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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.
Posted in: “The direction I’m outlining will return .,Trump’s ‘America First’ neo-isolationism
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