What Happened to America First?

At the White House It's Neocons First

A quarter of a century ago, a newly elected Republican president, who campaigned on a promise of a more humble, less arrogant foreign policy was putting together his Cabinet and national security team. By the time he was finished, even the new president’s critics had to agree that the team he had assembled was an impressive one.

The new Secretary of State – Colin Powell – had previously served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was so popular that he had been urged to run for president himself.

The incoming Secretary of Defense – Donald Rumsfeld – had previously served as a congressman, ambassador, chief of staff and secretary of defense.

The young and allegedly brilliant national security adviser – Condi Rice – had previously been the principal Soviet expert on the National Security Council under George HW Bush, who had been named, at the age of 39, provost of Stanford University.

And yet.

In a matter of three years this most experienced and accomplished of national security teams steered the United States into a needless and disastrous series of wars that ended up killing close to a million people and gave rise to terrorist groups such as ISIS.

All of which is to say: Experience isn’t always a predictor of success.

Today, journalists and foreign affairs analysts have been quick to criticize Trump’s national security team for its inexperience.

Yet, from the standpoint of those of us who care about global peace and stability, and who worry about whether the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East might spin out of control, Trump’s team has provided plenty of reasons for concern—but for reasons other than their lack of experience.

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Such a discussion must be made in the context of the debate in Washington around US foreign policy generally—and then within the context of the Trump team specifically.

The 3 principal schools of foreign policy in the United States are neoconservatism, liberal interventionism and realism.

Neoconservatives view military force and the threat of military force as the solution to nearly every problem. The conservative thinker Russell Kirk once noted that neocons “mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States”—which is about as pithy and accurate a description of neoconservatives as can be imagined.

Liberal interventionists, by and large, are the people who staffed the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations. The policies they favor have become hard to distinguish from those that the neocons favor— the main difference is that they pay lip service to multilateral institutions such as the UN and couch their militarism in the vocabulary of humanitarianism.

Both neocons and liberal interventionists share what the greatest European statesman of the 20th century, Charles de Gaulle, once described as “the American Messianic impulse which swelled the American spirit and oriented it toward vast undertakings.” De Gaulle believed that America had “a taste for interventions in which the instinct for domination cloaked itself.”

Such impulses are anathema to the 3rd school of American foreign policy, realism. The primary difference between realism and the first two schools is that realists are able to distinguish between core and peripheral interests.

Generally speaking, realists are critical of wars of choice, which they view as counterproductive and immoral. They also understand the imperative of achieving a stable balance of power in a multipolar world.

There is a widely held assumption that Donald Trump’s America First has some connection to the realist school. It is also often and wrongly assumed that “America First” is simply an updated brand of isolationism that was popular in the US in the 1930s.

I dispute these assumptions: Given the makeup of Trump’s national security team, Trump’s American First seems more like a marketing ploy—deploying realist rhetoric for the purpose of disguising, laundering, camouflaging what are essentially neoconservative policies. In other words, what we have today is America First in realist drag.

As such, there is a worrying amount of continuity with the policies of the Biden administration: in Ukraine, in Israel, in Asia, in Africa.

On the war in Ukraine, Trump’s “plan” or, more accurately, his expectation, that he and he alone would be able to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine was quickly dashed. No one has any right to be surprised. After all, there is a troubling precedent from which we can draw: In 1968 Richard Nixon campaigned on a promise to end the war in Vietnam— Nixon said he had a secret plan to end the war. Yet once he and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger were in office they escalated in the mistaken assumption that that would bring the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table.

Trump seems to be in the process of attempting such a gambit with the announcement that the US will be sharing intelligence with Kiev in order to facilitate long-range strikes inside Russia. Recall that it was he, during his first term, when he was allegedly in cahoots with Putin, who sent Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine; repeatedly sanctioned Russia; expelled dozens of Russian diplomats; and appointed a hardline neocon, Kurt Volker, as his Ukraine Envoy. In his second term he swapped out Volker for Keith Kellogg. Spot the difference? I can’t.

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De Gaulle once wrote that “Deliberation is the function of many; action is the function of one.” Ultimately, it is up to Donald Trump to decide whether to allow the neoconservatives to drag him (and us) into wars with Venezuela, Russia, and Iran.

Whether he will or not remains to be seen.