The rise of the radical ‘New Right’ (NR) across much of the global political landscape is one of the most striking political developments of recent years. This article seeks to foster international theory’s critical engagement with the NR by providing an overview of its thinking about world politics and the challenges it presents. We argue that in many ways international theory is in fact uniquely positioned to provide such an engagement, and that it is essential that international theory comes to terms more fully with its political vision and theoretical claims if it is to engage effectively with this increasingly potent and often deeply troubling intellectual and political movement.

The rise of radical right-wing leaders, parties, movements, and ideas have transformed not only domestic political landscapes but also the direction and dynamics of international relations. Yet for all their emphasis on nationalist identity, on “America First” and “Taking Back Control,” there is an unmistakable international dimension to contemporary nationalist, populist movements. Yet these movements are also often transnationally linked. We argue that a constitutive part of this globality is the New Right's (NR) own distinctive international political sociology (IPS). Key thinkers of the contemporary NR have, over several decades, theorized and strategically mobilized globalized economic dislocation and cultural resentment, developing a coherent sociological critique of globalization. Drawing on the oft-neglected tradition of elite managerialism, NR ideologues have borrowed freely from Lenin and Schmitt on the power of enmity, as well as from Gramsci and the Frankfurt School on counterhegemonic strategies. Against the temptation to dismiss right-wing ideas as “merely” populist and by implication as lacking in ideological and theoretical foundations, we are faced with the much more challenging task of engaging a position that has already developed its own international political sociology and incorporated it into its political strategies.

Set in the context of the neo-liberalisation of capitalism, this article examines the intellectual basis of neo-conservative interventions in debates over the reformation of America's regimes of citizenship and analyses the ethico-politics enacted by those interventions. The article highlights the main axes of the neo-conservative critique of both the post-War Left and the New Right and calls attention to the extent to which this critique has translated into an expressive politics of security facilitating the rearticulation of class interests and the further advancement of market forces in the US since the late 1970s. It is argued that neo-conservative expressive security discourses are underpinned by a distinctively Schmittian rationale that transcends the traditional separation between domestic and foreign policy and aspires to a mode of political association which is fundamentally extrinsic to the liberal tradition that neo-conservatives allegedly want to reform. Unlike a number of studies published since the advent of the post-9/11 `neo-conservative moment' in American foreign policy, the analysis presented here suggests that it is not necessarily in the imperialist character of the Bush administration's foreign policy as such that the Schmittian (and Straussian) bent of the neo-conservative project can be observed but in neo-conservatism's ambivalence towards the modern liberal state and the steering mechanisms upon which the latter relies to govern the life process.

Challenges to the liberal international order have tended to focus on the politics of populism most often traced to reactions against economic dislocation and mass migration. Parts of this portrait are undoubtedly true, but it also risks being deeply misleading. To fully understand the nature and depth of contemporary far-right movements, we need to examine more closely the distinctive ideological movements that inform and animate them. This article explores one specific articulation of these movements: US paleoconservatism. Although relatively unknown in the mainstream media, this anti-establishment strain of radical conservatism has provided intellectual ammunition to a wide range of agents and ideological forces challenging the prevailing liberal order nationally and internationally, including important parts of the anti-liberal politics of foreign policy under President Donald Trump.