Ian Klinke is an associate professor in human geography at Oxford University. He is the author of Life, Earth, Colony: Friedrich Ratzel’s Necropolitical Geography (University of Michigan Press, 2023).
With Atlanticism fraying, Nazi thinker Carl Schmitt is being reread in Germany as a theorist of a world divided into power blocs, a reading that Donald Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine” is helping to underscore.
What looks like Trump-era economic nationalism has deeper roots. German nationalists of the 1800s and fascist leaders of the 1930s imagined power through autarky — national self-sufficiency — with consequences that stretched from tariffs to conquest.