Ahead of the Trump-Xi summit in Palm Beach, I spoke with Rachman about how he understands Trumpism, how the Trump administration might accelerate Easternization, and what a world dominated by China might actually look like. Below is an edited and condensed transcript of our conversation.

Uri Friedman: You write that you see Donald Trump’s pledge to “Make America Great Again” as a promise to reverse the process of Easternization. What do you mean by “Easternization” and why do you view Trump’s agenda in that context?

Gideon Rachman: What I mean by Easternization is the shift of economic power to Asia and, with that, the shift of political power to the East. And I think that Trump and the many Americans who voted for him, and maybe even some who didn’t, are unsettled by that process. Certainly Trump doesn’t accept it in any way as natural or inevitable that America’s position as the dominant economic and political power would erode. There was definitely a backward-looking nostalgic element to the “Make America Great Again” slogan—[back to] the period when America was the dominant power, the dominant economy, when the world respected American power. Probably the peak of that was the 1950s.

Sometimes Trump explicitly links this to the rise of Asia, as when he says that China has been “raping” the United States. [White House Chief Strategist] Steve Bannon, who is acknowledged as the ideologue of the Trump agenda, gave an interesting interview just after the election where he rejected the idea that globalization, or as he calls it “globalism,” is a good thing. He said what [the globalists have] done is create the middle class in Asia and destroy the middle class in America. If you take that as your intellectual starting point, then that leads you to the [trade] protectionism that Trump is flirting with. He’s a reversal of the [Bill] Clinton and the [George W.] Bush views of the rise of China—that, although it presented challenges, basically it was a good thing, it would create economic opportunities for America, and it would bind the world together, reduce conflict. Trumpism, insofar as it’s a coherent ideology, is very much based on the premise that Americans made a big mistake encouraging the rise of Asia economically.

Friedman: Do you feel that, as power shifts east, nostalgia is becoming a political force in the Western world?

Rachman: Yeah. If I look at my own country, Britain, behind the arguments [in favor of Britain’s vote to exit the European Union], there was a very powerful nostalgia for a sense that, as one pro-Remain guy put it to me, “A lot of the Leave voters think we used to be a great country and now we’re just a member of a club with 28 countries. Luxembourg has a veto and we’re not going to accept that. We want to go back to the way it was.” And Britain, I think, has embarked on a rather perilous course of trying to do that. If you look at Russia—it’s not so much the West as Europe—[Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s slogan could as well be “Make Russia Great Again.” What is Marine Le Pen about in France? It’s “Make France Great Again.” She, like Trump, sees globalism as a force that’s eroding the nation.