Last week, the Ritz-Carlton in Washington played host to a much-hyped conference devoted to “national conservatism.” Hosted by the newly-formed Edmund Burke Foundation, the conference sought to sketch the blueprint of a right-wing nationalism shorn of its uglier elements (the mission statement cast itself “in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race”). The keynote speakers were Tucker Carlson, John Bolton, Josh Hawley, and Peter Thiel, but the impresario behind it was the Edmund Burke Foundation’s chairman, Yoram Hazony, whose speech announced that “today is our independence day” from neoconservatism and neoliberalism and called for a return to “Anglo-American traditions.”

While Steve Bannon has won the headlines, Hazony has emerged in the last year as the leading proponent of a more high-toned conservative nationalism. His current prominence is linked to his 2018 book, The Virtue of Nationalism, which has quickly become the closest thing the movement has to an intellectual manifesto. The book has received rapturous reviews across the right-wing press and won the 2019 Conservative Book of the Year award. While it gained plaudits from the more intellectually respectable precincts of the right (it carries blurbs from leading conservative Trump critics Yuval Levin and Reihan Salam), it has also been acclaimed by the MAGA crowd. In April, former Trump official Michael Anton (another participant in last week’s conference, better known as the pseudonymous author of the 2016 screed “The Flight 93 Election”) invoked Hazony’s book as the intellectual basis for a supposed “Trump Doctrine” in foreign policy—a hard-nosed yet non-crusading creed rooted in the recognition that “there will always be nations, and trying to suppress nationalist sentiment is like trying to suppress nature.”

Media coverage of Hazony in the United States has tended to refer to him simply as an “Israeli political philosopher,” but the label doesn’t really do justice to his interesting and highly illustrative career. Born in Israel in 1964, but raised and educated in the United States, he described being “mesmerized” by an encounter as a Princeton undergraduate with the ultranationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane, a few years before Kahane’s party was banned in Israel for anti-Arab racism. Going on to earn a doctorate in political theory, Hazony chose not to pursue an academic career, instead moving to Israel with Princeton friends to found the Shalem Center, an American-style think tank based in Jerusalem. Hazony was an early member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s inner circle, and Shalem would remain closely aligned with the Likud Party. It would also serve as a nexus for the Israeli and American right; funding came from American billionaires like Ronald Lauder and Sheldon Adelson, while the roster of fellows tended to feature Israeli political figures who played well inside the Beltway. Hazony and others in the Shalem leadership spent the 1990s living in Eli, an Israeli settlement deep in the West Bank, until security concerns following the Second Intifada convinced them to relocate to East Jerusalem.

Equally at ease in Washington or the West Bank, Hazony’s career checks every box for the current nationalist international.

In 2007, an entertaining exposé of the center in Haaretz documented financial irregularities, power struggles, and Hazony’s own “peculiar habits,” but he emerged relatively undented. (The center’s admittedly winning statement in defense of its chief protested that “every person, certainly a social or business leader, has his own human distinctiveness.”) He is currently head of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem; the Edmund Burke Foundation—which he founded alongside David Brog, former executive director of the Texas televangelist John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel—gives him an institutional footprint in Washington. Increasingly, Hazony’s appeal extends to Europe (a recent photo-op portrayed him in conversation with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán) and Europe-for-now (an avowed disciple of early English constitutionalists like John Fortescue and Edward Coke, he is highly simpatico to the Little England vision of the Brexiteers).

Equally at ease in Washington or the West Bank, extolling the glories of England’s ancient constitution or schmoozing with the scourge of rootless cosmopolitanism on the continent, Hazony’s career checks every box for the current nationalist international. Whatever one thinks of him as a philosopher, he has undoubtedly proven himself a gifted ideological entrepreneur. For that reason his book deserves our attention. What is its vision of nationalism, and why has it found such a receptive audience?