It should not surprise any nationalist leader that Iran’s generals and clerics preferred months of American bombing over quick subjugation.

So why does Trump seem lost in these political currents?

Somewhere between railing against OPEC in the 1980s, applauding Brexit in 2016 and winning the presidency in 2024, Trump started blurring the difference between a right-wing politics that insists on putting national identity above international institutions, and a purely American variant that wants to replace resolutions from the United Nations with edicts from Truth Social.

His sometime admirers have noticed. In a thoroughly revealing interview with POLITICO’s Marion Soletty, Jordan Bardella, the likely presidential nominee for France’s far-right National Rally, lamented that second-term Trump was very different from the first-term version.

These days, he said, the United States was acting more like an “empire.” Trump himself was “extremely unsteady and constantly shifting,” Bardella said.

Bardella disavowed interest in Trump’s endorsement in Danielle Smith-like terms: “We don’t need to accept or open the door to any form of interference.”

Trump’s rough strong-arming has worked well enough in a handful of countries. He endorsed the winning candidate for Poland’s presidency last year. In Latin America, Trump and members of his administration have helped anoint election winners in Argentina and Honduras — politically unstable, economically distressed countries that rely on U.S. assistance. His decapitation strategy succeeded in Venezuela.

Meanwhile Trump has continued to toy freely with European Union and NATO leaders. He all but ignores the UN and pays no political price for it.

To understand why, let’s return to Canada.

In the winter of 2025, as Trump was menacing Canada’s independence and calling it the “51st State,” the former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper — no friend to his country’s ruling Liberal Party — made a rare appearance in frontline politics. At an event here in Ottawa, he declared it would be worth taking “any level of damage” to protect Canada’s freedom.

“If I was still prime minister, I would be prepared to impoverish the country and not be annexed, if that was the option we’re facing,” Harper said then.

How many leaders — or voters — would say anything similar about preserving the regulatory authority of the European Commission or the treaty commitments of NATO?

Trump’s appreciation for the special force of national pride and patriotic sentiment used to be one of his political superpowers. It remains one of the few things holding the Republican Party together.

After all this imperial thrashing-around, Trump may never recover the clarity of purpose of his “Mr. Brexit” era. He has left a political space for someone else to fill.

And so Americans will soon look to Trump’s potential successors in both parties for a new version of U.S. nationalism. The world has only grown more confusing and dangerous since 2016, and voters still want to take back control.