism was released this summer, and I decided to give it a read to understand the ideas behind Yoram’s movement, and maybe get some insight into why they have become central to the American right in the Trump era.

Hazony’s big idea is that globalism has failed. The grand historical dichotomy he sets up is between nations, a concept in effect created through the Jewish tradition and encapsulated in the Old Testament, and empire, which involves some group of people trying to rule over those they don’t have any organic connection to. Hazony writes that “although Western civilization, for most of its history, has been dominated by dreams of universal empire, the presence of the Bible at the heart of this civilization has ensured that the idea of the self-determining, independent nation would be revived time and again.” Nations include the US, Japan, the UK, and Israel. Empires include Rome, the Catholic Church, Hitler’s Germany, the EU, and the rules-based international order.