On election night, I attended a party for political consultants visiting from over 40 countries to observe the U.S. election. I had moderated a panel a few hours earlier with experts from a half dozen of these countries, discussing what the presidential election would mean to the rest of the globe. It appeared to me very early that Donald Trump was going to win, and as I was preparing to leave I found myself alone with a gentleman from my earlier panel – a Russian consultant, described to me by many as Russian President Vladimir Putin's favorite pollster.

He asked why I was leaving so early, and I replied, "It's a good night for your friend, Vlad." He seemed truly surprised, but as I described why I thought Trump was going to win, his lips started to curl upward in a smile that he struggled to suppress. As we parted, I reiterated glumly, "It's a good night for your country," and he agreed, swaggering away cheerily.

As he did, a young man with Nordic features approached me and, in a vaguely familiar accent, said he overheard what I had said and thought I was absolutely right. He identified himself as an Estonia government official. We talked for a few minutes about Estonians' growing concern over Putin's probable Ukraine-like incursions into their country, and their fear – given both Trump's bromance with Putin and his expressed disinterest in NATO – that the election will give Putin a greenlight to do whatever he wants, unhindered.

The next day, I met with a delegation visiting from Sweden to discuss the election results. We spent most of the time on why Hillary Clinton lost, but toward the end, one of the Swedes asked me about the basis of Trump's fascination with Putin. As the conversation meandered into what other European countries could expect from a Trump presidency, the mood in the room turned noticeably darker.

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Russian warplanes have been buzzing over Estonia for the past few weeks, and I assumed that Putin would make some sort of move against it and other Baltic states very early in a Trump presidency. My guess was that Trump would essentially let Putin get away with it, for a combination of reasons: He admires Putin (both for his strength and for his perspicacity in flattering Trump). He has little interest in NATO, or collective security generally, or in investing American resources in other countries' defense. His advisers will undoubtedly tell him, when that time comes, that there's virtually nothing the U.S. could do to keep Russia from invading the Baltics, anyway. Finally, Putin's claim for invading Estonia will be, as elsewhere, that he's simply protecting the rights of ethnic Russians "oppressed" in other states – a claim that would appear to resonate with Trump, and certainly with the so-called nationalist advisers surrounding him.

This recurrent nationalism strikes me as something both new and odd. It's not – at least in the American context – the old, Cold War kind of patriotism in which our system is counterpoised against that of the Russkis and all other sorts of bad actors. The Russian pollster had, in fact, made an interesting comment to me in advance of our session: Russian citizens have more sympathy for Trump, he said, because he is an "American nationalist, not a globalist." Not that long ago, "an American nationalist" would have been a damning epithet coming from the Kremlin, basically a longer version of the word "imperialist." Now, it's what recommends Trump (aside from his obvious manipulability) to Putin and other Russians.

In fact, it's what also recommends any number of other foreign leaders – most notably Marine Le Pen in France and Brexit leader Nigel Farage – to Trump and his team. Part of this is the mutual attraction of authoritarian leadership styles. But, while these cannot be entirely separated any more than the debate over whether domestic Trumpism is a reaction to racial and cultural rather than economic anxieties, there is something more here than just the growing membership of the worldwide League of Authoritarian Gentlemen: All of these authoritarians – Putin, Viktor Orban in Poland, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, to name just a few Trump admirers – also believe in an ethnic partitioning of the world. Yes, Putin wants a greater "Russia for the Russians" – but an "America for Americans" is perfectly consistent with that, as is the nationalism of Brexiteers, Golden Dawn in Greece and other right-wing movements sweeping the world.

Sure, there's some tactical consideration in all that: The trainwreck-in-motion of the EU's and then NATO's (and, in my view, eventually the U.S.'s own) crack-up gives Putin a freer hand to pursue his reassembling the Soviet Empire. Globalism has meant a growing transnational consensus on economics and human rights, knitting together disparate countries both under de facto U.S. leadership and in opposition to regimes like Putin's, China's and the other authoritarians; it is therefore an obvious longer-term enemy. And good old-fashioned American nationalism meant precisely that – but now it's something different, something that both foreigners and conservative Americans alike embrace.

This represents a complete reversal of the American worldview – and that of most of the West – since World War II. It is, in fact, the triumph of the worldview we defeated in World War II. One wades into troubled waters in even mentioning the name Hitler, but it's important to understand in this context – separated, if possible, from all the other freight that goes with it – that the nationalist worldview now gaining traction worldwide is extremely similar to Hitler's, as detailed in Tim Snyder's meticulous "Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning." Hitler believed that the natural condition of mankind was a war for survival of all against all – a view, as I wrote here earlier this year, shared at a very visceral level by Trump and many of his supporters; Trump, as Evan Osnos wrote in The New Yorker, sees "the country as a survivor in an anarchic world."

Hitler also believed that this war is fought at an ethnic, not an individual or nation-state level, and that all peoples, to survive, needed their own national living space. (Jews – a people without a land – therefore had to be exterminated.)

Most Trump voters – including Trump himself – of course don't share the extreme Hitlerian view, I'd emphasize. To them, simply, as for most Brexit voters and others in Europe, the world they know and value (and which valued them), the culture and economy of the late 20th century, is being destroyed by global flows of goods, finance and peoples: "Good fences make good neighbors" – and even better economies. But the deeper anti-globalist forces, some of whom are the folks now being called "nationalists" in the U.S., are about something quite different. They see global economic and social integration as not simply a tactical threat to their economic interest, like many American workers do, or to their short-term geopolitical interests, as opposing countries Putin's Russia do (although it is all those things). They see it as a perversion of the rightful natural order, in which different peoples hold discreet territories, separated by walls.

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Is that, then, a world of peaceful co-existence, every man under his own vine and fig tree? Putting aside the genocidal murderousness of Hitler, both Putin's and China's actions on the world stage suggest otherwise.

Nor is this a novel view of the underlying basis of global conflict: In a recent review of Robert Vitalis' new "White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations," Susan Pedersen wrote that "at the moment of its American birth, 'international relations meant race relations.' Races, not states or nations, were considered humanity's foundational political units." And, therefore, here's the key point: Nor, despite the fact that these new "nationalists" of one country welcome the competing "nationalisms" of others, is it one of peaceful coexistence, of static, mutual isolationism. It's the opposite.

We – or, at least, the world leaders and their supporters who promote this so-called new nationalist view – are simply reverting to a pre-World War II conception of human interaction as an unending struggle for "Lebensraum" between competing ethnic groups. It is a Hobbesian view of human nature and the fate of the world – except one fought out between genetic groupings rather than individuals, the foundation of liberalism. It is one that, while not necessarily rooted in authoritarianism, is nonetheless at least conducive to it, since both the necessity and reality of unitary national interest lends itself to a single voice for the "volk." And unlike the declining warfare of the (albeit tense) postwar, increasingly-global era – and the economy it created – it presents a dark vision of perpetual conflict.