It is axiomatic to many of his critics that the US president, Donald Trump, is a fascist. Indeed, some have seen echoes of the work of the Nazis’ “crown jurist” and political theorist, Carl Schmitt, in the Trump administration’s domestic policies, particularly his doctrine of “the exception”, which can be used to suspend certain constitutional rights. After a tumultuous few weeks in geopolitics, his work is being discussed for its contemporary relevance again.
In the wake of the release of the new US National Security Strategy in 2025, its raid on Venezuela, the president’s rhetoric on Greenland, Panama, Colombia, Mexico and Cuba, and his apparent indulgence towards Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the question now being asked is whether Trump is also an advocate of aspects of Schmitt’s concept of “great space”.
Like many of his compatriots, Schmitt was outraged at Germany’s humiliation after the first world war and its alleged “colonisation” by the victorious entente powers. He regarded international law as a victor’s racket, designed to keep the Reich in permanent subjection and to facilitate the exploitation of the world’s resources. Schmitt reserved his greatest scorn, though, for the British, whom he saw as hypocritical “universalists” who preached a gospel of free trade and internationalism while building the biggest empire the world had seen. He contrasted them unfavourably with the Americans, who had confined themselves largely to their own continent in the 19th century, in accordance with the newly topical Monroe doctrine, before they were (allegedly) gulled into entering the first world war.
In April 1939, before the outbreak of the second world war, Schmitt proposed his solution in a well-publicised lecture to the Institute for Politics and International Law at the University of Kiel, which was later published in extended form. The world, he suggested, should be divided into great spaces (Großraum), each dominated by an empire (Reich) at its heart. Each great space would have its own identity, mission and force-field, which would shape the other states in its immediate orbit. Outside powers – which Schmitt termed “spatially alien powers” – would be “forbidden” to “intervene”. Obviously, Schmitt envisaged Nazi Germany as the Reich at the heart of the European great space, which he sought to shield from Anglo-American interference.
All this was garnished with a hefty dose of antisemitism, because Schmitt – like Hitler – saw “world Jewry” as a fundamentally “universalising” influence, determined to break down nation states and national economies. It is sometimes said that Schmitt’s Großraum inspired Hitler, but in fact Hitler had called for a “German Monroe doctrine” as far back as 1923, more than 15 years earlier. It is also possible to see echoes of Schmitt in imperial Japan’s concept of a “greater east Asia co-prosperity sphere”.
Of course, Schmitt’s vision failed. The “Anglo-Saxon” powers, as he termed them, refused to stay out of Europe and eventually confronted Hitler. The Reich was annihilated, though not before it had inflicted terrible harm on Europe, especially its Jews. Schmitt himself, well known as a representative of the Nazi regime, was widely pilloried and never held another academic appointment after 1945, although he continued to exercise considerable intellectual influence on the right and the left, within Germany and beyond.
In recent decades, Schmitt’s ideas have found new advocates and been reprised in anti-western “challenger” states, especially Russia. His rejection of western universalism and his concept of great spaces free of outside interference have found a ready audience in Moscow and Bejiing. For example, the notorious Eurasianist Alexander Dugin – a key influence on Putin and an intellectual architect of the attack on Ukraine – has been a strong partisan of Schmittian ideas. He too calls for Russia to radiate its conservative and Christian Orthodox principles into neighbouring states and to exclude western influence, especially that of the Anglo-Saxons, as “spatially alien”. Like Schmitt, Dugin and many of his Russian nationalist peers are particularly anti-British, regarding them as the primary agents of liberalism, international capitalism and other supposedly noxious, anti-Russian, universalising principles.
All this, with Trump’s willingness to impose territorial losses on Ukraine, has led some to suggest that we are finally witnessing a Schmitt-style division of the world into great spaces. Such a partition of the globe between Trump, Putin, Xi Jinping and perhaps Narendra Modi is certainly plausible, but it is probably mistaken – and not only because Trump is unlikely to have been directly influenced by Schmitt.
It is true that the Trump administration has prioritised the western hemisphere, explicitly invoking the 200-year-old Monroe doctrine. But if the original intention of President Monroe was to stay out of Europe in return for an end to any new European colonies in the Americas, the doctrine as it subsequently evolved became an entirely one-way affair. Washington rejected any outside influence in “its” continent – though it had to accept outliers such as Cuba – but it also asserted its power across other continents, especially Europe and Asia. “What’s yours is mine,” Americans were saying, “and what is mine is my own.” While many objected to this as hypocrisy, and many Asians were bitterly opposed to the US presence, a healthy majority of Europeans rightly welcomed this US “empire by invitation”, as the Norwegian historian Geir Lundestad once put it.
So far, Trump is firmly – in his own way – within that expansive American tradition. There is no sign of him acknowledging other spheres of influence, except perhaps in corners of Ukraine. Trump has clobbered Iran, obliterated Russian air-defence systems in Venezuela, stopped Russian tankers in European waters with British help and, on his watch, the CIA masterminded crippling Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s oil infrastructure. Whatever we think of all this, it does not suggest either any strategic collusion or any understanding based on spheres of influence. Trump is not a fascist but a narcissist. He will not accept any other gods beside him, and Putin and Xi know this. Schmitt would be turning in his grave, but he would also feel vindicated in his belief in the “hypocrisy” of the Anglo-Saxons.
Brendan Simms is director of the Centre for Geopolitics at Cambridge University and author of Hitler: Only the World Was Enough
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