Angelo Codevilla’s scrappy rise from penniless immigrant to MAGA guru

At a time of war abroad and political violence at home, a new book called “Fighting Enemies Foreign and Domestic” couldn’t be more relevant.

Or could it? This slender volume just published by Encounter Books is all about the life and thought of Angelo Codevilla, a scholar of international relations who died four years ago at the age of 78.

The world has changed profoundly since 2021. Russia invaded Ukraine. Hamas perpetrated the Oct. 7 attacks against Israel. Donald Trump survived an assassin’s bullet and returned to the White House. And another assassin claimed the life of Charlie Kirk.

Can a book about a man who didn’t live to see all this be essential reading in 2025?

The answer is an emphatic “Yes” — because Angelo Codevilla was one of the finest strategic minds America has ever produced, and his lessons are more urgent than ever.

Take missile defense: Codevilla was a champion of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in the 1980s, the effort to create space-based systems that could take out enemy intercontinental ballistic missiles before they could inflict a nuclear holocaust on America.

The end of the Cold War didn’t mean the end of the nuclear threat, however: far from it, with Russia and China still having thousands of warheads pointed at us, while other untrustworthy or outright hostile nations like Pakistan and North Korea joined the nuclear club, and Iran advanced toward acquiring the bomb, too.

Codevilla never stopped arguing for real missile defense and countermeasures against nuclear weapons. President Trump was listening — but the rest of Washington refused to hear the warning.

And so, writes Brian Kennedy, one of the contributors to this volume: “Despite the best efforts of Codevilla and President Reagan, the United States does not today have an effective national missile-defense system.”

What little defense we have is only intended “to stop a limited number of North Korean missiles aimed at the western United States. It cannot stop Russian or Chinese nuclear ballistic missiles. Nor can it stop a ship-launched ballistic missile from said countries or from Iran nor the myriad advanced missiles, drones, and hypersonic-reentry vehicles such countries can produce.”

It seems “our missile-defense systems are designed primarily to give the illusion to an otherwise uninformed public that we are defended,” and this “was the worst of all worlds for Codevilla. Not only was the United States not defended, but opponents of missile defense could claim in fact that one existed.”

Kennedy, American Strategy Group president, points to Codevilla’s 1988 book “While Others Build: The Commonsense Approach to the Strategic Defense Initiative” and his posthumous 2022 volume “America’s Rise and Fall among Nations: Lessons in Statecraft from John Quincy Adams” as the cure for our political class’s reckless complacency.

Angelo Codevilla was a renaissance man in more ways than one — a brilliant policy architect and scathing critic of the national-security establishment (including in the CIA) who was also a longtime Boston University professor and a translator of the most daring and dangerous thinker of the Renaissance itself, Niccolo Machiavelli.

His edition of Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” in Princeton University Press’ Rethinking the Western Tradition Series, is unmatched for its combination of readability and accuracy — it stands alongside the classic translation by Harvard University’s Harvey Mansfield and the recent version by Seton Hall’s William J. Connell as the best rendition of this brief but notoriously subtle work. As a native speaker of Italian, Codevilla brought a unique panache to the task of Englishing the Florentine mastermind.

He may have been born in Voghera, Italy, in 1943, but Angelo Codevilla became all-American — an immigrant endlessly grateful not only for the opportunities this country gave him but also for the virtues of its ordinary citizens and the rightness of its founding principles.

In his contribution to “Fighting Enemies Foreign and Domestic,” Thomas Codevilla relates his father’s story of immigration and Americanization: “Imagine, if you will, being born poor in World War II Italy with a predeceased father. You steal fruit from orchards to keep your belly full; your scalp bears a hatchet scar from a fight with a preteen Communist gang. You bathe in a cauldron. You are first in your class every year because you have to be. Standing at your father’s grave, your mother lectures you on duty and family.” After making it to America on a ship in 1955, “Every August 8 for the rest of your life, you celebrate the anniversary of your disembarkation.”

Angelo himself would recall, “It was my privilege to stand on the port rail of the American Export Lines SS Constitution, along with every other emigrant on board, as the ship slipped past the Statue and into NY harbor, Pier 40. Nobody made a sound. All were overwhelmed. The only sounds I heard that morning were quiet sobs. . . . Nobody really knew what awaited us. But everybody was awed and delighted that, finally, we were here!”

So how does a fatherless, almost penniless Italian boy make his way in the New World?

If you’re Angelo Codevilla, as his son recounts, “You learn English from John Wayne movies and perfect your accent by repeating Winston cigarette ads. You deliver newspapers to mobsters; you learn to knife fight to protect yourself at school; you build amateur rockets and gleefully shoot them over the Hudson River into New York. You meet your future wife by walking straight into a Valentine’s Day mixer to which you were never invited, asking her, ‘Good evening miss, would you like to twist?’ and then taking her out for her first beer at age eighteen.”

There was no limit to what a young man of Codevilla’s drive and talent could achieve in America.

He earned a bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University, a master’s from Notre Dame and a doctorate from Claremont University City — now known as Claremont Graduate University — where he studied with the political philosophers Leo Strauss and Harry V. Jaffa.

After serving in the Navy and a stint in the Foreign Service, Codevilla went to Washington to work for Sen. Malcolm Wallop (R-Wyo.) as a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence staffer.

He was a staunch conservative who refused to accept stalemate in the Cold War and backed Ronald Reagan’s bold defense initiatives.

He taught at Georgetown University, then left DC in 1985 to devote himself full-time to teaching and scholarship, first as a Hoover Institution research fellow and then, from 1995 to 2008, as a Boston University professor of international relations, writing a slew of books along the way, including “The Character of Nations” and “Advice to War Presidents.”

Intelligence mavens kept a close eye on what he wrote — Codevilla might have left Washington in the flesh, but he was never out of the policy arena.

He warned the George W. Bush administration was making a serious mistake in the early 2000s by attempting nation-building and democracy-promotion in the Islamic world rather than cutting off extremism at its source, which for Codevilla meant Saudi support for Wahhabism.

“He was a master of the original America First brand of foreign policy,” Brian Kennedy writes. “It asked the simple question: ‘What is good for America and the American people?’ There was no secondary consideration.”

He wasn’t just a foreign-policy expert, however — Angelo Codevilla also wrote what might be considered the manifesto of the MAGA movement a full six years before Donald Trump was first elected president.

“America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution,” first appearing in The American Spectator in 2010 and later expanded into a short book, was an essay so important that Rush Limbaugh read it aloud, in full — 12,000 words — on his radio show.

Calling for a more populist breed of conservative to take on a ruling class that was no longer loyal to the nation’s citizens, Codevilla’s essay galvanized the Tea Party movement in that year’s midterm elections and looked ahead to the rise of a leader like Donald Trump.

Ryan Williams, president of the Claremont Institute, has done something more than justice to Angelo Codevilla’s life and legacy by compiling and editing “Fighting Enemies Foreign and Domestic,” with contributions from scholars and policy minds such as David P. Goldman, Steven F. Hayward, Robert Reilly, J. Michael Waller and David Cobrin, as well as Brian Kennedy and Thomas Codevilla.

Williams has also done a service to the cause for which Codevilla fought tirelessly until the traffic accident that took his life in 2021 — the cause of American security and self-government.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and editor-at-large of The American Conservative.