In a speech commemorating the centenary of World War I, French President Emmanuel Macron recently condemned nationalism as “the opposite of patriotism,” which most everyone took as a rebuke to Donald Trump, who was in attendance.

President Trump may be wrong on many issues but he is right on nationalism, as properly understood.

Nationalism is a heterogeneous concept. In the modern sense of national political autonomy and self-determination — an “imagined community” — it arose in reaction to the universalist-cosmopolitanism of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. The attempt by France to impose its political, legal, and cultural hegemony over Europe created a nationalist backlash. While Britain’s sense of national identity predated the rise of Napoleon, the long series of wars against France, especially those fought against Napoleon, strengthened and consolidated British nationalism.

Much of today’s debate fails to distinguish between two types of nationalism: ethnic and civic. The former is based on language, blood or race. American nationalism is the latter, civic in nature, holding that the United States is a nation based on a set of beliefs — a creed — rather than race or blood. This understanding of nationalism is equivalent to “patriotism.”

Abraham Lincoln articulated the American meaning of nationalism in a speech he delivered in Chicago on July 10, 1858. In it, he noted that many citizens of the United States could not trace their lineage back by blood to the Founders “but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.”

American nationalism is based on the idea of a political community in which citizens, whether foreign-born or native-born, have reciprocal responsibilities to one another. In addition, citizens and government also have reciprocal responsibilities.

Although the United States is founded on universal principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence, the fact is that “rights and liberties” can exist only in separate and independent nation-states, in which the “just powers of government” are derived from “the consent of the governed.” American civic nationalism still depends on sovereignty.

American nationalism is nothing less than patriotism, and American statesmanship must be directed toward reifying this patriotism. The sole purposes of American power are — or should be — to secure the American Republic, protect its liberty, and to facilitate the prosperity of the American people.

It is not — or should not be — to create the “global good,” a corporatist globalism divorced from patriotism or national greatness. The United States does not have a “moral entitlement” to superior power for the global good. The United States must work constantly at maintaining it.

Part of that work is persuading our sovereigns — American citizens — that it is good and right and in their interest to maintain that power. A healthy regard for the safety and happiness of American citizens requires that U.S. power remain supreme.

To reiterate, the purpose of American power is not to act in the interest of others, the “international community,” international institutions, or the like, but in the interest of the United States.

As Walter Russell Mead observed in a recent Wall Street Journal column, “postnationalism is a Western fantasy, not a global trend, and no lasting peace can be built on such a shaky foundation." Trump understands that "Western countries need the strong whiskey of nationalism — not just the weak tea of bureaucratic cosmopolitanism — to thrive in a dangerous world."

Mackubin Thomas Owens, a monthly contributor, is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and editor of its journal, Orbis.