Trump’s ‘America First’ neo-isolationism
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivers a foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., April 27, 2016. (Photo: Jim Bourg/Reuters)
After rolling over its opponents in all five Eastern seaboard primaries, the Trump juggernaut entered Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, where the victorious candidate gave a speech intended to add gravitas to his scattershot positions on foreign policy and national security. As he edges closer to becoming the Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump field-tested a new bumper sticker to describe his unique brand of economic populism and trade protectionism, anti-immigrant nativism and a neo-isolationism that eschews foreign entanglements: “America First!”
“The direction I’m outlining will return us to a timeless principle — always putting the interests of the American people and American security above all else. It has to be first,” Trump said. “That will be the foundation of every single decision that I make. ‘America First’ will be the major and overriding theme of my administration.”
Putting America first hardly seems a controversial idea for a U.S. president, but the phrase has a long lineage in Republican politics dating back to the isolationist, noninterventionist wing of the party in the 1930s and 1940s. The America First Committee of the 1930s was established to keep the United States out of the approaching Second World War, and its noninterventionist agenda was embraced by Republican Sen. Robert Taft, who ran for his party’s presidential nomination in 1948 and 1952. Many Republican foreign policy experts in particular worry that, coupled with Trump’s strongman persona and what many see as his strong-arm instincts, the America First agenda would amount to a rejection of the United States’ outsize role in protecting the liberal international order put in place after World War II.
Under his America First conceit, Trump recited a familiar litany of foreign policy positions and criticisms of the Obama administration and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He once again suggested a moratorium on Muslim immigration and opposed the Obama administration’s “senseless” immigration policies that “import extremism.” He threatened to punish U.S. companies that move jobs overseas and to quickly reverse the country’s lopsided trade imbalance with China by using economic coercion. He promised to rebuild depleted U.S. military power but also to use it sparingly, eschewing nation-building or democracy promotion overseas. In the early days of his administration, a President Trump would hold summits with European and Asian allies and demand that they pay America more for its security umbrella, or else he would be willing to close it and walk away from those alliances.
Going further than just bashing the free-trade agenda, Trump denigrated multilateral agreements and international institutions that undergird a rules-based international order and the dynamic of globalization that has been a driving force in spreading liberal economic and political values for decades.
“No country has ever prospered that failed to put its own interests first. Our friends and enemies put their interests above ours, and we must start doing the same,” Trump said. Insisting that nation-states remain the foundation of “happiness and harmony,” he voiced skepticism of “international unions that tie us up, and bring America down. Under my administration we will never enter America into any agreement that reduces our ability to control our own affairs. … No longer will I surrender our people to the false song of globalization.”
Arguably not since Patrick Buchanan in 1996, and possibly not since Taft in 1952, has a serious Republican presidential hopeful embraced such an isolationist platform or called into question an international order based on free markets and international institutions, and both of those previous Republican candidates ultimately lost the nomination.
In Trump’s telling, his agenda is not isolationist, but rather a sign of strong leadership. Allies and adversaries alike will respect America’s newfound strength and determination, in his view, and respond to border walls, trade tariffs and demands for more burden-sharing by quickly getting into line. What worries many Republican foreign policy experts is that that expectation doesn’t comport with reality as they understand it.
“Donald Trump is no Taft-style isolationist, because while Taft was clearly wrong, he was a decent and thoughtful man that you could never accuse of disrespect for the Constitution,” said Eliot Cohen, director of the strategic studies program at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a former counselor in George W. Bush’s State Department. Contrast that stance, he said, with Trump’s dubiously constitutional intentions to ban Muslims from entering the country, to torture suspected terrorists and kill their families.
“His promises to make allies pay more for our support also shows that he thinks of American foreign policy the way a mobster thinks about protection rackets,” said Cohen. “He has similarly shown an affection for strongmen like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, and has surrounded himself with people who are cozy with Putin’s crowd, which is quite sinister. You’d have to be delusional to believe that all that demagoguery is fake, and now Trump is somehow going to pivot and become ‘very presidential.’”
In early March, Cohen helped organize a letter signed by roughly 50 Republican foreign policy experts united in their opposition to a Trump nomination, calling his vision of American power “wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle” and predicting that as president he would act in ways that make the country less safe. The letter has garnered more than 120 signatures and counting.
“Since 1948, there has been a foreign policy tradition in the Republican Party of free and open trade, a reliance on alliances and a conservative internationalism to uphold the global order that the United States created after World War II, and Trump has taken positions in opposition to all of those things,” said Eric Edelman, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey who served as a senior official in the Defense and State Departments during the George W. Bush administration. Edelman is one of the signers of the letter opposing Trump’s nomination. “Trump is clearly not conservative, and he is barely a Republican, and to convince many of us that he is really serious about foreign policy would require that he repudiate almost every position he has taken. Add in his lack of mastery of policy issues and his willingness to use mob psychology to whip up crowds in ugly ways, and I conclude he would be a threat to the constitutional order.”
As the ultimate outsider candidate, of course, Trump has worn the nearly unprecedented repudiation of the Republican foreign policy establishment as a badge of honor. When Trump earlier announced his kitchen cabinet of foreign policy advisers, it amounted to five names that most Washington observers had never heard of, including a former Pentagon inspector general and a 2009 graduate of DePaul University who specialized in energy issues involving Cyprus, Greece and Israel.
In his speech Wednesday, Trump argued that Washington could use some new blood and officials not associated with past failures. “My goal is a foreign policy that will endure for several generations,” he said. “That’s why I have to look for talented experts with new approaches, rather than surround myself with people with perfect résumés who have little to brag about except failed policies and continued losses in war. We have to look to new people, because many of the old people frankly don’t know what they are doing, even though they look good writing in the New York Times or appearing on television.”
One of those “old” Republican foreign policy experts is Kurt Volker, executive director of the McCain Institute and former U.S. ambassador to NATO. Unlike many of his former colleagues in the Bush administration, Volker did not sign the letter opposing Trump’s nomination, precisely because it seemed likely to reinforce the argument that the Republican establishment is united against his candidacy. Also, if Donald Trump becomes the 45th president of the United States, Volker figures the commander in chief will need all the good advice he can get, from wherever he can get it.
“Trump has tapped into a huge frustration in the country from a public that believes the political and foreign policy elite in Washington have really messed things up, and there’s some truth to that. So he’s their change agent to turn the situation upside down and start over,” Volker said in an interview. “Trump is also clearly a very forceful personality, and he could conceivably channel that into strong American leadership. The problem is whenever Trump opens his mouth and praises Putin, or denigrates Muslims, or threatens to pull out of our alliances, our friends around the world don’t see a strong American leader. They see someone to fear.”
James Kitfield is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress.
